Red Hook is the part of Brooklyn the subway forgot: a peninsula of warehouses, cobbled streets and low houses with no train station, cut off from the rest of the borough by an expressway. A happy hour near me search from Manhattan will not send you here, which is most of the reason Sunny's Bar at 253 Conover Street still feels like what it is — a waterfront bar that has been open in some form since 1890.
Ask Karpo what time the music actually starts, how to get back to a subway afterwards, and what else in Red Hook is open on the way.
The bar and the family behind it
The building has been a bar since the late nineteenth century, when Red Hook was one of the busiest working ports in the country and the room served longshoremen. It became a cultural anchor under Antonio 'Sunny' Balzano in the 1990s, whose family had run it for generations, and it has survived a flood, a closure and the death of its namesake without being redecorated into something else.
What that produces is a room full of accumulated objects rather than a designed interior: photographs, instruments, paintings, things left by people who came regularly. Nothing about it is styled and none of it would survive a refurbishment.
Bluegrass at the weekend
Live bluegrass runs on Friday and Saturday nights, in a format closer to a jam than a booked show — musicians arrive, sit in a corner, and play acoustically to a room that is standing around them rather than facing a stage. It has been happening for decades and it is the single best reason to make the trip.
Arrive before the music if you want somewhere to stand. The room is not large and a weekend jam fills it, and the sound is acoustic enough that being at the back means hearing considerably less of it.
The hours run long
The bar opens in the afternoon most days — around three Monday through Thursday and midday at the weekend — and runs to midnight or one in the week, two on Friday and Saturday. That is a long, forgiving schedule for a bar this far from everything.
The quiet version is a weekday afternoon, when you can sit at the bar with a drink and the door open to the street. The full version is Saturday night with the jam going. Both are worth doing and they are barely the same room.
Getting to Red Hook, and back
There is no subway. The practical options are the B61 bus, the NYC Ferry to Red Hook, a long walk from Carroll Gardens or the F and G at Smith–Ninth Streets, or a car. The ferry is the best of them by a distance — it runs across the harbour with a view of the Statue of Liberty and lands a walk away from the bar.
The catch is the return. The ferry stops running earlier than the bar closes, and late-night bus service out here is thin, which means a rideshare home at one in the morning from a peninsula with no train. Decide how you are getting back before the second drink, not after the fourth.
Red Hook's isolation is not an accident of geography alone. The Gowanus Expressway and the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel approach cut the peninsula off from the rest of the borough in the mid-twentieth century, and the container revolution moved the port's business to New Jersey, which emptied out a working waterfront that had employed thousands. What was left was cheap, quiet and physically separate, which is why artists, boatbuilders and small manufacturers ended up here.
Hurricane Sandy flooded the whole peninsula in 2012, this bar included, and the fact that it reopened is the reason people talk about it the way they do. A room that a neighbourhood physically rebuilt is a different institution from a room that merely survived.
What else is out there
Red Hook rewards the trip beyond a single bar. The waterfront at Louis Valentino Jr Park has the clearest head-on view of the Statue of Liberty from land in the city; the Waterfront Museum sits in a 1914 barge; there are key lime pies, a distillery, a winery working with New York grapes, and a run of restaurants along Van Brunt Street.
Do it as an afternoon rather than an evening trip if it is your first time. Walk the waterfront while it is light, eat on Van Brunt, and finish at the bar — which is the sequence the neighbourhood is built for and the one that solves the transport problem at the same time.
A note on the jam itself, because it is not a concert and behaving as though it is spoils it. Musicians sit among the drinkers rather than on a stage, there is no amplification, and the volume of the room decides whether anyone can hear the fiddle. Stand close if you want to listen, take your conversation to the other end of the bar if you want to talk, and put something in the hat when it goes round.
Practical notes
Sunny's Bar is at 253 Conover Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, open since 1890. Hours run from around 3pm Monday through Thursday and from midday at the weekend, closing at midnight or 1am in the week and 2am Friday and Saturday. Live bluegrass runs Friday and Saturday nights. There is no subway — use the B61 bus, the NYC Ferry or a car, and plan the return trip before you start drinking, because the ferry stops early.
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know what time the music actually starts, how to get back to a subway afterwards, and what else in Red Hook is open on the way? Ask Karpo for tonight's schedule, a ferry timing that works in both directions, and a Van Brunt Street plan for before the bar.
