by Tim Sultan
Sunny was not in the least proprietary, at least not overtly. If a person expressed admiration or fidelity to his bar, he would say, “My bar? This isn’t my bar any more than it’s anyone else’s bar. It don’t belong to me. It belongs to each of you who have come here and have served to make it what it is that it is. It’s our bar, aye?” He appeared to mean this in the most sincere way. It was an outlook that emboldened customers to make whatever contribution to the humanities they wished. There weren’t always obscure films being projected or ingenious songs being sung, though a bakery-truck driver with a guitar and a Maine accent thicker than Edmund Muskie’s usually got up once a Friday and sang of his Long Island route, “You can have it all / Any way you like / You can have it all / On the Jericho Turnpike!”—perhaps the most hopeful sentiment about a stretch of road since Nat King Cole first crooned, “You can get your kicks / On Route 66.”
There was a sense that one was off the leash here. The culture that I came upon at Sunny’s was a distinct and self-generated one, as you might expect to find on an island far from any shore. If a stocky biker named Ross wanted to stand in the middle of the room and play two trumpets simultaneously, sounding less like Rahsaan Roland Kirk than a subway car’s brakes thirsting for oil, Sunny was unperturbed. If a chauffeur wanted to noisily recite Harold Pinter (“You have a wonderful casserole…I mean wife”), Sunny was appreciative. If the rare woman patron, and an adult entertainer no less, wanted to perform an interpretive dance of Aphrodite’s birth wearing something less than pasties, Sunny was understanding. And if a tugboat captain, addressed as Captain Ritchie both on and off the water, decided abruptly to yodel, and yodel very ably at that, Sunny loved it. He loved it because he seemed to love people in an absolutist manner that I had rarely seen. His affection for them, his curiosity about their histories, and his appreciation for their customs and eccentricities were apparent in the way he engaged his patrons and in his habit of extolling their virtues and their vices. He particularly loved vices. He always seemed to be exalting people, whether to their faces, behind their backs, or, as he often did, indirectly while telling a story.
One night in those first few months at the bar, Sunny, looking into the middle distance, had begun reciting Lucky’s monologue from Waiting for Godot (he had, I would learn, an intense interest in theater). “Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann,” he intoned, “of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions…” And a customer, conceivably better acquainted with Ireland’s whiskey than its playwrights, confused as to why Sunny was now referring to himself as Lucky, asked, “Well, which is it now? Sunny or Lucky?”
“Can’t I be both?”
“I don’t know,” said the man, an elderly widower named Frankie Brown who drove over regularly from Staten Island, mostly for the company since he always brought his own beer. “I’ve seen the kind of attention you get from women so you might say you’re lucky in love. How ’bout cards? You lucky in cards?”
“I might play the lotto now and then,” Sunny replied. “And I like to gamble in the sense that I take chances in life but I don’t really gamble in the conventional sense that it is you’re referring to.”
Frankie Brown blinked at Sunny and seemed to be searching his mind for another explanation as to why Sunny might be calling himself lucky.
“Although now that you mention it, I do remember this one time,” Sunny continued after pausing on his cigarette. “I was traveling cross-country with a friend of mine and we stopped in Reno. He had to make some calls so I said, ‘I’ll call home.’ I put the kern in the phone and it spits out like two, three bucks. I put another kern in the phone and out comes more money. I was playing the phones! That was my Reno gambling experience. I played the phones and I came out ahead.”
“Well, so you really are lucky,” said Frankie, brightening. “Lucky Balzano. Lucky like Luciano. You oughtta make a phone call more often.”
“Nye, the truth of the matter is that I am probably the unluckiest gambler that there ever has been,” Sunny said. “I am the gambler that has known the near miss.”
“How you mean, Sunny?” Frankie asked. (As I would very soon figure out for myself, “How you mean, Sunny?” was the sort of thing one asked when one had plenty of time on one’s hands.)
“Well, I’ll tell you why. There was this friend of mine. You may remember him, Frankie, because his name was Frankie, too, only you’re Frankie Brown and this Frankie they called ‘Blackjack’ because he’d be in a bar and a fight would break out and he’d pull out a blackjack and conk people over the head with it.
“Anyway, Frankie liked to take me to Atlantic City every once in a while. As I said, I never was much of a gambler and I went really just to give him company. He used to be with a girl named Mary Ann who lived around the corner and when I’d go over to his house to pick him up, he would shout up the stairs as we were leaving, ‘MARY ANN. WE’RE GOING TO GO. WE’LL SEE YOU IN A COUPLE OF WEEKS!’ Because our intention was that if we won, we were going to stay. We were going to stay until we’d used up all of the money.
“So this one time, we got into the casino and there’s a wall there with slot machines and there’s a wall here. Catty-corner. Now, Frankie’s working a machine on one side and I’m sitting over by the other wall and the others are mostly taken. Meantime, I didn’t know that I could use two slot machines at once. And I say, ‘Frankie, can I use this?’ And he says, ‘Yeah, you can use as many as you want.’ I say, ‘Why don’t you come over and use this one?’ and I pernt to the one next to me. And he says, ‘But I’m hitting, Sunny. I’m doin’ okay. You go ahead and play it.’ We were playing dollar chips. So, I’m putting chips here and I’m putting chips there and this woman comes over with a group of her friends. Elderly. She says to me, ‘Are you using this machine?’ and pernts to the machine next to where I’m sitting—the machine I had invited Frankie to play. So I say, ‘I am but you can use it if you like.’ And son of a bitch, she sticks in her kern and fuckin’ bells start going! I didn’t know what the hell was happening. Frankie didn’t know what was happening. He might’a thought it was me. She hit the jackpot! I think it was eighty-four thousand dollars. The guards come and do the whole thing that they do and she walks away and turns to me and says, ‘Thank you’ and waves. One kern away from the jackpot! ‘WE’LL SEE YOU IN A COUPLE OF WEEKS!’ That one time, that one time we came close to those couple of weeks. So, no. Not Lucky. You better just call me Sunny.”
Sunny was equally at home speaking Beckettese and Brooklynese. In his gravelly voice, he enunciated words with a Masterpiece Theatre formality that made one think of John Gielgud or William F. Buckley introducing an episode of Brideshead Revisited, while also allowing several “fuhgeddaboudits” into every half-hour of conversation—though when he did so, he was no more aware that he was engaging in vernacularism than a French bulldog is aware of being French.
Indeed, he seemed to be unsuspecting that there was anything remarkable about himself at all.
* * *
3
The Last Small Town in New York City
The Red Hook I’d found myself in that first night at Sunny’s was a ghost town. Not in the way of a forsaken mining town in the Southwest, more like the abandoned vicinities of former industrial cities: Baltimore, Schenectady, Cleveland, Flint—places where industry boomed, industry died, and the people that served that industry have vanished. Had one taken a man from 1854, when Red Hook had one of the great settlements of the Irish in Brooklyn, or 1884, when the expansion of the largest dry dock in the country had just been completed there, or 1934, the year of Sunny’s birth, and deposited him on the corner of any two streets along the Red Hook waterfront in 1994, he would have looked around and asked, “Where’d everyone go?”
Where dockworkers had once crowded shape-ups, where labor racketee
rs had ruled, where bounty hoppers hid, bootleggers distilled, arsonists lit, nuns crossed, longshoremen hauled, unions agitated, kids pelted, gangs brawled, it was now so quiet you could hear the bell buoys in the harbor clanging like church bells calling truant parishioners. Brick warehouses dating to Reconstruction, and some row and frame houses older still, stood amidst empty grassy lots, but there were no restaurants, no bars. There was Sunny’s place and a VFW post and a few small sandwich shops and bodegas. Most of the population that remained was clustered in a sprawling public housing project on the eastern side of the neighborhood, an area known locally as “the Front” to distinguish it from the waterfront quarter around Sunny’s, which was referred to as “the Back.” It was a division that dated to the previous century, long before such a thing as public housing existed, when the boundary line was said to follow the path of a creek. Though the creek eventually dried up and the bed was paved over and became a street, the border remained, now delineated in asphalt.
I knew nothing then about this unofficial partition of the neighborhood, but I did already know about invisible boundaries. Since moving to New York in 1991, I had lived in Park Slope, a leafy neighborhood of fin de siècle brownstones just minutes away by car, but I had only dimly been aware of Red Hook in all that time. Surrounded on three sides by water and on the fourth by an expressway, the neighborhood was isolated and strangely remote. It was a corner of the city that rarely made the news. And when it did, it was mostly in connection with crime, tragedy, or municipal neglect. Red Hook was where the local elementary school principal was shot and killed while out looking for an absentee student a couple years earlier. It was where the previous summer a turf soccer field—donated by the government of Norway to coincide with the World Cup—was set on fire by teenagers days after being installed. At the time, a city official simply mocked the Scandinavians’ naiveté for putting their field in Red Hook. “Red Hook isn’t Norway.”
Red Hook was notorious. A place to take garbage and corpses. Dead Hook. At least that had been my own very vague sense of the place before coming to Sunny’s: hearsay and gangster mythology. Wasn’t that where Al Capone earned the nickname Scarface? Didn’t On the Waterfront have something to do with Red Hook? Isn’t that where Joey Gallo kept a lion in his basement?
—
AT ONE TIME, the name “Red Hook” had encompassed a far larger neighborhood, stretching north to Atlantic Avenue and the edge of Brooklyn Heights and east to the foothills of Park Slope. It was Robert Moses, New York City’s unofficial master planner, who, in the 1940s, had an elevated expressway built over what was then the neighborhood’s main commercial street, and later connected that expressway with another to its north, creating a river of cars through the center of the old Red Hook and cleaving the harborside half from the rest of the borough of Brooklyn. In his influence on thousands of mid-century Brooklynites, Moses must have seemed more powerful than his ancient namesake, parting not mere water but land.
What now lay to the north and east of this concrete moat soon took on new names—Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, and Boerum Hill—as if to disavow any relation to their past during a time when the word “red” itself was viewed with suspicion.
But for those who lived in the low-lying areas close to the water, there was no escaping “Red Hook.” In this area—known at least since the 1880s as Red Hook Point, its inhabitants called Pointers—a sense of separateness, not only from the rest of Brooklyn but from the northern half of the neighborhood, had existed long before Robert Moses rose to prominence. Those who had lived below Hamilton Avenue and closer to the harbor had always held the view that they were the true Red Hookers, while those who lived above this line would just as soon have referred to themselves as living in South Brooklyn or Old Brooklyn. Robert Moses had merely set in stone a border that had already existed between Red Hook Point and greater Brooklyn for generations.
As early as the 1840s, when the first great wave of Irish immigration hit New York, Red Hook Point was thought of as an alien enclave within the city of Brooklyn—though less San Marino than Devil’s Island. A home for fugitives, bootleggers, and rumrunners; a vicinity where, in 1842, people were advised to do their marketing during daylight hours so as to avoid the knives of thieves hiding in the marshes. Sensational accounts of bodies found in various states of decomposition in Red Hook’s fetid swamps filled the crime blotters of nineteenth-century tabloids, and the hometown newspaper, The Brooklyn Eagle, variously described Red Hook Point as “a strange and odious place,” “an unknown region,” and a place where “some of the worst murders that have ever been recorded took place.”
A full half-century before the macabre H. P. Lovecraft would describe his neighborhood as a cauldron of deviance and iniquity in “The Horror at Red Hook,” the Eagle wrote:
There is scarcely a ward in Brooklyn that does not contain within its precincts dens so infamous in their character, and in the character of the inhabitants, that the more respectable portion of the community would start back in horror at the idea of breathing the atmosphere tainted by their proximity. In some immorality, unbridled and unfettered, bears sway; in some thieving and dishonesty prevail, while in others the pallid faces, tattered garments, bleared eyes, and shriveled bodies, bear unerring testimony to the degrading effects of dissipation, and in more than one case can be found the assassin and murderer, ignoring altogether petty crimes as beneath their notice….Red Hook Point stands out in bold relief as being the grand central and amalgamated cesspool and sink of low life in Brooklyn.
If nineteenth-century Red Hook appeared to outsiders to be a vile settlement, twentieth-century Red Hook would become synonymous with criminal gangs, extortionists, black marketeers, skirmishes between the Irish and the Italians, longshoremen’s union corruption, and internecine Mafia wars. It was here in 1903 that the Black Hand made its first appearance in America. A now-forgotten phenomenon, the Black Hand was widely believed to be a sinister criminal fraternity, with origins in Sicily, that fanned out from Red Hook across New York and to Italian communities in other cities. Extortion letters and bombings were its calling card. Newspaper readers were told that the Black Hand was worldwide and that its adherents had arrived on American shores to set up cells and plunder our wealth.
It was in Red Hook, too, that the White Hand, an Irish gang whose territory and source of income were the piers that stretched from the southeastern end of the neighborhood to the Manhattan Bridge, ruled for much of the 1920s. The White Hand specialized in protection rackets, taxation of the docks, and simple theft, in sum an operation that netted enough income to make gang boss a sought-after position. There was one catch to being the White Hand’s chief executive officer—one’s tenure was sure to be short and one would suffer a violent death at the hands of one’s successor. The rise and demise of White Handers such as Dinny Meehan, Peg-Leg Lonergan, Garry Barry, Wild Bill Lovett, Cinders Connolly, Red Donnelly, and the eleven other known heads of the gang were given dramatic coverage in the press. The shortest stint as leader of the White Hand was that of Eddie McGuire, who in 1928 foolishly agreed to roll dice against Red Donnelly for supremacy of the gang. Minutes after McGuire rolled a winning three and four, Donnelly shot him dead on a dark pier.
By 1926, the juvenile delinquency rate in Red Hook was five times greater than that of any other district in Brooklyn and the New York State Crime Commission chose the neighborhood for a study on the causes of crime. Describing Red Hook as “an unusually provincial district tucked away in a large city, with most of its residents neither knowing nor caring about what goes on beyond the section’s narrow bounds,” the commission concluded that the children’s concept of adult life came from “watching the men of Red Hook engage freely in drinking, gambling, brawling, shooting, and stabbing matches.”
Robert Moses must have thought he was doing the rest of Brooklyn a favor when he built his expressway and sealed Red Hook away.
My own father, who grew up in Depression-era East New York, Br
ooklyn, then the home of Murder Inc. killers like Bugsy Goldstein and Mendy Weiss, looked shaken when I told him over dinner where I had begun spending my Friday nights.
“Red Hook!” he exclaimed. “That was no-man’s-land when I was a kid. Nobody went to Red Hook!”
—
NO DOUBT RED Hookers of the time didn’t think of themselves as living in a True Detective tale or an Elia Kazan movie. But Red Hook was home to enough criminals to fill its own wing of the rogues’ gallery. In addition to the White Handers, mob eminences like Frankie Yale, Al Capone, Albert Anastasia and his brother Anthony “Tough Tony” Anastasio, Joey Gallo, and in more recent times, the unsung men and boys who fought territorial battles for the street corners in the shadows of the housing projects, all contributed to the notion of Red Hook as a place of mayhem and thuggery that persisted nearly to this day. Some social commentators wondered whether there wasn’t a geographical determinism at work, the very words “red” and “hook” bringing to mind blood passion, butchery, aggression. Impalement by gaff. No self-respecting lowlife would want to admit to being raised in a place called “Park Slope,” “Carroll Gardens,” or “Windsor Terrace.”