Sunny's

As late as 2016, Sunny's looked largely unchanged since the Balzano family opened it in 1890¹. When we listed it, we called it the gold standard of neighborhood bars: as far as you can get from convenient transportation, open only three nights a week, and still kept in the original family. For a few years Sunny and the bar's current proprietor ran it together, first as a social club called the Red Hook Yacht and Kayak Club, then as Sunny's Bar².

In October 2012 Hurricane Sandy's flooding did structural and electrical damage that closed Sunny's for ten months, and when it reopened the neighborhood rejoiced¹.

Sandy wasn't the last of it. Sunny died in 2016². There was also a three-year lawsuit in which most of the Balzano family tried to force a sale². On July 25, 2017, the current proprietor bought the family out². That put one line of our old listing out of date, 127 years after the family opened the doors^{1, 2}.