Exploring Red Hook, Brooklyn

This is Red Hook, Brooklyn, a neighborhood I'd call mine if real estate divides hadn't designated us as the Columbia Waterfront. It's a short walk towards the bend and bust of rusted fences cornered with overgrown grass. I look through metal bars at the cruise terminal and encounter the careful swirl of paint against aluminum and brick.

Red Hook is as deliberate as it is haphazard. Beyond the projects, the ball fields, the towel skirts and inner tubes spilling from the community pool, there are farm to table restaurants next to stores that sell high-end baby clothes. Printed onesies of a Kentile Floors sign silhouette. The old abandoned trollies sit at the foot of a warehouse turned artist's collective and gallery. The chocolate factory pumps a whispered Wonka reminiscence, a place that also managed to carve out a barrelled whiskey distillery in a courtyard of trees.  

There are buckets of key limes in a smoky shack where they make, only, key lime pies. I'll see them carefully packaged and sold with labels at the local grocery store and it seems too Easter pastel and pristine for the goods of a place cranking out graham cracker crust and slippery green next to the glass-blowing artists at the pier.

At night, there's the slight twang of blue grass from Sunny's bar, a simple hum that spawned rabid kickstarter campaigns when the bar had to close its doors after Sandy blew through.

The streets of Red Hook are quiet, often deserted, but just beyond the brick and cobblestone, creativity pulses, the way the dock-workers there once drummed the New York harbor to life. I love this place and sometimes claim it when asked where I live. Near Red Hook, I'll say. On the border of an accidental neighborhood. 

No-Read Stories: Sunny, One So True

Story Giveaway

Thanks everyone for your encouragement and for sharing your own stories about the road to publication. We're all in this together and I'm pretty sure there's safety in numbers :-)

Today, I have a really random post for you about this bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn called Sunny's. I'm obsessed with this bar. And as you read on you'll see why.

Last weekend, I was sitting up at the bar at Sunny's. Most of the bar stools there are glued to the ground and the little wooden seats wobble and swivel around, like a Frisbee on top of a skinny stick. Fortunately, I had found one of the only two free-standing stools that wasn't stuck like a post in the ground, so I was sitting steady. I sipped my warm apple cider, which had been topped off with a little bourbon and I was feeling all edgy and cool with the whole bourbon thing (I've never had bourbon in my life.) The band, which consisted of 2 guitarists, a drummer who doesn't wear shoes, and a bassist, was playing a lovely little diddy about walkin' in to your kitchen, slippin' on the tile, and goin' straight to heaven. The bartender, a short, smiling woman had been walking around with a metal bucket asking us to give tips to the band, and she had just slung the bucket up on a little wire hanger that dangled above the bar. All of the sudden, this roly poly looking fat man walks in with a checkered shirt and denim overalls, his chubby cheeks all rosy from the cold. He walks directly to the back room of Sunny's and, a few minutes later, follows the same path right out the door, this time carrying a life size, naked mannequin.

So, there I am at Sunny's, realizing that I had walked into a novel. I mean, seriously, does this not read like fiction to you? It's Red Hook, Brooklyn, for goodness sakes. A place full of yuppies and hipsters and people riding bicycles past fancy little farm to table restaurants and boutiques. And there I am, sipping bourbon, listening to bluegrass, while people do crazy s*** like walk into a dive bar and walk out with naked mannequins. I was in the middle of a scene.

So, somebody, please take it. I am giving this scene to you. Because I'm hooked and have to know. What's the bartender doing when she's not pouring me bourbon and cider? Why is the drummer barefoot in the dead of winter? And why, on earth, did the fat man take the mannequin and where the heck is he going with it?

It's all you.