tough times as it had lost it's traditional client base which had been replaced
by a much less favorable crowd. That crowd needed much more attending to and
Israel Mervis, a.k.a. Sunny, had gotten very elderly and could no longer get
around very well. His son took over, but hated it and refused to continue. They
put the building up for sale, then decided to knock down half the building
(which had been a house with an added front built out to the curb and attached
to the building to it's south).
In days long gone (sometime before 1990), eating lunch at Sunny's was a
pleasure. Meetings were regularly held there. Good times were to be had there.
By 1990, the old crowd had disappeared and a new, much different crowd replaced
them. Sunny wound up having to employ off duty cops to wand everyone on
entering and the police were called out on too many occasions. Sunny was
pulling his hair out trying to figure out how to contend with his new clients
and various Lieutenants of the Third Precinct vowed to shut him down
permanently without much success.
So now there's a twenty or thirty foot hole in the landscape and the rumor on
the street is that someone is thinking about buying it and putting in a
posh-like restaurant with patio where to hole is now.
On story is that Robert of Robert's Shoes would come in at lunchtime daily. His
invariable order was three shots of whiskey sitting one at the front of the
bar, one in the middle, one at the end of the bar. He would come in, drink each
shot by turns, and walk out the rear door in about fifteen minutes. Robert is
long since dead and his son-in-law, Mark Simon took over the shoe store and has
much different habits, who never, in my observation, drank at Sunny's, if he
drinks at all.
Another landmark business bites the dust. But I remember Israel Mervis as an
old fashioned gentleman , lovely man, entirely puzzled as to what to do to
reclaim his bar with his old customers.