Customer Who Love You Can Save You

In business, success and failure can seem binary. Some small businesses make money and flourish; others lose money and close. But there’s a third camp: companies that lose money but also forge deep, enduring connections with their customers. So deep, in fact, that when they’re in trouble, they can turn to those same customers to help save them. And sometimes it works. Here’s a look at a very curious kind of small-business success.

- Lissa Harris

The building on Conover street in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn that houses Sunny’s Bar isn’t much to look at— just a squat utilitarian block of red-painted brick with a sign hanging over the front door that announces, helpfully, BAR. In the froth and churn of Brooklyn real estate, buildings like it go down all the time to make way for offices and condos. But for owner Tone Balzano Johansen, widow of beloved longtime proprietor Sunny Balzano (who died in 2016), it’s sacred space. It’s 100 years of Balzano family history, the place teeming with the ghosts of longshoremen and artists, a place where live music is something you do, not listen to. It’s a piece of old Brooklyn still doggedly refusing to knuckle under to the new world order.