UP ALL NIGHT

RED HOOK

LOVE NY1, its soothing low-price graphics, its dippy music, even the New Yorker of the Week. It's great to wake up to, sitting in a daze with a cup of coffee watching the same items repeated endlessly. The launching of a ferry from Red Hook to Manhattan was an item, with one semi-official saying, "Red Hook is an up-and-coming place for up-and-coming people," and another proclaiming, "It's an exciting place to be!"

I laughed at that nerdy optimism as I walked along uneven cobblestones on wide empty streets, amid abandoned buildings, in dead silence. Hardly anybody had shown up for the inaugural launch, according to NY1.

It was exciting to escape Ludlow St., where I'd been earlier that night. Compared to dodging clumps of expectant people on narrow sidewalks, Red Hook seemed like a grim vacation. Getting out there is a problem late at night—you have to take the subway to Carroll Gardens, a self-contained little neighborhood with a great pizza restaurant, then wait up to an hour for a bus to take you farther.

I was with Michael Carpio, who sells books in Williamsburg near the fashionable Bedford stop, where up to nine tables can be lined up at a time. We broke down and took a cab, my treat, to Sunny's, a popular bar on the waterfront on the western edge that was opened by Sunny's great grandparents in 1890. The patrons were smoking away, lawlessly, but otherwise looked quite lawful, educated types who might also be able to fix something. Ugly art and mismatching furniture decorated the empty back room, where readings by Brooklyn authors take place one Sunday a month. Sunny's is only open three nights a week, maybe because the charismatic 60-something Sunny has a new baby at home.

I met Anthony, one of the handful of longshoremen left in the area. He'd recently moved to New Jersey, after rents went up to about $1200 for a one-bedroom. Real estate has taken off—his father bought some property for $200,000 eight years ago; it's worth about $2 million now. Anthony is a Red Hook booster—"Sunny is like a father to everybody, and the people are the best you can know. People think of bums and robberies in Red Hook, but it has one of the lowest crime rates in all of NYC." The biggest problem, he allowed, is transportation, but this may change after the ground is broken for the new IKEA.

I sometimes worry about performance artiste Anna Montana, a lady from Amsterdam who found a room in Red Hook on Craigslist for $450. She loves the old buildings, the quiet, the space; but the F train is unreliable late at night and the buses don't run much after midnight or 1 a.m. This makes her hard life even harder. She's got a roof to sleep under in the summer, though, and likes walking on the old pier on the Buttermilk Channel, where you can spot the Statue of Liberty welcoming performance artist types from all nations.

"People keep saying that Red Hook is happening," says Andrew, a Brooklyn-based comedian, "But then you get out there, and there's only three places to go." Lillie's is one place, owned by the exuberant bar-voiced Lillie Haus, and is open the most—4 to 4, seven days a week. There's a nice drop-ceiling from the late 40s, but Lillie's was a longshoreman bar in 1903. "One day I saw eight elderly people outside the bar and they told me they were the Savorichi family, who had a Wedding Banquet Hall here." It's a rock 'n' roll hip place, with concert performances by Mini-KISS, the popular midget cover band; people come from Williamsburg and Carroll Gardens just to hang out. Every Sunday she has a barbecue in the back garden and crams in about 80 people.

Sometimes Lillie runs shuttles from the Carroll Gardens F stop to the bar, with the Translounge party bus, a classy outfit. We walked up Van Brunt to the Hope & Anchor, by far the slickest place of the three. It's a family restaurant in the day, and every Friday night the mature drag queen Kay Sera hosts karaoke. She highly recommended the pork burger for $8, but it was a little rich for me. I was shocked when Michael, who is constantly broke, ordered a Cobb salad—he was really living it up in this up-and-coming place for up-and-coming people.