Body found inside flaming boat near NYC landmark Sunny’s ‘a flashback to the old days of Red Hook’
A little bit of the “old days” came back to Red Hook early Saturday when the FDNY was called to a boat fire near a world-famous bar in the Brooklyn nabe, and discovered a smoldering body in the wreckage.
The FDNY responding to a call of a “dumpster fire” at 253 Conover St., between Beard and Reed streets, found flames shooting out of a boat on a trailer just before 5 a.m., the FDNY and NYPD said.
Stunned firefighters found the man’s body inside the boat, an NYPD spokesperson said.
“I called it in. Honestly, I thought it was a dumpster fire. These days they have all these lithium batteries. My second thought was that it’s hazardous material. It was a powerful blaze,” Sunny’s owner Tone Balzano Johansen, 58, who lives upstairs from the bar, told The Post.
She found it strange when an ambulance pulled up to the scene.
When she learned there was a dead body aboard the ”fiberglass” boat, it gave Johansen the creeps.
“It was a flashback to the old days of Red Hook. The Red Hook of yesteryear,” she noted.
Johansen said the bar closed at around 1:30 a.m. Saturday and an hour later her bartender had closed-up and unlocked her bike and headed for home.
Johansen said she did not hear a thing. “I was facing the other way [sleeping] so I saw something orange, flickering.. and I turn around and it was a big blaze.”
She continued: “I’m a little suspicious. We don’t really have homeless people much in this neighborhood because it’s too far from the hustle and bustle of the city,” she reasoned, adding the locale is far from the subway. “I don’t think a homeless person would have curled up in a boat. I think it’s an inside job,” she added.
Johansen, is a Norwegian artist and the widow of Sunny Balzone, the original proprietor of the legendary Red Hook bar and beloved raconteur who died on March 10, 2016. The rough-and-tumble gin mill is a local institution and was a favorite of the hard-scrabble best-selling author and chef Bourdain.
Cops could be seen Saturday morning examining the charred boat and surveying the lot.
The FDNY fire marshal is investigating what sparked the blaze, and a medical examiner is working to determine the cause of death, officials said.
