Long Island Sunset

THE SUNSET BAR and Restaurant is located on a small street not far from what passes as a business district in Rockville Center, N.Y. A block or two away lies the local station of the Long Island Railroad where commuters come and go on their way to work in Manhattan. No one on an LIRR train ever sees the Sunset, for the trains move too fast for passengers to catch a glimpse of the small bar.

And for the most part the patrons of the Sunset don't use the LIRR. They live in the neighborhood, work at nearby stores and factories, and come into the place after work to chat about the things people always talk about in bars. "How are they treating you at Grumman," one man says to another as they sip their Schlitz and Schaffer. "Not bad, but I'm not going anyplace," he replies. A little further down the rubbed wood bar, a scotch drinker banters with the barmaid, asking how she likes the heat. "Most of the time it's not too bad," she says tossing her bobbed head. "I have a very nice apartment with a fan." The man looks at her pensively for a moment and then returns to his drink. The customary TV set is on, showing an old movie with two gray-haired men talking in a library. You can't hear what they are saying, for the voice is off, and a "Here Come De Judge" routine is blaring out from a radio instead.

It's pretty relaxed, so calm in fact that a white man can almost forget that all of the faces are black, save for a man who left a moment ago after telling a black man with whom he had been chatting to "stay out of trouble" in a friendly way. Just after he left, Deloros, the manager of the Sunset, came in and talked about the place. "It's like a club in a way," she said. "I have lots of parties here for the regular people ... we have pictures of the parties." She said that the police had few complaints about the Sunset, commenting, "We have some complaints, but no bar and grill is perfect. There are a lot of restaurants that serve liquor who are worse. Why they even had a ... an incident at the Copacabana a couple of years ago."

WHETHER the Sunset causes problems for the police or not, one thing is sure: the bar and grill will soon be thrown out of the location which it has occupied since Rockville Center was a true village in a still bucolic Long Island. An urban renewal project has been grinding away in the area for over ten years, and the developer in charge of the project has told the owners of the Sunset that they must leave in a year or two to make way for a 175-unit housing project and an industrial park.

"They just told us we'd have to leave and find another place by ourselves," said Deloros, who confessed that she left the village mayor's office in tears of rage after a meeting on the urban renewal project. (The developer commented that he would try to find a new location for the Sunset, but that the law did not require him to do so.) "If you asked the people around here, they'd tell you that they don't want us to leave," Deloros said. "We're not opposed to the new housing and all but we think they ought to take the wishes of the people in the neighborhood into account." Several heads of middle-aged men sitting at the bar nodded in agreement.

The name of New York Mayor John Lindsay drifted into the conversation, and Deloros said, "If Lindsay can walk the streets of Harlem and Brooklyn, why can't our mayor come down here and talk to us? He's just a few blocks over there," she said with a gesture sweeping past a juke box toward the dustry rear of the rectangular room. "He really should come here and see the people," she said, "That's what keeps him in office--the people."

The juke box began to play James Brown and a teenaged girl who had been sitting at the end of the bar danced a couple of steps as she walked out. It was becoming hard to hear, but Deloros meditated out loud for a moment on the Sunset's future: "You take the people's pleasures away from them and then you have violence. Nobody wants violence." She paused and her gaze roamed over the rows of liquor bottles behind the bar, coming to rest on fresh pictures of John and Robert Kennedy on either side of Martin Luther King. "No," she resumed, "nobody wants that."