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The Appraisal

Tempting Offer Could Mean End of a Brooklyn Longshoreman’s Bar

Pepe Montero with his wife, Linda, and their dog, Mooshi.Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times

“There are ghosts in here,” Amethyst Valentino said, holding up a photo on her cellphone as proof.

For the past seven years, Ms. Valentino has been hosting karaoke at Montero Bar and Grill, the last of the longshoreman’s bars on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. And every night that she was there, Ms. Valentino said, she would feel someone nudging her. Of course, no one was there.

Then one day last year, she was taking pictures of one of the singers. Over the shoulder of a young woman mid-cadenza, caught in the LED flash of her phone, was a familiar face.

“I rushed over to Linda,” the owner’s wife, Ms. Valentino recalled, “and showed her. She said, ‘Oh my god, that’s Nick!’ ”

The red laminate table where Ms. Valentino sets up, under a giant model of an 1873 Spanish warship, turns out to be where Nick, a dearly departed Navy veteran, would sit.

Montero’s is hardly as busy as it once was, even if Ms. Valentino still draws a crowd. The bar used to open at 8:30 in the morning, to serve dock workers getting off their midnight shifts, and kept going well past last call. Still, the place is crowded every night, if not with bodies than with the spirits of the past.

Where might they find a final resting place if the bar becomes a ghost, too?

For the owner, Pepe Montero, 68, even his welcoming smile and cheerful banter cannot hide his anguish over what many would consider the opportunity of a lifetime.

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Mr. Montero, the bar’s owner, has agreed to sell if he and six of his neighbors get a $56 million offer on the row of buildings on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Having inherited Montero’s and the three apartments above it from his parents, Joseph and Pilar Montero, Mr. Montero recently agreed to join six neighbors, including his brother Frank, in a possible sale of all their buildings. For $56 million — or $7 million per property, three times what each is worth on its own — someone could acquire the whole row, from the bar down to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

“Everyone else on the block wants to sell, so I said O.K.,” Mr. Montero said, sitting at the block-glass bar that came over from the original Montero’s across the street, where it opened in 1939. “Even my brother Frank said, ‘Try it, Pepe.’ So I tried it.”

The classic neon sign hanging over the bar, at 73 Atlantic Avenue, is a testament to the Monteros themselves. The bar survived the master builder Robert Moses, who bulldozed the original in 1947 to make way for his expressway; the migration of ships to container ports in New Jersey; crime and recession; and the influx of money into the neighborhood.

Now it may be too much to ignore. Brooklyn Bridge Park has opened, Long Island College Hospital across the street has closed, and hundreds of luxury apartments are already opened or in the works. Crowds not seen even in the waterfront’s heyday stream by to enjoy the piers, with some of those visitors sidling up to the bar on their way back. With 160 feet of uninterrupted storefronts up for grabs, and the likes of Barney’s nearby, it could prove a tantalizing opportunity for a major developer.

“This could be the next South Street Seaport,” said Stuart Venner, who bought No. 71 in 2008 for $1.6 million.

The figure $56 million may seem like a lot to ask, even in Brooklyn Heights in 2015. But it isn’t to Avi Adiv, the founder of Brick Real Estate and the broker who brought the seven mom-and-pop owners together. He points not only to the condominiums planned for across the street, but also major Manhattan firms making small-but-big deals throughout Brooklyn and Queens, such as the recent purchase by Related Companies of 10 far-flung tenements for nearly $40 million.

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Seven adjacent buildings on Atlantic Avenue, leading up to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, are on the market.Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times

“So far it’s just been lowball Larries,” Mr. Adiv said of the offers coming in.

The owners have signed an agreement to execute the sale no matter what if they receive an offer of $56 million or more. If they get a lower price, they will consider it but could also walk away or sell on their own.

This would most likely leave them with less, as happened to Ramon Montero, Frank and Pepe’s brother. He sold No. 75, the only other building on the block, after he and his siblings inherited one property each in 2013. He made $1.9 million.

The new owner of No. 75, which sits on the corner of Hicks Street, does not want to sell so soon after buying the building, Mr. Adiv said.

For patrons, Montero’s is priceless.

“He’d never sell this place,” Matthew Mannino said of Pepe Montero. Mr. Mannino was sitting at his regular spot not far from the door, where Pilar Montero used to hold court until she died in 2012 at age 90. “They’re going to have to take Pepe out of here in a beer box.”

Mr. Mannino was nursing a Budweiser, as was his friend Nick LoPorto, a third-generation regular who was working on the fourth: “My son sits right here and has his soda.”

After all, there is almost nothing like Montero’s left. “Applebee’s and the new bars,” Mr. LoPorto said, “they put up fake memorabilia to be like this.”

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Montero's is the last of the longshoremen's bars in Brooklyn Heights, with a décor that matches its history.Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times

The décor at Montero’s is as lively as the regulars, an attraction unto itself: above the antique register hangs a “Montero’s Bar” sign made in Brazil by a Danish sailor entirely out of butterfly wings; the beret traded by a British naval officer for a Montero’s baseball cap; a pair of ornamental parrots; photos and sketches of Joseph and Pilar, of Pepe and Linda, of Nick and all the regulars, all smiling.

(As for the photo on Ms. Valentino’s phone, a passing resemblance to the blurry outline of a face, bearing some resemblance to Nick’s, could be seen in the haze behind the singer.)

While only Pepe Montero wanted to take over running the bar, having worked there summers during his 44 years as a teacher, the rest of the family is struggling with the decision to let it go.

“Even though I’ve moved away, and I am just shocked at the changes every time I come back, you can still see what the bar means to the neighborhood,” said Frank Montero, who is a lawyer in Washington and owns No. 69.

The only person more conflicted about the decision than Pepe Montero might be his wife, Linda. She would like them to travel or move closer to her family in Las Vegas.

“Owning a bar, it’s like having a second marriage,” she said. “But I see what it means to him. It keeps him going. It’s his connection to his family and his people.”

Maybe both of them could get their wish.

“If we did ever sell,” Mr. Montero said, “I could put the whole bar in a container and just move it. Wherever we go, the bar is still well known.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: $56 Million May Decide Fate of a Longshoreman’s Haunt. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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