Custom Tiki Mugs Created for Sunny’s Halloween Festivities

For the last eight Halloweens, Rob Wall has transformed Sunny’s Bar into Tone’s Tiki, a spooky 1950s Polynesian tiki bar. A neon “Tone’s Tiki” sign goes up in the window, bamboo covers the walls, and an array of tropical beverages go on tap for the last three weeks in October.

“[The theme] stems from the fact that a lot of the Halloween music I like to play is the old ‘50s exotica music: Martin Denny, Les Baxter, and these sort of orchestral jazz numbers that are very dramatic and moody and kind of make it sound like you’re in a spooky jungle … which is kind of a classy Halloween instead of just playing the Monster Mash,” Wall shares.

Wall, or Tiki Rob, as he is lovingly called at Sunny’s, has never lived in Red Hook, but he started coming to the neighborhood frequently in the early 2000s when he worked for the New York Water Taxi. Wall quickly became a part of the community at Sunny’s and eventually pitched a Halloween takeover to the bar.

Every year, Wall adds new decorations to the tiki pop-up, and this year he had lofty aspirations to create custom tiki mugs to add to the festivities. “I make everything for the bar, from the lighting to the decor. And so it makes me learn new skills every year, where I figure out how to do upholstery and stained glass and different lighting and electronics. And now I finally got around to learning ceramics, which seemed like the biggest undertaking of them all,” says Wall.

In May, Wall started a hand-building ceramics class at The Pottery Studio in Gowanus. After five months and various pottery classes at multiple studios, Wall created five custom tiki mug designs shaped like the iconic truck that sits outside Sunny’s, the Lehigh Valley Railroad 79 barge, and three additional tiki cups with Red Hook’s crane hook symbol, Sunny’s neon, and one shaped like Sunny’s building itself.

But he didn’t stop there. Wall then learned to slipcast, so he could make plaster molds of each design so replicas could easily be made of each cup. In the end, Wall made twenty final tiki mugs and hand-painted each one.

Wall finished the mugs just in time for the opening of Tone’s Tiki. Since there was a limited supply, Wall sold the mugs as “first come, first served” via the Tone’s Tiki Instagram. Unsurprisingly, the tiki mugs went very quickly. Wall also donated two of the tiki mugs to the Barnacle Parade raffle.

“There’s a couple different tumbler designs and a lighthouse that I’m very excited for,” Wall shares as he looks ahead to next year’s Halloween, where he hopes to refine his current designs and add a few new cups to his Tiki collection.