![]() “It’s been a lot of work, and some heartache, and a lot of battling with regulations. “Their parents brought ‘em here, and they keep coming here, and then they bring their kids here.”īut if you talk to Bill Koop, who’s run the place with his brother for more than half of his 74 years, he’ll tell you it’s time to retire. “A lot of people have been coming in here since they were kids,” he says. He says he doesn’t know what he’ll do for work when the marina shuts down. “That came in at 1:30 this morning,” he says. Tripp points to a mammoth white boat that had apparently beached itself at 31st Street on the Oceanfront and stayed stuck for days. ![]() Tripp himself now runs the boat lift for the marina. His wife tended bar here, and his son, Joe, worked in the kitchen. He says he’ll follow his favorite servers and bartenders - Mike, Melody and Stefanie - wherever they go.įor John Tripp, smoking stoically in the marina’s gravel lot, the place might as well be home. “It’s one of the last really local places - one of the last local, cheap places.” “I think it’s a shame,” says Doug Prosnick, a landscaper who’s been coming here for years and looks a little like Terence Stamp. The restaurant and marina are soon to be demolished, making way for construction crews who plan to lay wiring for the hulking luxury senior apartments being built next door.Įventually, the site will become a new and more modern restaurant and marina, complete with a swimming pool, says Samantha Tricoli of Arlington-based Bonaventure Realty, the marina’s new owners. Its owners, half-brothers Bill Koop and Jimmy Campbell, sold the place last year, and have been renting month to month ever since. Jed DeLaune, a trim-goateed regular identified by another patron as “the mayor of Ocean View,” strides down the dock to more high-fives and fist bumps than a Super Bowl player coming out of the tunnel.īut after Sunday, the Cutty Sark’s last day of business, it will all be gone. “The real party’s outside!” his friend shouts back. ![]() “Well hey, I didn’t know you all were here!” says a guy with a gray horseshoe mustache and mysteriously wet sneakers, who’s just wandered out from the bar with a fresh rum and Coke. “You could be sitting next to someone and not be sure where they’ve been or what they’ve been doing, and they have more money than God,” server Rosie Bowen told The Pilot in 2012.īut at least today, it seems, everyone knows everyone. And if you’re so inclined, you could cure your headache the next morning with steak and grits, alongside families just coming from church. It’s the sort of place you might earn your hangover on a Saturday night next to anglers and off-duty police - former Norfolk sheriff Bob McCabe, whose corruption case now winds through the courts, was reportedly a fan - not to mention wealthy retirees from the new buildings across the street. In gentrified East Beach, whose condos now rise like tiered wedding cakes over Little Creek, the Cutty is perhaps the last survivor from the old rough-and-tumble go-go bar days of Ocean View, with loyal regulars who’ve beached here over generations like the boats on the blocks outside.
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