Locals remember Roberto Gonzalez’s wit and generosity

“Nice to meet you. I’m the Mayor, the security, and the entertainment.” This is how Roberto Gonzalez, also known as Bobby, introduced himself to me four Julys ago when I moved to Sunset Park. Bobby cemented himself as a fixture on our block — 57th Street between Third and Fourth avenues — through an unwavering presence on his stoop and in the homes of neighbors and friends. In many ways, he was the quintessential Sunset Park man: a proud Nuyorican viejito who had done stints in several boroughs before landing in Brooklyn in a house filled with three generations of family. He was an everyman and yet one of a kind. Bobby’s energy was larger than life. His death earlier this summer has left the block in a collective somberness.

Roberto was born in 1943 in Isabela, Puerto Rico. He moved to the Bronx when he was nine years old. From the moment he arrived in New York, he bounced from odd job to odd job, becoming a true jack-of-all-trades. He never finished high school, dropping out to care for his mother. Bobby moved to Spanish Harlem, where he owned a cuchifrito restaurant on 103rd Street and did maintenance work in a building on 106th Street. He met the mother of his children there when she got into a fender bender outside his restaurant. She already had two children, whom he cared for as his own even after her early death. He later made his way to Long Island, leaving city life behind for a brief respite in the suburbs. There, he fully embraced his Renaissance man persona, fixing odds and ends around the house, cooking for the family and working for Minuteman Press. After some health complications, he moved in with family in Sunset Park, where he lived out his days.

By the time he made it to Brooklyn, well into his 70s, he was technically retired but was not a man known to idle. “I’m pretty sure my dad painted half the stoops on the block,” said Bobby’s daughter, Alexis Cancel. “If he ever saw anyone doing work, he would offer to help.” Over time, he gained near-celebrity status among neighbors, always watching and supervising the happenings of the street from his eternal position on the stoop. Tina Chen, a local resident and business owner, knew Bobby from the moment he arrived on 57th Street. He painted her stoops and helped her with other contract work. “He would sit on the stoop and watch all of the people walking by to make sure everyone is safe,” she said. “He would talk to the kids and the old people. When people had packages delivered, he would take them to their door so they wouldn’t get stolen.”

Bobby embodied a spirit of community inherent to the Brooklyn experience. His daughter Teresa Vasquez-Bobe, who grew up in Sunset Park, said her dad “really brought that old school energy. Growing up here, I remember seeing the viejitos playing dominoes on the sidewalk or sitting on the stoop, and he just preserved that essence of what Sunset Park is about.” He welcomed anyone and everyone to join him on the stairs. Even from inside my apartment, the echo of his voice from the stoop and the sound of his pigeon calls — a comfort after many years — traveled to meet me. I’d overhear conversations with delivery workers, jokes shared with his grandchild and greetings delivered to doctors and nurses leaving their shifts at the local hospital. He was a stranger to none and clearly a giant to his family.

The first week after Bobby’s death, I sat on the stoop in an eerie silence. Neighbors would linger at his stairs, sometimes asking me if I knew where he’d gone or whether he was okay. In the days before his wake, his family set up a poster on the stoop, alerting the neighborhood to his passing and inviting them to his funeral. For days, I watched countless neighbors, families and strangers stop to pay their respects. I saw the local canning lady kneel and pray. I saw children grab their mothers’ hands as they read the news. Bobby’s presence on the stoop and on this block was as certain a sign of summer as the jingle of a Mister Softee truck or the laughter of children playing in a fire hydrant’s spray, and the impact of his absence is palpable.

In his obituary, his family remembered him as he was: “the man, the myth, and the legend.”

“It blew me away that so many people from the block came to the wake,” said his daughter Alexis. “Just hearing their stories and how much my dad impacted them, he made so many people feel like family. I wonder if he knew that. He loved being on that stoop, and he didn’t want to be anywhere else.” By the time I returned home from his funeral, his staircase overflowed with flowers — the stoop now a shrine to the man who inhabited it.