“Anna was very well known in that neighborhood,” Ms. Ambrosio, 76, said. “Anna went to all the churches. She went to the Russian church, she went to the Polish church, she went to the Orthodox church.”

During an economic slide in the 1970s, Ms. Smith closed down the business. The factories had shuttered and the bar was being relentlessly robbed and vandalized, her niece, Susan Sheldon, said.

“They stole her safe once,” Ms. Sheldon, 61, said. “She was coming home from church and they were rolling it down the road.”

Image An undated photo of Jennie and Charles Szyjka, with children Michael and Anna.

For many years, Ms. Sheldon said, Ms. Smith was the only person who lived on the block. The family begged her to leave Williamsburg, but she refused. In the late 1980s, she finally moved to a nursing home in Manhattan but spoke endlessly of returning to North Sixth Street. She died in 2003.

Sweetwater opened 10 years ago. On a recent Friday afternoon, the happy hour crowd sidled up to the bar and a few early birds took menus in the dining room. The dusty light that percolated through the plate windows, illuminating the tile floors and ornate tin ceiling, made it easy to picture a time when shipbuilders and longshoremen gathered there. Some of those men and their female companions are immortalized in photos on the wall.

Ms. Brondmo lives in Ms. Smith’s former apartment. She shared it with her husband, Pablo Arganaraz, the restaurant’s chef and co-owner, who died in 2013. She does not believe the building is haunted and thinks the staff is superstitious. As for the broken glasses, she said vibrations from the drilling during construction at the restaurant probably made them brittle.