As we prepared to enter Riptide by the Bay, Greg Lukowski stopped in his tracks.

“My grandmother used to sit right in there,” he said, pointing to the right corner of the storefront window.

Veronica Lukowski, nicknamed “Fronie,” ran the Seaman’s Café and Boarding House on Thames Street for decades. She introduced herself to people as Florence.  Legendary boarders included the Greek, the Russian,  Mr. Olie, and the Toothmaker, who had something to do with dental reconstruction.

“No one went by their real names, ” said Greg, 52, who had just finished an all-night shift as a docking pilot. (“I’m a parking valet for ships,” he said.)

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Fronie, who died in 1990, never rode in a car or owned a phone.

“She didn’t want bill collectors to call.”

On Sundays, the Lukowski family would gather from around Baltimore for Grandma’s soup and ham. 

“She kept everybody together,” Greg said.

When she made noodle soup, Fronie would hang noodles in all shapes and sizes from eight clotheslines in the kitchen. Flour was everywhere. For crab soup, she’d let the pesky crustaceans scamper all over the backyard. Wearing sneakers, she held them down with her foot and pulled the shells off.

Fronie also made simmering pots of “gawumpkis” — cabbage leaves stuffed with ground beef and rice, with their delicious humped backs rising to the surface. Greg especially liked her pierogies  —“Polish ravioli” — the best. She served them with sautéed onions, butter and a dollop of sour cream. “I was in heaven,” he said.

Greg fondly remembers his summertime trips to the market with Grandma. “Only we didn’t call it Fells Point back then. It was “foot-a-Broadway,” he said.

Between the market stalls, Fronie caught up on the neighborhood news. “When Grandma mixed in Polish with her English, I knew I was missing the good part,” said Greg, who added that it was an enchanting place to grow up.

Greg worked his way up through the ranks to captain. Today, most captains have a naval background. 

“I’m a throwback,” he said. “I came up through the Hawes pipe [an old shipboard term that means “worked his way up from the rank and file].”

With Fronie as their matriarch, the Lukowski family has produced generations of harbor men.

Overhearing our conversation, Justin Abrams, the bartender at Riptide, informed us that 1718 Thames is haunted.

“I saw an ice scoop fly down the steps, and last night, the manager watched a chair lift itself up and hit the wall right there,” he said, pointing to Fronie’s corner.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Greg said.