No sooner had wreckers smashed the iconic crown atop the former El Teddy's restaurant on West Broadway than Greg Yerman was readying his hippie-themed Burrito Bar for sale, ending yet another vestige of Tribeca funk.

This month the 14-year-old restaurant at Walker and Church streets, with its VW minibus flying southbound above the doorway, will be gone. A Brazilian restaurant is due to take its place.

		The colorful, sculptural sign cannot be preserved, the owner said, even if someone wanted it. "I'm saddened by that," said Yerman, seated at one of his restaurant's back-room tables, this one adorned with a large likeness of Led Zeppelin. "It's made out of Styrofoam, and once you start hacking away at it it breaks up into a thousand pieces." Yerman inherited the sign from his predecessor, Caliente Cab Co., whose owner commissioned the work from a local artist. But many other touches to the place-such as its "psychedelic salsa," the "Thank you for pot smoking" sign, the tie-dyed shirts worn by waiters, and the hippie cartoons on the restaurant's doors-Yerman can claim as his own. He said the '60s motif was added piecemeal from the time that he and his wife (now ex) started Burrito Bar in 1990.
"We just went with our gut," he said. Yerman, 41, was barely of school age when the era caricatured in his restaurant was in full flower. "I don't remember it at all. I was way too young," he said. "But we knew what we liked. We knew we liked the Doors, we liked Hendrix and Janis Joplin." Yerman said he is closing his doors because only three and a half years remain on his lease and because he wants a new challenge. "I find it difficult to give it 110 percent of my energy and to reinvent and energize the place." He will take the summer off, he said, then open a "bigger and better" Burrito Bar elsewhere, he hopes in Tribeca. But there was a mournful tone in his voice. "I gave birth to this place and I raised it and although I'm comfortable with my decision to leave it's still a bittersweet feeling." Will he be there when the sign comes down? "I hope not," he said solemnly. "It will be a sad day."