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Tribeca's
Crown Jewel Comes Down
by Ronald
Drenger
Where Elizabeth Taylor once sipped martinis and mobsters came to dine,
Gary Scully now prowled the dimly lit rooms, looking to pry away another
piece of Tribeca history
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He surveyed the musty ruins of El Teddy's restaurant. Little remained.
Tables, banquettes, lighting fixtures, the long, shiny bar-almost
everything had been ripped away and tossed into a dumpster on the
street.
"The boss told us to throw it all away," Scully said.
"All" included the building's famous Statue of Liberty
crown, which had been cut to pieces with a blowtorch. The crown's
five steel spikes lay scattered about on the roof, alongside sections
of its base and rusting metal frame.
"Everyone is asking about it," Scully said of the crown.
"A few people walking by on the street have said they wanted
to buy it."
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Last month, the building at 217-219 West Broadway, where meals and
drinks had been served up since early last century, was gutted by
Scully and a crew of workers, in preparation for its demolition.
There were still a few remnants of the building's former life. The
mosaic tiled podium, where managers at El Teddy's had taken reservations,
stood in the front room, covered in dust. In an alcove, dozens of
glasses, most of them broken, filled a set of shelves behind sliding
glass doors.
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Upstairs, mirrors covered the walls of a room where about
100 chairs waited to be trashed.
The kitchen-where German, then Italian, then Spanish, then
Mexican food had been prepared-was a shambles, dark and reeking
of spoiled food, most of the equipment gone, the gritty floor
stripped of tile, the unplugged refrigerator empty except,
inexplicably, for two bottles of capers.
"When we came in, there were rats all over the place,"
Scully said.
The colorful stained-glass canopy over the restaurant's entrance
also survived for the time being, and, like the crown, was
attracting interest.
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"One guy gave me his cell number and said he would get guys to
come and take it," Scully said. "But I haven't been able
to get through to him, and he hasn't come back."
Various people had hoped to salvage the crown or awning. Bob Townley,
director of Manhattan Youth, thought about moving them to the Tribeca
waterfront. But in the end, nobody was ready to take on the costly
and time-consuming job.
Christopher Chesnutt, who owned El Teddy's before the City Marshal
padlocked it in January, said he had gotten several phone calls from
people who urged him to save the two distinctive architectural features.
He considered salvaging the awning, which he created in the early
'90s with artist Judith Robertson, but decided it wasn't worth the
effort.
"Yes, it's too bad, yes, I really like it, yes, it's a shame
for it to be thrown in the dumpster, but what am I going to do with
it?" he said.
"We'll probably smash it up," Scully said of the awning.
"There would be no other way of doing it. If someone wants to
come with a few people to take it away, they can. But it's probably
too late."
After the Teddy's building is demolished this summer, its owner, Steven
Elghanayan, will begin constructing a six-story condominium with ground-floor
retail, ending the site's colorful restaurant history,
Teddy Bartel ran the original Teddy's, a German eatery popular with
workers, from the 1920s until 1945. Sal Cucinotta, who bought the
place from Bartel, turned it into an Italian restaurant and swank
celebrity den that attracted movie stars in the 1950s and 60s. The
restaurant was also known as a mobster hangout for a time.
In 1984, artist Antoni Miralda and his partner, Montse Guillen, a
chef, created El Internacional, a Spanish restaurant and tapas bar
that lasted for two years. It was Miralda who built the 2,500-pound
crown and added numerous other funky, artistic touches. Chesnutt opened
El Teddy's Mexican restaurant in 1989.
Donna Perillo, the owner of Sweet Lily nail spa across the street,
was saddened by the restaurant's demise.
"It was really nice, especially at night," she said. "The
crown was kind of pretty and it was a great landmark to tell people
where we are. Every day, tourists stood on my step taking photos."
"I'm not so much sad about the artwork being destroyed,"
said Robertson, the artist who created the stained glass for Chesnutt's
awning. "The real sad thing for me is that as a story, that building
was so interesting. It's sad to see that story end."
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