El Internacional: Tribeca's Remarkable Marriage of Commerce and Creativity

The El Internacional "Statue of Liberty" crown, which remained on the roof until 2004, when the building—along with the crown—was demolished to make way for a new building. Photo: ©Peter Aaron/OTTO

Twenty-eight years after artist Antoni Miralda shuttered his cow-spotted, Lady Liberty-crowned, blue margarita-and-tapas-serving, post modern creation called El Internacional, he is bringing the short-lived yet spectacular restaurant back to life—in words and pictures.

From 1984 to 1986, the flamboyant Tribeca eatery stood at 219 West Broad­way, to be replaced by the longer-lived and better remembered (and no less eccentric) El Teddy’s.
Since 2005, a residential building has occupied that address and now only the memories remain. Miralda is collecting them.

For a book, and for a Tribeca event or “action” yet to be fully imagined, Miralda is seeking the help of others to bring it together, be it through reminiscences, photos, finances or more.
“There are so many people who took pictures here, who had their wedding banquet inside, whatever,” he said. “Just send a picture, a Polaroid or a note and incorporate those memories in the book.”

Miralda can be reached at miralda@foodcultura.org [1].

What the Barcelona native, who opened the restaurant with his chef partner Montse Guillen, comes up with remains to be seen. But it is worthy history he seeks to revisit, a freewheeling time for art and artists in the neighborhood. A time when most anything—even a restaurant topped with a 2,500-pound crown—seemed possible.

It was also a very different era for the city, and El Internacional, Miralda said, reflected it.

“This was New York, in the middle of the ’80s, with this coincidence with [clubs] Palladium, with AREA,” Miralda said, seated at the coffee shop Pecan that is across the street from where his restaurant once stood. “There was a lot of energy. This was a very intense, very deeply interesting time.”

In 1973, Miralda and Guillen had moved to 228 West Broadway, across from what then was an Italian restaurant called Teddy’s. Its glamorous, celebrity-filled 1950s and early-’60s past had faded by then. Its present, reputedly, ap­pealed more to mobsters. Then it closed.

When the partners took it over, the entire space—floors, walls, ceiling, roof, even the sidewalk—became the artist’s canvas. True to El Internacional’s name, diners entered the restaurant by walking over a collection of flags encased in the floor. They might eat in the Marina Room, where codfish served as a centerpiece, stalactite-like protuberances hung from the ceiling and sculpted toreador heads served as candleholders.

“It was like coming to a dream,” Miralda recalled.

Then there was the neon-bright, anodized aluminum bar with its trophy-like containers, topped with statues of Christopher Columbus and filled with blue margaritas.

“It harkens back to a past that never was,” is the way the bar was described in each of the four oversized “newspapers” that the restaurant self-published during its brief life.

“And of course here’s the turquoise main dining room,” Miralda said, showing a photo from his portfolio of El Internacional memorabilia, “with its wonderful ’50s ceiling and the ’20s mosaic wall and mix of furniture—authentic furniture we found.” Miralda embedded Coke cans into the sidewalk. “There were strong protests. People thought they were dangerous.”

El Internacional was a mere year and half old when Miralda saw the end coming. The artists and actors who once dined at the restaurant were driven away because, as he put it, “everyone was there.” And he had become distracted by the start of his six-year-long “Honey­moon Project” that featured a host of installations around the symbolic “wedding” of the Statue of Liberty and Spain’s monument to Christopher Co­lumbus.

Christopher Chesnutt would take over, renaming it El Teddy’s and adding his own quirky flourishes but preserving the place as a cherished local icon, made famous by its appearance in the opening credits of “Saturday Night Live.”

Despite vehement op­position from Com­munity Board 1 and others, the Land­marks Preservation Com­mission de­­­clared the building “noncontributing” to Tribeca’s historic district, paving the way for a developer to demolish it.

Looking back all these years later, Miralda seems both touched and amused that his creation had turned into a preservationist cause, much as a 19th-century cast-iron classic might be.

“El Internacional only started in the ’80s,” he said with a smile, “and already it was something that people wanted to keep, and to love.”