When someone stole the Great Jones Street Elvis, a few years ago, a lot of people viewed it as a sign that the old East Village was officially dead. The Elvis was a chalk-plaster bust that had stood in the window of 54 Great Jones for thirty-seven years. It started out in the Great Jones Café, a gathering spot for the downtown arts scene in the eighties, and after the café closed, in 2018, it continued on in a new restaurant there called Jolene.
The theft was unusually brazen. “It was a busy night,” Vishwas Wesley, Jolene’s general manager, told me. “I see these two people kind of push past my maître d’.” There was a woman wearing a Covid mask and a black coat, and a man in a jacket and a fedora with a little feather. “They didn’t look like subway creatures who had just stormed in,” Wesley said. They looked as if they might be senior citizens. The woman made straight for Elvis and took off. Wesley set down a tray of glasses he was carrying and gave chase. “I’m not very proud to say, with the age difference in mind, that she outran me,” he said. Curiously, the man in the fedora and a younger female accomplice who’d waited on the sidewalk didn’t seem to be in a hurry. After the older woman made a run for it, they stood outside the restaurant, giggling.
“When I approached them, they thought it was the funniest thing ever,” Wesley said. The older woman had disappeared with the statue. To de-escalate, Wesley offered to buy the man and the younger woman a beer and talk things over. They declined. The man gave Wesley a parting message: “Tell your owner the statue is mine.”
Gabriel Stulman, the restaurant’s owner, soon got a call from Wesley. “My reaction was: what the fuck do you mean somebody stole Elvis?” Stulman recalled. He decided to rally the community to find the bust. He posted to Instagram that it had been “passed down through three successive owners, and blessed thousands of nights of service.” He knew the bandits’ identities; in his posts, he included a snapshot of the pair, their faces concealed by colorful circles, along with a threat. “If these crooks don’t return the sculpture of Elvis that they have stolen in the next 24 hours, we’ll let you know exactly who they are and where to find them,” he wrote. “You have disrespected our restaurant, our team and the history of this space.”
It’s not that people hadn’t stolen from restaurants before. A month before Elvis went missing, Nightmoves, in Williamsburg, reported the theft of a cherished ceramic figure with a lumpy and prodigious phallus. (Grub Street: “On the evening of October 1, Penis Man went missing.”) A large porcine sculpture outside the Spotted Pig, in the West Village, was swiped twice. (The Post: “Swine steals the pig.”) But the Elvis, whether because of its doe eyes or the way it had become part of East Village lore, felt more personal—less like a theft and more like a kidnapping.
Phil Hartman and Rich Kresberg opened the Great Jones Café in 1983, a more violent time for the block. “When my mother walked in, she wept and said, ‘Please don’t do this,’ ” Hartman, who lived on East Tenth for four hundred and nine dollars a month, told me. In a sense, the café was for, and belonged to, the community. It was the size of a living room. Before it opened, Hartman and Kresberg slapped up paint—the Mets’ orange and blue—and sanded the bar with the help of friends. Sharon, the manager, hung Christmas lights. Karen, a rock guitarist and chef, learned Cajun cooking: blackened redfish, gumbo, peanut soup. The Martinis were made using bottles of house gin or vodka stuffed with jalapeño peppers and served in a shot glass for a dollar. The beers were long-neck Rolling Rocks. Staff and patrons played together on a softball team called the Cajuns. One day, a server known as the Rudest Waitress in New York City showed up with the Elvis. It was approximately life-size, with chipped and crudely applied paint delineating a pinkish face and black hair. It’s Vegas Elvis, looking over his left shoulder, with a kind of blue-steel gaze. Occasionally, someone dressed it up or made out with it, and people liked to hang Mardi Gras beads around its neck, but nobody made it into a big deal. “Nothing about the Jones was trying too hard,” Hartman said.
This was the decade of the yuppie. (A few blocks west, the Gotham Bar and Grill was serving up vertical towers of roasted celeriac with black truffles.) The Jones was for the artists, the punks, the weirdos. Line cooks smoked pot in the walk-in refrigerator. There was sex in the bathrooms and dancing on the tables. Cocaine was abundant. One regular, Milt, lived in the Whitehouse Hotel, a flophouse around the corner. The Jones could abide eccentrics and cranks. After closing, a cocktail napkin might be left on the bar with a note like “Rich—last night, your friend George ‘got carried away’ and massaged his member (to no climax) before being asked to leave.” Once, a regular who claimed he was a Middle Eastern prince took out a gun and waved it around. At Christmas, the owners hung up a hundred and fifty stockings for the regulars and filled each one with a bottle of the patron’s favorite booze. When the Village Voice reviewed the place, the writer found it to be insidery and exclusive, and irresistible, and refused to print its full name or address, to avoid ruining the spell.
Word eventually got out. Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray showed up in a white limousine; Aykroyd hung out in the kitchen. There was Bruce Springsteen, Christopher Reeve, Matt Dillon. The photographer Nan Goldin and Mark Ibold, of Pavement, were bartenders. Keith Hernandez wore a Great Jones Café T-shirt at spring training. Penélope Cruz and Monica Lewinsky were part of a later era. But the most famous regular was Jean-Michel Basquiat.
In 1980, shortly before Basquiat sold his first painting—to Debbie Harry, for two hundred dollars—he was living in an upstairs apartment at 54 Great Jones. When the restaurant opened, three years later, he had moved across the street, into a loft owned by Andy Warhol. Sometimes he would send his assistant over with a cart to load up with food from the Jones. By then, Basquiat was collaborating with Warhol and, in his paintings, honing a critique of ownership and the commodification of everyday life. He liked to use the copyright symbol in his work as a joke. A painting from 1984 shows a Native woman giving birth under the words “ABORIGINAL GENERATIVE ©.” In other works, he copyrighted “milk,” “spine,” and “elbow.”
Basquiat might visit the Jones and pay with a hundred-dollar bill, then bum change to use the café’s pay phone. Often, he’d walk in before the place opened and sit at the bar in silence. He knew the bartender, a guitarist named Randy Gun, from the music scene. Basquiat would order a margarita with house tequila and fresh lime juice. Gun, a recovering addict, would talk to him gently about sobriety. Basquiat bestowed little gifts upon the place. Hartman ended up with a poster of the painter and Warhol, in the style of an old boxing promotion. Basquiat gave Gun a book about bartending, inscribed “TO RANDY FOR THE BEST BARTENDER IN N.Y.,” along with some doodles that later featured in his paintings. Forty years later, Gun sold the book for nearly two hundred thousand dollars.
To a resident of the more anonymous and corporate post-pandemic New York, the East Village of the eighties could seem as small and intertwined as a walled city. You saw the same people every day. Hartman, in the seventies, had worked at a bookstore, with Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, where Patti Smith liked to hang out. Basquiat had been the teen-age friend of a Great Jones Café dishwasher named Julie Wilson. It wasn’t unusual to bump into Madonna. For three hundred dollars a month, Gun shared a three-story loft on Bowery after one of its floors had been vacated by Chris Stein and Debbie Harry. Half the neighborhood was between the ages of twenty and thirty-four. Everyone knew everyone, or knew someone who did. So it came as a shock when the Elvis bandits turned out to be two of their own.
The novelist Jonathan Safran Foer saw Stulman’s ultimatum shortly after it was posted on Instagram. He sent a screenshot to his friends Sam Messer, an artist and a retired associate dean at the Yale School of Art, and Eleanor Gaver, Messer’s wife, an underground filmmaker. “I said something like ‘Isn’t it funny how much these people look like you?’ ” Safran Foer told me. “I was sort of joking, but half serious. More than anything, it was so exactly something that they would do.”
In 1983, Gaver was living in a studio with a back yard, on Seventh Street between A and B, for three hundred dollars a month, and working at the Jones. Messer was making art and pitching for the Cajuns. The first time he visited the café, Gaver was his bartender; Messer asked her to marry him. She threw him out. “I was known as the Rudest Waitress in New York City,” Gaver told me.
Recently, I visited Gaver and Messer at their house, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. We sat in their back yard with their dog, Easy, a docile Great Pyrenees mix. Messer and Gaver are in their sixties. Gaver, who has shoulder-length silvery-blond hair, wore a black button-down, Jimmy Choo sunglasses, and Crocs. “I bought that Elvis,” she said. In 1984, she and a co-worker had found it at a Spanish plaster-statuary shop on Ludlow Street. “We paid nothing for it, and I just stuck it in a window at the bar,” she said. Gaver told Hartman that she was O.K. with him keeping her Elvis at the Jones. In 1989, Hartman sold the café (he now owns Two Boots Pizza) to a regular, Jim Moffett, who preserved the place as if it were a museum. Gaver extended the loan of Elvis. In 2018, Moffett died, and the place shut down. Gaver and Messer decided not to push to reclaim the Elvis in the immediate aftermath—they felt it would have been inappropriate.
The pair and their daughter, Jo Messer, who is also an artist, considered the Elvis a family heirloom. “We always said to Jo, ‘This is your inheritance,’ ” Gaver told me. After Moffett’s death, Stulman took over the space. He’d made a splashy entrance into the downtown restaurant scene around 2006, with Little Owl and, later, Joseph Leonard. In the Great Jones Café space, he opened a new restaurant called, simply, the Jones. Messer told me that he stopped by before it opened: “I said, ‘That’s our Elvis.’ They said, ‘Get the fuck out.’ ” (Stulman said he had no knowledge of this.) The Jones—the new one—soon changed its name to Jolene. Stulman also covered the garish old orange-and-blue façade with pristine white paint.
One night in 2021, the Messer-Gaver family, on their way to a gallery, found themselves walking past the restaurant. “I said, ‘I’m gonna go in and get it,’ ” Gaver recounted. She did. Messer, finding the caper hilarious, and also sympathizing with the restaurant’s employees, felt compelled to stay behind and explain after his wife made her getaway. So Stulman didn’t need to do any detective work to find the culprits. Messer had explained the history of the bust to Wesley, the manager, and left his name and number. Jo stayed with her father. “I was, like, ‘Why would you give them our information?’ ” she told me. She handed Wesley a hundred dollars.
Minutes later, Messer got a text from Stulman demanding the statue back. “I was just, like, Fuck you,” Messer said. Stulman called and texted many more times and threatened to go to the police. Messer ignored him. He and Gaver brought Elvis home. They took photos with it around the house. Gaver slept with it in bed, topless.
Shortly afterward, Jo exchanged messages with Jolene’s Instagram account. “It was crazy rude,” she said. “He was, like, ‘You’re harboring them.’ ” She went on, “He was, like, ‘How dare they take a piece of East Village history? They stole our history.’ But it’s not your history—it’s our history. He clearly wanted it because it gives him some sort of old-school New York cachet, which I found ironic, because if you want to be old and cool you don’t arrest the old and cool New Yorkers, because then you’re sort of a narc.”
The public reaction on social media was getting aggressive. People who didn’t know the backstory were calling her parents cowards and demanding their imprisonment. One said, of Gaver, “Her hands need to be stealing anti aging cream!” At Jo’s urging, Messer eventually gave in, and began negotiating with Stulman over text. Stulman had a habit of referring to the Elvis as “art” in his messages, which bothered Messer. He and Gaver were also offended by the picture of them that he had posted on Instagram. Stulman hadn’t used surveillance footage but, rather, a photo he’d found on social media. In it, the pair appear jaunty and arrogant. Messer is mid-dance move. Above all, Messer objected to the colored circles that Stulman had added to conceal their faces, which he saw as a ripoff of the artist John Baldessari. “He doesn’t even know who Baldessari is!” Messer said. Gaver added, “They tried to make us seem like a couple of old white people.”
“It was the time of the Karens,” Messer said.
Gaver said, “We moved here”—Bedford-Stuyvesant—“in 2013 and are, you know, we’re the first white people that moved here, and we are very tight with our neighborhood.” The Facebook photograph of them that Stulman had posted was taken at a block party. “We were virtually the only white people at the party,” she said.
If anyone was a thief, Messer and Gaver believed, it was Stulman, who was stealing and selling the Jones’s East Village legacy. “There’s a romance about that time,” Gaver said. “For some reason, that lives on in the body of Elvis.”
The history of New York, like that of any city, can be told in cycles of decay, rebirth, and stultification. We are all gentrifying, or being gentrified. Every Great Jones Café will beget its Lucien. Even the Jones and its early crowd would be classified by urbanists as “pioneer gentrifiers.” But what irked Messer and Gaver was not that the neighborhood had changed but that the newcomers seemed to be commodifying, and perverting, the memory of the old. It wasn’t just the Jones. Out went the CBGB of David Byrne and Joey Ramone (replaced by a John Varvatos store), and in came the Zero Bond of Elon Musk and Eric Adams. Basquiat’s loft was recently listed for sixty thousand dollars a month. It was rented by Angelina Jolie. The scene’s artists have had their estates acquired by marketing firms. The work of Robert Mapplethorpe can be licensed from a company called Artestar for use in “elite brand extensions.” The Nets paid to create special Basquiat “City Edition” uniforms. There are Basquiat ski helmets, Basquiat wristwatches, and a Basquiat candle, which smells of ylang-ylang and smoked tea.
Eventually, Messer and Gaver agreed to meet Stulman at a coffee shop in Fort Greene. The couple brought Easy the dog. Safran Foer had recounted the dispute to the broadcaster Ira Glass, who dispatched a “This American Life” reporter to the meeting. At the coffee shop, Messer told Stulman that he’d bought an identical Elvis bust on eBay, for a hundred and fifty dollars, and offered an exchange. Stulman declined. “It got somewhat contentious,” Messer said. “He was saying how it was ‘art.’ I kept saying, ‘You don’t know about Baldessari. You’re stealing copyrights from artists.’ ”
Stulman’s willingness to have the police settle the dispute gave him the upper hand. Ultimately, Messer went to his car and relinquished Elvis. “We figured it was over,” he said. On Great Jones Street, Stulman put the bust back on display.
A few days later, Messer and Gaver were visited at home by three N.Y.P.D. officers. The lead detective, Mark Tufano, wore a bulletproof vest and a Yankees hat, and spoke in the Queens English of a WFAN caller. “Listen, I feel stupid coming to your door about this, but we don’t get to pick and choose the cases,” he said.
“You’re hunting for Elvis?” Gaver asked. She explained that they’d given it back already.
“Here’s the deal,” Tufano said. “A complaint was made about the Elvis bust, O.K.? We’re not, like, booming your door and dragging you outta here in handcuffs. But you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” Tufano told them that there was a warrant for their arrest, and he asked them to surrender the following day at the Ninth Precinct, in the East Village.
Messer informed Tufano of their own East Village roots. Tufano replied, “You a McSorley’s guy?” The conversation was amicable. Messer told the three cops, “I’m gonna now call Ira Glass and see if they want to finish the story.” The officers looked as if they had no idea whom he was talking about.
Messer left a message for a lawyer, and the next day he and Gaver walked into the precinct. “The lawyer called back as I’m walking in, and she said, ‘Do not go into the precinct! Do not talk to anyone!’ ” Too late. A detective grabbed Messer’s arm. Gaver recalled, “I said, ‘Don’t touch him! He had nothing to do with it. I did!’ ” The detective advised her that she’d just admitted to a crime; Messer was an accessory. They were handcuffed, mug-shotted, fingerprinted, and separated for questioning. Gaver was handcuffed to a pipe in an interrogation room. Messer was taken to a cell. They were charged with grand larceny.
“I absolutely had notified the police,” Stulman told me recently. I met him at Fairfax, his cozy restaurant on West Fourth Street, along with his business partner, Matt Kebbekus. Stulman wore a blue cardigan and a scarf, and had his hair in a bun. He is earnest and direct, and a restaurant romantic in the Bourdain mold; he’s been in the business since he tended bar at the University of Wisconsin, where he met Kebbekus. (His college roommate was Virgil Abloh.) In 2003, he moved to New York, where he lived in a studio on the Lower East Side for thirteen hundred dollars a month, and opened his first restaurant. When I told him of the opinion shared by Messer and Gaver—essentially, that Jolene was borrowing the Jones’s credibility, because it wasn’t cool enough to have its own—he looked wounded.
Taking over the Jones’s space, he explained, was not part of any plan. His son went to school, at P.S. 3, with the grandson of the Jones’s landlord. After the Jones closed, in 2018, the landlord struggled to find a tenant. Would Stulman be interested? “When we went in, it looked like one day somebody just turned off the lights,” he recalled. “The Mardi Gras beads were still hanging. The Elvis bust was still in the window. The last specials were still written on the chalkboard. It was, like, this perfectly preserved, old, worn-in restaurant. And it spoke to us. There was energy in the walls. There was a vibe.” He and Kebbekus talked to former regulars about the place’s history. “Also, like, I’ve lived in New York for twenty-one years,” Stulman said. “I went there.” The landlord, himself a longtime neighborhood resident, stipulated in Stulman’s lease that certain parts of the building, such as a neon sign on the façade, and the bar itself, could not be altered or removed. “There was something else in the lease, though,” Stulman said. “The Elvis head.”
If their original decision to name the place the Jones was a brand extension, it backfired. Too many patrons thought the new Jones was the same thing as the old Jones, and associated it, Stulman said, with “average gumbo and average wings and a Red Stripe.” For a new name, they landed on Jolene, in honor of Dolly Parton. (Kebbekus’s young daughter was obsessed with the song.) “It felt like a female version of the Jones,” Kebbekus said. “Jo-lene.” Jolene strove for some funkiness and some comfort. “Our M.O. is to build restaurants for neighborhoods, and for people to make part of their lives,” Kebbekus said. But things had changed since the eighties: Yelp, regulation, labor markets. Low margins, high rent. Soon came the pandemic, which, strangely, re-created something of the old feeling.
“It was amazing, in a way,” Stulman said. “It was just New Yorkers. I felt like I was part of a resilient bunch. There was an energy.” But it was also financially stressful. At times, Stulman found himself clutching his chest, thinking he might be having a heart attack.
The theft happened at a time, with the pandemic winding down, when restaurants, as a social idea, felt precious, and possibly endangered. Losing Elvis created a new problem. “I’m literally in default of my lease if I don’t have this,” Stulman said, of the plaster head. He viewed his Instagram post as an attempt to resolve the issue extrajudicially. (Penis Man had been recovered in this manner.) Stulman had kept trying to negotiate with the thieves, and he went to the police only after he suspected that Messer had blocked his number. A detective asked him how much the Elvis was worth. Stulman told me, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s worth thousands and thousands of dollars—to someone.” Messer believes that it should be valued at the (negligible) price of its eBay clones, though this arguably overlooks how meaningless objects are sometimes transmuted into something more precious by the force of their history. A bartending manual may go for two dollars; Basquiat’s goes for two hundred thousand. In any case, the police used Stulman’s valuation in its report. This was enough to transform a petty caper into a class-E felony, punishable by up to four years in prison.
Stulman remembers the Elvis-handover meeting as bizarre. The first odd thing he noticed was the reporter from “This American Life” hanging around. He wondered if he was involved in some kind of publicity stunt: “I’m now, like, is this all a ruse?” (No story materialized.) He also felt menaced. “They had at least one, maybe two, very big dogs,” he said. He struggled to comprehend Messer’s complaint about the Instagram post. “They accused us of trying to steal some artist’s style of art work,” Stulman said. Then, he went on, “they start asking me, ‘Why is this so important to you?’ I said, No. 1, it was in my restaurant, and you took it. And, whether this was originally yours or not, that’s not a way to go about telling me. But then—and I think this was when they had the, like, ‘Aha!’ moment—I said, ‘Really, I’m obligated by my lease to return this. So this isn’t my Elvis bust. It belongs to 54 Great Jones Street.’ ”
After he got Elvis back, Stulman informed the police that the bust had been returned, and that he no longer wished to press charges. The police told him that wasn’t his call.
Jolene, meanwhile, never cohered into a local joint. “That neighborhood changed quite a bit,” Kebbekus said. “It’s people that have money. And if you could afford to live there you could also afford not to live there during the pandemic.” Last year, he and Stulman decided to close. On the final night, one of the regulars hired a Scotsman in a kilt to play a bagpipe dirge. Soon, a new restaurant took over the lease. It opened last September. The new owners called the place Elvis.
Elvis is a French wine bar, with orange walls, a cozy nook in the back, and tiny tables. When I visited, in January, there was a couple, dining in a corner, who’d met at the Jones, got married, and subsequently divorced. A co-owner of the restaurant said that his girlfriend’s parents had their first date at the Jones. It was loud and bustling, and people seemed happy. Not the Jones, exactly, but, still, nice. The Elvis, which I’d been hoping to find, wasn’t there.
“It can’t live here,” one of the owners, Darin Rubell, told me, adding that he wished it could. “It’s a shame.”
Rubell said that, shortly after the name was announced, the ownership team received a cease-and-desist letter from a company managing the estate of Elvis Presley, alleging trademark theft. “It’s stern. It’s clear. It’s well put together. It’s threatening,” Rubell said.
In 2013, much of Presley’s estate was acquired for a hundred and forty-five million dollars by a company called Authentic Brands Group. Authentic Brands is an intellectual-property business whose portfolio consists primarily of distressed companies—Brooks Brothers, Barneys New York, Juicy Couture, Nautica, Sports Illustrated. Authentic buys them cheap, then typically ceases operations and licenses out the trademarks. This keeps beloved, bankrupt businesses alive, in a sense; there are still Nautica polos and Juicy sweatpants, albeit manufactured by third parties. In another sense, it creates zombie brands, whose new lives have nothing to do with their original ones. You can buy Sports Illustrated protein powder, for instance, or visit the Sports Illustrated Resort, in the Dominican Republic (“Where Champions Come to Stay!”).
Jamie Salter, Authentic Brands’ founder and C.E.O., previously worked at a private-equity fund, where he bought up the rights to Bob Marley’s estate. Salter went after bootleg Marley T-shirts, beanies, and bongs. There was money to be made in the dead and famous. At Authentic, he bought the rights to the estates of Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali; Salter, who owns twelve houses, recently told Bloomberg Businessweek that they made ideal partners: “They don’t fly private, they don’t talk back.” Authentic began marketing Presley to a younger generation, licensing an Elvis Snapchat filter, CBD-infused Hound Dog dog treats, and an animated Netflix show, “Agent Elvis,” in which Matthew McConaughey voices a secret-agent Elvis who jet-packs around the world.
Messer once remarked to me on the irony of a bunch of well-off white people fighting for control of a plaster head of Elvis, who built his own career upon the sound of Black blues artists, many of whose copyrights were stolen by their record labels. The Authentic purchase was just a step in the copyright food chain—an I.P. tuna swallowed by an I.P. shark.
Rubell, the new owner, viewed his Elvis trouble as a misunderstanding. “It’s not named after Elvis Presley,” he said, of the restaurant. “Sometimes things just sound right. My partner, John, was, like, ‘Isn’t Elvis a great name for a bar, just on its own? Just a great name: Elvis.’ And that was really it.” He repeated a version of this to me many times. Once, he mused, “It’s almost like ‘El-vees! ’ Not ‘Elvis.’ It’s clearly French.” To avoid further misconceptions, the ownership group decided to remove any references to Elvis the man—including the plaster bust. It currently resides in the office of the landlord, who runs an auto-repair shop next door.
Messer and Gaver would still like to get the bust back. After their arrest, they pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor; as part of the deal, by avoiding criminal charges for the following six months, they had their convictions erased. But news of the new restaurant’s name reopened the old wound. Gaver began plotting, and recruiting accomplices for, another heist. “We were gonna go back en masse and take back the Elvis on opening night,” she said. Eventually, they contacted Rubell. “Sam Messer called me and started yelling,” Rubell said. “He was really angry, man. He was demanding I switch the Elvises.” But they talked it out, and Rubell explained that the Elvis was also protected by his lease. “We’re cool now,” Rubell said. (Messer confirmed this.)
Rubell doesn’t think that Messer and Gaver have much of an argument in terms of owning the bust. “I feel like if you take something back that’s been there for thirty-eight years, I don’t know that it’s yours anymore,” he said. But he’s rooting for them. “There’s a beautiful end to the story if they could swap it out and have it. If it were to come back to them, isn’t that fucking amazing?”
I met Elvis for the first time a few weeks later. He’d been living for months atop a butcher’s block in an office behind the mechanic’s garage next to 54 Great Jones. I don’t know what I expected; it looked like a nice arts-and-crafts project. (Many of today’s plastercraft and chalkware Elvises came from shops with paint-your-own ceramics, which rode a boomlet of Elvis sales after his death, in 1977. A woman named Audrey Tasiemski, who owned a shop in Long Beach, California, painted a lot of them. “It’s not a Rembrandt,” her son, Larry, told me.) Elvis had pockmarks, and a chunk of his hair had fallen out, which made him seem old. There was a vulnerability to him. If plaster Elvis was born, in a sense, at the Jones, that would make him about the same age that human Elvis was when he died.
“He’s my buddy,” the landlord, Anthony Marano, told me. “I say good morning to him every day.” Marano, who is seventy-nine, was sitting at his desk, which faces Elvis. The office is windowless, a little dusty, and filled with knickknacks and junk stacked above head height: an old barber’s chair, paintings, posters, neighborhood detritus. “People come in and give me stuff,” Marano said.
Marano is a downtown lifer. He was born on Cherry Street, by the Manhattan Bridge, and opened an auto-repair shop on Delancey in 1963. He has seen the neighborhood rise and fall and rise again. His current mechanic shop is basically a retirement hobby, something to pass the time. He’s done well for himself real-estate-wise, but he is perhaps not the world’s most exacting businessman. He’s a sentimental guy. “I like old,” Marano said. “People can’t believe I have a little garage over here in the middle of multimillion-dollar fucking apartments. But I enjoy my life. I enjoy being who I am. I enjoy being here. I fixed the building up. My tenants have all been nice people. And it gives me something to do. That’s what life is all about.”
In the matter of Elvis, he was on the side of Stulman, of course, though temperamentally he has the gleeful combativeness of a Gaver/Messer type. Withholding the bust from his antagonists seemed to give him joy. “Maybe if they came to see me, it would’ve been a different story,” he said. “I talk tough, but I’m not a hard guy. Instead they fuckin’ tried to steal it. There’s no fuckin’ way they’re getting it now.”
Marano told me that he’d let Moffett, the last owner of the Jones, slide on rent, in order to help keep the place open. He was owed a six-figure sum by the end. After Moffett’s death, Marano got the restaurant’s furnishings—Elvis among them—which, monetarily, didn’t amount to much. “I call Elvis my hundred-thousand-dollar bust,” Marano said. We sat for a moment. In the office, Marano still has the Jones’s old jukebox, and some fake fish that used to hang on the café’s wall. Elvis seemed to be staring at us over his shoulder. I asked if there was anything Gaver and Messer could do to entice him to give it over. “Nah,” he said. “Outside a hundred thousand dollars. But I don’t think they’re ready to spend a hundred thousand dollars for a piece of fucking chalk.” ♦
