Famous NYC diner heads for new home on the range

[Spider]

http://www.casperstartribune.net/art...340012c7e4.txt
Famous NYC diner heads for new home on the range

By RICHARD PYLE
Associated Press writer Saturday, August 11, 2007

NEW YORK -- Stripped of its glittery sign and strapped to a flatbed trailer, the famous Moondance Diner is set to slip out of New York for a new home in the West, leaving behind not so much as a bent fork or a greasy spoon.

After a three-day bureaucratic snarl over city permits and a torrential rainstorm that briefly delayed the project, the diner was on the verge of being lifted onto a trailer late Friday for a 2,100 mile trip to LaBarge, Wyo.

As former patrons looked on and traded memories, workers were preparing late Friday to roll the the Moondance to the curb on beams around midnight, said Michael Perlman, a Queens preservationist and diner aficionado involved in the project.

"The atmosphere is very friendly," he said.

Mel Brandt, the rigger in charge of the project, had said the diner's departure from the city would have to wait for the George Washington Bridge to open to wide-load truck traffic about 4:30 a.m. this morning.

Vincent Pierce and his wife, Cheryl, rescued the 74-year-old Manhattan eatery from oblivion for $7,500. He said he expected the trek through nine states to take about a week. The actual route depends on the 14-foot-high load being able to pass under bridges along the way.

"We can't go any more than 45 miles an hour or maybe 55 max," he said. "We don't know exactly how long it will take because we've never done it before."

Pierce and his father-in-law, Kent Profit, will share the driving. Profit owns the truck, and the flatbed trailer was borrowed from a company in Wyoming.

Although frustrated by the delay, they remained philosophical about the red tape that forced Profit to park his truck at a New Jersey Turnpike rest area for three extra nights.

"There are a lot of reasons you have to be careful," said Profit, a friendly, rugged-cowboy type whose great-grandfather homesteaded land near LaBarge, a century-old settlement on Wyoming's Green River, in 1912.

"Back home, things like permits aren't as big a problem as you have here," he said. "You just sort of load up and go."

Pierce, who like Profit drives service trucks for the area's oil and natural gas industry, said he and his wife had been looking for a restaurant investment when they spotted the Moondance for sale on the Web site of the American Diner Museum in Providence, R.I.

The idea of a New York-style diner has LaBarge's citizens excited, he said. "People say they are really pulling for us. I probably wouldn't be doing this if they were giving us a lot of negative comments."

The stainless steel-sided diner includes grill, counter, stools and other furniture, along with its New York pedigree as a place where celebrity revelers sometimes showed up for breakfast, and as a location for scenes in "Spider-Man," "Friends" and "Sex and the City."

The revolving-moon sign was taken down earlier and stashed inside the 36-by-15 foot diner.

Vehicles with "wide load" signs will escort the Moondance across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming.

On arrival, it will be ensconced in what passes for downtown LaBarge, where the population is officially 493 but probably closer to 600, according to town clerk Betty Mocieka.

The town has one restaurant -- when it's open -- but nothing resembling a descendant of the railroad dining cars of a bygone era. Considered cultural icons in cities of the Northeast and Midwest, the diners are gradually disappearing, preservationists say.

Of about 6,000 that originally existed, fewer than 2,500 survive, according to Daniel Zilka, director of the American Diner Museum.

Another New York diner recently went to Utah, but without the fanfare of the Moondance move.

Originally called the Holland Tunnel Diner, the Moondance was the city's "oldest extant diner," according to Perlman.

After the site was bought for new luxury housing, Perlman helped arrange for Extell Development Co. to donate the doomed diner to Zilka's nonprofit museum, but before it could be moved there, the Pierces gobbled it up like a bacon cheeseburger.

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[Jana®]

Consider me dumb or blind, but where are they moving it to?

[BucklandBronco]

Good post, Spider. There's just sumpin' about old diners--even one located in NYC! I'll hafta drive up there and see it in LaBarge, once it's all settled in. Just hope they purchased the NYC-style menu along with the diner!