WHERE'S ELVIS?

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 deescalate, 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.”