The February 2009 request for proposals indicates a strong preference for a re-envisioned eatery and includes photos of the restaurant from pre-LeRoy days: “The historic photos included in this RFP are meant to inform proposers and provoke design ideas.”
Further, “Parks envisions a restaurant that will honor the original design intent of the Olmsted and Vaux park plan,” the RFP reads. “Today’s Central Park is much changed from the Central Park of the 1970s, when Mr. LeRoy began to operate Tavern on the Green. The Central Park Conservancy (“CPC”), founded in 1980, has invested more than $450 million to enhance, repair and maintain Central Park’s 843 acres. Parks encourages proposers to place particular focus on the restaurant’s relationship with the park, which has enjoyed renewed vitality in the last few decades.”
It’s not hard to read between the lines. Parks wanted a new Tavern on the Green, perhaps one more in keeping with the Connecticut farmhouse aesthetic of the Upper East Side-heavy Central Park Conservancy.
Nor was the timing of the RFP propitious for the LeRoys.
“Why didn’t they do it the year before, when a lot of people had expected it?” said Shelley Clark, Tavern on the Green’s longtime spokeswoman (neither Kay nor Jennifer would comment for this article). “Why didn’t they issue it in 2008, so that a decision could have been made so there could have been a smooth transition? The current Tavern wouldn’t have had to go into bankruptcy. We couldn’t book any business. There was a perfect storm of not getting that cash flow, or not even being able to cooperate with a future operator. Then we had the economy.”
The Parks Department, for its part, claims that “[t]he license expired at the end of 2009, [and] we had no choice but to issue the RFP for the new license term,” said Vickie Karp, a Parks spokeswoman. (This reporter, it should be noted, worked in the Parks Department for three and a half years.)
IN SEPTEMBER 2009, A group of investors did try to find a way to save some semblance of Tavern on the Green. They contacted the Plaza. Maybe a new Tavern could be reprised there, relocated to the Palm Court, or the Fifth Avenue lobby? Another investor reached out to the New York Athletic Club, also on Central Park South, only to be told that it was a no-go because Dean Poll was a member. At any rate, come October, it was a moot point. The LeRoy organization had not only declared bankruptcy, but it was also struggling to retain ownership of Tavern on the Green’s very name. The city was now claiming ownership of the trademark, contrary to the original RFP, in which the Parks Department wrote, “The City does not represent that it owns the name ‘Tavern on the Green.’ Proposers who wish to continue to use this name should be prepared to pursue its availability independently.” The investors disbanded. The issue of who owns the name—valued by an appraiser at $19 million—remains tied up in court.
The resulting dissolution of all that was Tavern on the Green has been well documented: Mr. Poll’s ongoing and hard-nosed negotiations with the restaurant workers’ union; the long line of creditors seeking a piece of the LeRoys; the massive auction of everything inside Tavern on the Green, from the chandeliers to the topiaries to the murals, which have actually been peeled off the walls.
What’s left is an empty, litter-strewn memorial to the house of LeRoy, shorn of decoration, lights haphazardly lit, front door padlocked. Mr. Poll may well resurrect it, but there’s no question that the landmark restaurant of Warner Leroy’s imagination will never return.
