When someone stole the chalk-plaster Elvis bust from Great Jones Street a few years ago, a lot of people viewed it as a sign that the old East Village was officially dead. It started out in the Great Jones Café, a gathering spot for the downtown arts scene in the 80s, and after the café closed, in 2018, it continued on in a new restaurant there called Jolene. Following the unusually brazen theft, Gabriel Stulman, the restaurant’s owner, decided to rally the community to find the bust with a post on Instagram.

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 When someone stole the chalk-plaster Elvis bust from Great Jones Street a few years ago, a lot of people viewed it as a sign that the old East Village was officially dead. It started out in the Great Jones Café, a gathering spot for the downtown arts scene in the 80s, and after the café closed, in 2018, it continued on in a new restaurant there called Jolene. Following the unusually brazen theft, Gabriel Stulman, the restaurant’s owner, decided to rally the community to find the bust with a post on Instagram. 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. It’s not that people hadn’t stolen from restaurants before. 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. Zach Helfand reports on the pilferage and how the tussle over its return stirred up an old New York question: are we all gentrifying, or being gentrified?.

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