Can I Just Have One A More Moondance With You, My Love

New York City extends the brand into Wyoming as remnants of its cultural heritage go west, young man:

If you want to enjoy the unmistakable ambience of a real New York diner, head to Wyoming. The Moondance Diner, whose iconic, crescent-shaped sign has long beckoned hungry pedestrians on the western edge of SoHo, is heading to the small town of La Barge, Wyo.

A couple, Vincent and Cheryl Pierce, recently bought the diner and are working out the details — including permits to close off Sixth Avenue and Grand Street — to move the building west, as in the Wild West, not “West Side Story.” According to the Star-Tribune of Casper, Wyo., which broke the news yesterday, Ms. Pierce’s husband and father plan to drive a semi-tractor-trailer to New York City in order to relocate the Moondance to a rural town surrounded by oil and gas fields about five miles north of the Oregon Trail from near the West Side Highway.

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The Pierces bought the diner from a Rhode Island-based nonprofit, American Diner Museum, to which it was donated by Extell Development, the company that is developing the diner’s former site on Sixth Avenue into luxury residences.

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“I’m excited,” a teacher at La Barge Elementary, Eileen Stewart, said. “We are in desperate need of a restaurant.” Currently, there are only two gas stations and convenience stores that serve hamburgers, hot dogs, and fried chicken. A restaurant called Timberline, which served American cuisine, was once part of the landscape, and the Moondance may also get a competitor, to be called the Hideaway Café.

Previously, hungry La Barge residents have gone 20 miles north to Big Piney, Wyo., to eat Mexican cuisine at Los Cabos or American cuisine at Annie’s Place, which is in a log building that has been an American Legion Hall, a clothing store, and a schoolhouse where Cub Scouts once met. Annie Phillips, who started Annie’s Place after taking over Gatzke’s Grubhouse, serves a 12-ounce New York steak for $17.95.

Ms. Phillips said New Yorkers who travel to La Barge and Big Piney will find a “friendly atmosphere and good people.”

The executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, called the move a “disconcerting trend.” He said: “It’s an indication that the real estate market in New York, and particularly in Manhattan, is so superheated that anything that doesn’t dedicate itself to the super luxury market does not seem to be able to survive.”

The Moondance is not the first rural rescue of a diner. A real estate developer, Jeremy Gorelick, was one of 15 people who banded together to save the 1940s-era Munson Diner on 49th Street and haul it to Liberty, N.Y., in 2005. “A diner can do well anywhere,” he said, adding that it was terrific that so many people have the vision to save diners, which are pieces of Americana.

The director of the SoHo Alliance, Sean Sweeney said, “I’m thinking — SoHo is getting Starbucks and Wyoming is getting the Moondance Diner. Is this a fair trade?”