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Cheyenne Diner’s Red Hook–bound

By Mike McLaughlin
The Brooklyn Paper
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Michael Perlman
The Cheyenne Diner, a Manhattan mainstay, will move to Red Hook.

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A beloved, but nearly doomed, retro Manhattan diner will get a second lease on life in Red Hook.

The Cheyenne Diner, a railcar-style greasy spoon from the 1940s, will be transported to Red Hook by its new owner, Mike O’Connell, the son of Greg O’Connell, a major Red Hook property owner who turned a Civil War-era warehouse into the Fairway supermarket on Van Brunt Street.

The Cheyenne Diner remained encased in an Edward Hopper-esque time capsule on 33rd Street and Ninth Avenue until it closed this month to make room for a nine-story building.

O’Connell got the diner as a blue-plate special, paying $5,000 so that the eatery could make the fabled last exit to Brooklyn.

The deal was coordinated by Michael Perlman, an ardent preservationist from Queens who helped save SoHo’s Moondance Diner from the wrecking ball last year by finding a man from Wyoming to buy and transport the structure.

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“I’m elated,” said Perlman, who created the ad-hoc group, The Committee to Save the Cheyenne Diner. “The Cheyenne is part of a dying breed of railway car-inspired, free-standing diners.”

Once in Brooklyn, the Cheyenne will join the shiny steel ranks of Williamsburg’s Relish and just a handful of other restored, railcar-style diners in the borough.

©2008 The Brooklyn Paper

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