Struggle For Tavern On The Green's Name

Would a Tavern on the Green by any other name fare just as well in Central Park? The NY Times digs into the latest debate over the restaurant's name, which is reportedly appraised at $19 million.

As the LeRoy family prepares to end their reign as operators of the restaurant later this year, a spokeswoman for the city says New York "will be taking legal action to assert our right to the Tavern on the Green trademark" — if they win they declined to say if they would sell the name to the new operator, Dean Poll (who already runs the Central Park Boathouse). Of course, this is an apparent about-face for the city which had said earlier it didn't have rights to the name and would let the LeRoys take it.

The LeRoys trademarked the name when they originally took over in the 1970s; it was named in 1934, however, when Robert Moses was the parks commissioner. (Long before that, in 1870, Calvert Vaux designed the building to house sheep that grazed Sheep Meadow.) The paper notes that the LeRoys say "they have proof of the legality of the original trademark, in addition to proof that the family has defended the trademark through the years, expending legal fees to challenge other restaurants that tried to use the name. They have claimed that such proofs established their legitimate ownership of the name." Maybe we can just put a Shake Shack in there.