The Dish On Diners.(Brief Article)

The preacher was break-dancing. "Save Jones Diner!... Save Jones Diner!" We chanted along, some imitating his break-dance moves, all of us packed cheek to cheek into a tiny, subway-car-sized eatery in lower Manhattan. The Rev. Billy is no priest, but then I'm no social activist, either. Yet here we are, he a performance artist who dresses up like Father, the rest of us friends of the 'hood, rallying to rescue a 64-year-old diner from urban extinction. George W. Bush wouldn't know an evil axis until he's met Cafeteria, a hipster restaurant armed with pricey attorneys and a celebrity publicist best known for nearly running down a Hamptons nightclub bouncer after allegedly calling him "white trash." Its owners plan to knock down Jones Diner and erect a three-story behemoth in its place.

This being New York, the neighbors are outraged. "The Jones Diner is the soul of the neighborhood," a little old lady whispers to me. She's sitting on one of those twirly stools at the counter. She and I are improbable allies in yet another of those battles being waged with increasing fervor throughout the city as upscale restaurants and nightclubs (not to mention chains like Starbucks and the Gap) displace the old mom-and-pop shops that have always defined gritty and rough- edged New York.

Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, a bleached-blond anticonsumerism advocate who looks more like a game-show host, has organized many of the protests. He calls them "interventions"--a term normally reserved for saving loved ones from drug ODs. Now he's leaping to save the Jones Diner. A speck of a restaurant, it has sat on the corner of Lafayette and Great Jones Street since the Great Depression, reflecting the great tides that built New York. George is the twinkly- eyed, ham-handed Greek short-order-cook-proprietor whose last name hardly anybody knows. "The Jews" opened the diner in 1938, he tells me. They sold it to "the Italians" in the '50s, who sold it to him and his partner, the Greeks, in 1974. George remembers how factory workers would line up for coffee at 5 a.m. back then. After came artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, looking pretty much like ...