Tim Costello’s Beaverboard Thurbers
Zipping around the world wide web (does anyone call it that anymore?) I came across an article from, of all things, the June issue of Dodge News Magazine on the 1972 restoration of James Thurber’s drawn on beaverboard panels that once hung in Tim Costello’s bar.
Directly below: all I could see of the article (I’ll have to purchase the magazine to see the rest):
The New York Times reported on the Yank cartoonists working on (working over?) Thurber’s drawings as well (“Thurber Creatures Live Again In Bar Here” April 9, 1972), showing the same drawing being restored above as well as this one (the article included the great aerial photo of Costello’s at the top of this post):
Eleven beaverboard panels, with a good bit of mystery and a great deal of confusion attached to them. The narrative shifts as to exactly how these drawings came about, and whether or not the drawings were painted over, or not painted over, or redrawn. Here are some of the various muggy facts:
1 Thurber drew the pieces over time in Costello’s original location, 3rd Ave & 44th St., sometime in 1934 or 1935.
2. Thurber drew them all in one night sometime in that same timeframe.
3. The originals were painted over, and Thurber redrew them. Timeframe unknown.
4. The originals (either the originals or the redrawn originals) were moved to Costello’s new location, “one door north” of the original address at 3rd Ave. & 44th St in 1949.
5. The originals disappeared, and no one knows who took them and where they are now. This last fact is actually not at all muggy. No one knows what happened to the panels. They’ve vanished.
Here’s what The New York Times showed readers October 3, 1973 when it reported that Costello’s was closing. 
For more photos of the drawings go:
(the last two are with Marilyn Monroe. In the second one, the drawings are unfortunately very blurry).