Vincent Sardi Jr., who owned and managed Sardi's restaurant, his
father's theater-district landmark, for more than half a century and
became, by wide agreement, the unofficial mayor of Broadway, died today
at a hospital in Berlin, Vt. He was 91 and had lived nearby in Warren,
Vt., since retiring in 1997.
Mr. Sardi inherited one of the world's
most famous restaurants, a Broadway institution as central to the life
of the theater as actors, agents and critics. Mr. Sardi was born July
23, 1915 in Manhattan and spent his early childhood in a railroad flat
on West 56th Street, where his parents took in show-business boarders.
In 1921, his father took over a basement restaurant in a brownstone at
246 West 44th Street.
He named it the Little Restaurant, but theater
people called it Sardi's, and so it became.
Photos by Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.
