Last week, after a lengthy and heartfelt goodbye to Dave Letterman, CBS construction crews waited less than 24 hours to start marching set pieces of Late Show With David Letterman straight to the dump. Soon after, various New York citizens cautiously poked their noses out of the gutters and around corners and scuttled over to snatch whatever shards they could haul back to their dens and list on eBay. Now, in yet another stark reminder that everything good and beautiful in life is fleeting, the show’s marquee outside the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City has been pulled down.
Using ladders and a crane, the demolition squad took the structure down in two pieces, as well as the smaller “featuring Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra” sign. The marquee had stood outside the Midtown Manhattan theater for 22 years. Stephen Colbert’s Late Show will inhabit the same space and debut September 8, so that leaves a little more than three months for construction workers to tidy up the place and awkwardly hang a new marquee as if the theater’s previous boyfriend had never lived there at all.