In 2013, after years of searching, Anna Viertel and Dave Sclarow finally found just the right spot to open the upscale pizzeria they’d long dreamed about. Sure, it was on a desolate Red Hook, Brooklyn, block underneath the BQE, and it had last been a less-than-atmospheric Papa John’s — but it had one key amenity: a coal-fired oven dating back to the mid-1800s.

The space had been sitting empty for more than a year, as the property’s owner, Franco Facili, and his real estate agent, Frank Galeano, struggled to find a tenant. Then, in 2012, they knocked down an interior wall and discovered the oven. Soon interested parties came knocking.

“Without the pizza oven, we couldn’t rent it,” Galeano says. “The location is an empty windswept block under the highway.”

After spending nearly two years negotiating their lease and renovating the space, Viertel and Sclarow, who have run a successful mobile pizzeria for years, opened Pizza Moto in October. The small restaurant is packed nightly, and the old oven is a focal point.

“It’s the centerpiece of our business,” says Viertel. “Emotions, technical details and age are important.”

The oven was originally built for John Grace Bakery in the 1800s. In the decades since, the space has housed a coal-oven pizzeria, a sandwich shop, a cigar-maker and a Papa John’s. Facili, who bought the building in 2007, is unclear on when the original oven was covered up, but Viertel and Sclarow are thrilled it was discovered. A similar new oven would cost $30,000 to $50,000.

“It’s a piece of New York history,” says Viertel

In 2011, when Patsy Grimaldi came out of retirement — he sold his eponymous restaurant in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood to Frank Ciolli in 1999 — he was also lucky enough to find a space with an old oven. Ciolli was being evicted, leaving the original Grimaldi’s space — and the coal-fired oven Patsy had built nearly a quarter of a century earlier — open.

“It was karma,” says Grimaldi’s business partner Matt Grogan.

Last year, when a Chelsea space with a nearly $20,000 Neapolitan cooker custom-built by famed oven-maker Stefano Ferrara became available, restaurateur Maurizio de Rosa jumped at the chance.

“When you get a chance to play with a Stradivarius, you take it!” he told Eater at the time.

But de Rosa’s sonata with the oven has come to an end. The pizzeria he opened, Prova, closed a few weeks ago after lukewarm reviews.

A fancy appliance alone, it seems, doesn’t make for great pizza. Just how important an oven is — be it decades old or newly designed by a big name — is a matter of debate.

“You get a flavor [with age] you couldn’t get with a newer oven,” says Adem Brija, who co-owns 82-year-old Patsy’s Pizzeria in Harlem. “It’s like cooking with a pot you’ve had for 30 years.”

John Brescio, who owns Lombardi’s, which has a 110-year-old oven, agrees. “I don’t believe [new ovens] throw off heat like my oven,” he says.

Others aren’t so sure. “It’s all in the hands of the pizza-maker,” says Scott Wiener of Scott’s Pizza Tours.

Even Moto’s Sclarow admits that the appeal of his old cooker might be more romantic than practical. “Heat is just heat,” he says. “What makes great pizza is the cook, the recipe and the ingredients.”