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March 8–14, 2019
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CLAY IT AIN’T SO!
Slopers mourn looming closure of beloved store The Clay Pot
BY COLIN MIXSON
Park Slope is going off the Pot.
Slopers are sobbing over the looming
closure of yet another long-standing
local business, Seventh Avenue retailer
The Clay Pot, whose owner will
shutter the local store on March 10,
just months after it celebrated its 50th
anniversary.
“It’s really sad,” said Helen Spontak,
who moved to Park Slope in 1977.
“The neighborhood is turning into
something I don’t recognize.”
Entrepreneurial couple Bob and
Sally Silberberg opened The Clay Pot
in January 1969, hawking ceramics
they made on site in a back-room studio
from the shop between Garfi eld
Place and First Street.
The couple moved to Massachusetts
in 1974, but continued to operate the
store in absentia, using it to sell their
“seconds” — slightly damaged pieces
they offered on the cheap — according
to their daughter Tara Silberberg, who
now runs the shop and a sister outpost
that opened three years ago in Manhattan.
The Silberbergs expanded their
Seventh Avenue store’s inventory in
the 1980s, stocking other makers’ merchandise,
including jewelry, in addition
to their ceramics, and their daughter
took charge of the family business
in 1990 after graduating college, say-
FDNY pulls
man from
fetid canal
BY COLIN MIXSON
Firefi ghters pulled a man out of the
Gowanus Canal after he jumped into
the notoriously polluted waterway on
March 1.
The man leapt the short distance
from the Third Street Bridge near
Bond Street to the toxic bath below
around 3:15 pm, before New York’s
Bravest quickly plucked him from
the fetid Superfund site and rushed
him to Methodist Hospital for treatment,
according to a Fire Department
spokesman.
And although the Feds in charge of
scrubbing the noxious canal recently
declared part of it cleaner than it has
been in 150 years , much of the chan-
Continued on page 14
END OF AN ERA: The Clay Pot’s second-generation owner Tara Silberberg is closing the
store’s Park Slope location on March 10. Photo by Colin Mixson
Continued on page 14
Brooklyn is Bernin’
Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders returned to his native borough on March 2 to host the fi rst rally of his recently announced
2020 presidential campaign at Brooklyn College, which drew thousands of supporters still feeling the Bern after the
pol’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic Party line in the 2016 election. For more, see page 2. Photo by Caroline Ourso
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