Brooklyn bids adieu to beloved dry cleaner

October 9, 2014 Meaghan McGoldrick

BROOKLYN MEDIA GROUP/Photo by Meaghan McGoldrick

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It was love at first sight for Bensonhurst resident Dominick Botte who met his wife, Carol, as a 21-year-old customer at JTJ Cleaners & Tailors where she worked. He may have waited six years to ask Carol on a date – to a dance at the Waldorf Astoria, no less – but, 42 years later, the two are still happily married.

Happy endings aside, on Saturday, October 11, the Bottes will bid adieu to the very business they met in and later owned together with the help of Carol’s brother, Anthony, taking over from Carol’s father, Tony Campisi and her brother-in-law, Joe, who first opened the business over half a century ago.

“A lot of blood, sweat and tears were put into this business,” said Carol who first started behind the counter at JTJ, located in the small 86^th Street shopping center near 15^th Avenue, at age 13. Now 65, she and Dominick, 71, are closing up shop after losing their lease.

“We were never told that our landlord wasn’t going to renew the lease, no matter how often we asked,” said Dominick explaining that, when a former client wanted to take the business off their hands, the Bottes were willing to sell but, when that buyer pitched an upgraded JTJ Cleaners to the new landlord (their old landlord, a neighboring bank, sold the lease in January of 2013 for over $10 million), he was swiftly denied, just as the Bottes were denied a 53^rd year moving forward.

Rumor has it, Dominick said, the store’s rent has since doubled.

“They told us that they weren’t going to renew on July 31 of this year, the day our lease was up,” said Dominick. “It’s their place and they have the right to do with it what they want, but it’s the way they went about it that we don’t like.”

While certainly sad to see their business go, the Bottes are taking the closing in stride, despite the hole the missing mom-and-pop shop will leave in the heart of Bensonhurst.

“This place wasn’t only a dry cleaner, but it was also a part of the community,” Dominick told this paper as Carol rung up a friend, and 10-year-customer, for the last time. “I remember doing work for the parents of children who would run around at Saint Frances Cabrini and then, years later, those children would come to us as doctors and lawyers with their own suits in hand.”

According to Carol, the news has been especially hard on clientele.

“Customers are actually crying. A lot of them have been coming in here for 50 years,” said Carol of the shop which originally opened in 1962 and has since seen three generations of expertise and even more generations of customers. “We’re one big family here, and we hate to lose that.”

The couple smiled as they recalled Sundays past when customers – “like family to them” – would knock on their front door and beg the Bottes to open up shop, just for one item, and “just for one suit.” Additionally, customers trusted JTJ with some of their most precious (and peculiar) items, from pocketbooks and wallets to doll houses, doll clothes and, most specifically, a miniature upholstered chair.

“We would always do it,” said Dominick, looking forward to some hard-earned rest and relaxation once final pick-ups are made. “We loved being a part of this community and we felt honored to serve it.”

“I’ve spent my whole life here,” said Carol. “Words can’t really touch it.”