THE OVEN ON COURT STREET WENT COLD AND THE STARTER MOVED TO PARK SLOPE

The note went up on the door of 329 Court Street around April 27. Handwritten, taped to the glass: the flame in the oven had been lit for the last time. Caputo's Bake Shop had been baking in Carroll Gardens since 1904, five generations of one family, lard bread studded with salami and provolone and black pepper, seeded Sicilian loaves, Italian cookies, cheesecake, cash only. Brooklyn Magazine, Brooklyn Paper, News 12 and Crain's all ran the closing within two days and all said 124 years. By the founding date the family gives it is 122. Either way it was the oldest bakery on the street and now it is a cold oven in a building the Caputos still own.

James Caputo, who left finance to take over from his father John about 25 years ago, told News 12 it was time for a new chapter. The coverage mentioned burnout and the Court Street bike-lane redesign that reshuffled the block's parking and deliveries. Andrea Strong, who has written about the street for years, called it simply: Caputo's has closed. Mazzola's building on Union Street had just been sold on the condition that the bakery stay. Esposito's pork store had closed the year before. Ferdinando's Focacceria, the Sicilian lunch counter, had become Bar Ferdinando. The Italian corridor that Court Street was built on was down to Court Pastry, D'Amico, Monteleone's, Marco Polo and Mazzola, and for six months there was no lard bread anywhere.

What Caputo kept was the culture. Caputo Bagels, which opened at 81 Fifth Avenue in Park Slope on Sunday, October 5, uses no commercial yeast. The dough is built on a sourdough starter the shop says is at least 45 years old, the one his father used on Court Street, plus a poolish. It takes about two days: an overnight cold ferment, shaping by hand, a boil, and a bake. The result is a sourdough bagel, which is not what most of the city's hand-rolled shops make, and it is the thing that connects a bagel counter on Fifth Avenue to a bread oven on Court Street. The signature is the Lard Bread bagel, salami, lard, provolone, salt and pepper folded into the dough, a direct translation of the loaf the bakery was known for. It is $4. Plain, sesame and everything are $2.50, a half dozen $14, a dozen $26, a bagel with plain cream cheese $5.50, the lox open-face $15.95, drip coffee $3.50.

The process is the opposite of where the city's bagel business is going. Two months before Caputo Bagels opened, Apollo Bagels opened a 5,075-square-foot production kitchen in Industry City that turns out 15,000 bagels a day and ships them overnight to nine counters. That is the model a landlord understands: central dough, small rooms, a price that holds at every door. A two-day sourdough process in a 25-seat shop, with a starter that has to be fed whether or not anyone buys a bagel, is a bakery's model, and it is the one that just closed on Court Street. Caputo is betting that the thing that made the bread worth a trip is worth a trip in bagel form, at a counter where you can watch it happen.

Rafi Hasid opened Hill Diner on Court Street in 2002 and bought Caputo's bread wholesale for two decades before he ever thought about selling bagels. He now runs Miriam, the Israeli restaurant that started in Park Slope in 2005 and has four locations, and 1803 in Tribeca. The two had talked about doing something together for about a year before the bakery closed. They considered rotisserie chicken. They considered a pizzeria. They went through roughly a hundred test batches before the bagel was right. The shop took over the Miriam Street Food space at 81 Fifth Avenue, next door to Miriam itself, with about 25 seats, a grab-and-go counter and a kitchen you can see into from the room. Caputo bakes and develops the product. Hasid runs the operation. The friendship is twenty years old; the bagel is one.

Court Street in the fall of 2026 is Mazzola on Union, still baking, with a landlord contractually bound to keep it; Court Pastry, the Zerilli family's since 1948; D'Amico, roasting since 1948; Monteleone's, at its address since 1929; Marco Polo, since 1983. It is also a cold oven at 329, Esposito's gone, Ferdinando's a bar, and a block that has watched its reasons to exist leave one at a time. There is no villain in that. A fifth-generation baker got tired, said so, and kept the building.

What Park Slope got is the part of Caputo's that could travel: not the oven, not the storefront, but the culture, 45 years old and still working, in a bagel that tastes like the loaf. Open seven to three on weekdays, seven to four on weekends. Go before the line figures it out, and bring the people who used to go to Court Street.

SOURCING