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Goodbye to Farrell's Beloved Styrofoam Cups

By John Ness | June 2, 2015 2:11pm | Updated on June 2, 2015 7:06pm

Another symbol of a bygone time is disappearing from Windsor Terrace’s Prospect Park West. This time it’s not the family-owned stationery store that gave generations of kids school supplies, or the sprawling Catholic high school down the block.

Instead, we were presented this week with a 2000-word obituary for the big-as-your-head styrofoam cups containers given out at beloved local bar Farrell’s.

Longtime Windsor Terrace local Ali Gharib wrote 2000 words in Brooklyn Magazine about the impending end of styrofoam drinks on this corner, and if you live in the area, you should probably read the whole thing:

It will be the end of an era. Decades ago there were cardboard cups, but the supply ran dry, so to speak. “They went out of business,” Houlihan recalls of the supplier, “and we got the styrofoam. And that’s been 30 years.” The cups even have their own idiosyncratic name: “containers.” It’s an anodyne label for such a monstrous beer vessel, but it’s what you ask for as far back as anyone remembers. Containers rest in stacks by the dozen next to the cash register, glimmering round towers of white begging to be filled and then emptied.

Everyone in the neighborhood knows the 32 ounce cups containers because bargoers take them outside to the corner all the time.
 

The un-biodegradable containers have fallen victim to a citywide anti-styrofoam push started by Mayor Bloomberg and moved forward by Mayor de Blasio. The styrofoam containers are officially banned as of July 1, but will probably disappear from Farrell's after a “grace period” later in the year, a bartender told Gharib. You might want to get one and take your own selfie with it before they go the way of the Kentile sign.