Clark to Open Temporary Newsstand on Spring Street

The Clark Art Institute is opening a newsstand with international flair on Spring Street.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Newspapers are returning to Spring Street.

And it is the Clark Art Institute that is making the delivery.

At Wednesday night's 1Berkshire gathering, Clark Director Michael Conforti announced that the museum on Monday will open Extra!, a pop-up newsstand at the bottom of Spring Street.

The store will offer newspapers from around the country and around the world, serving the Clark's international clientele, visiting scholars, students at Williams College and local residents eager for a replacement to the departed Williams Newsroom, which closed its doors in May after more than a century of service.

"We at the Clark are all about collaboration, as is everyone in this room," Conforti told the crowd gathered for the regional development group's third annual Trendsetter Awards.

On Thursday morning, Clark Director of Communications Vicki Saltzman said the museum has a four-month lease in the building that also houses Barbara Ernst Prey's art gallery and Tony's Sombrero Mexican restaurant.

"The Clark has been thinking about having a presence on Spring Street for a long time and toyed with various ideas," Saltzman said. "At this moment, there is no vendor on Spring Street to sell newspapers. We thought it would be a really great experiment for us to create a small newsstand operation.

"Like all experiments, we'll look at it and see how it goes. ... We're going into this with no preconceived notions. We'll just see what happens."

Extra! will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. seven days a week and will be staffed by Clark employees, supplemented by some of the museum's many seasonal hires.

It will carry newspapers from around the world as well as a variety of art, lifestyle and cultural magazines and books, including some of the Clark publications found in the shop at the museum's Manton Research Center on South Street, Saltzman said.

And although Extra! is not a gift shop, per se, it also will offer a small assortment of gift items.

"It's going to be fun," Saltzman said. "There are some big, comfortable sofas and chairs in there. It's going to be as much a reading room as anything else."

The Clark is working with a number of different distributors to obtain the most currently available international newspapers.

"Obviously, it's not easy to get the morning paper from Paris on our doorstep here," Saltzman said. "But we will keep them as current as we can. They may be a couple of days late. But for many our international scholars and fellows, international visitors who tour the area and students at the college, I think getting the news from home and an opportunity to catch up on it — even if it's a few days behind the breaking news standard — is something they'll appreciate."

Extra! is just one of a number of changes on Spring Street that returning visitors will find this summer. Both the Prey gallery and Tony's Sombrero opened this spring in the building that once housed Lickety Split. The ice cream shop now opens seasonally in the Dennison Gate House just off Spring street.

In addition to the Newsroom, the Ephporium Spring Street Market closed last month.

And a June 20 letter to the Williams community by President Adam Falk, that recirculated this week on a local blog, indicates the college is considering moving Water Street Books west to Spring Street as part of a new "college store."

Falk's letter also refers to the previously announced college plan to build an "appropriately sized hotel and restaurant." It states, "a professional feasability study confirmed that a hotel of around 60 rooms, located somewhere around where the American Legion building is now, would be profitable."

Update: Headline changed on June 28 to clarify its a temporary, 4-month newsstand, as stated in the article.

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