DURHAM — City Councilman Howard Clement told colleagues last Thursday that he’s shutting down his attempt to serve as go-between with the proprietors of south Durham’s new Adam & Eve store and residents opposed to it.

Store manager Marcus Goswick refused to meet with opponents, deeming it a “lose-lose” proposition for him, Clement said.

Given his stance, “we were at loggerheads as to where to go from there, so I decided I would rest my case,” Clement said. “We did all we could.”

Other council members thanked Clement for making the attempt.

“We appreciate your work,” Councilwoman Cora Cole-McFadden said. “Job well done. Job well done.”

Clement said Goswick had pledged to keep things at the store’s new location near the corner of N.C. 54 and Fayetteville Road low-key, as it’s been at its old home in the South Square area.

Adam & Eve sells lingerie, sex toys and related goods.

In conversation, Goswick was “a very personable gentleman, understanding of the concerns raised by the residents,” Clement said. “He said, ‘Mr. Clement, I’m the father of a 3-year-old daughter and another daughter in the womb and I’m not going to put up anything [in the windows] that would cause them to raise a question or embarrass them.’ I knew where he was coming from. So that’s where I left it.”

Goswick, when told Thursday that Clement had briefed the council, echoed the councilman’s summary of their talks.

“I found Councilman Clement to be very cooperative and very pleasant to speak to,” he said. “I talked about how I wouldn’t put anything in my windows that I wouldn’t feel comfortable explaining to my 3-year-old.”

Goswick added that Adam & Eve staff does listen to the people who visit their stores. The new store, he said, would be “an upscale lingerie boutique.”

Declining the requested meeting “was a matter that as business owner, you have to have some level of First Amendment protection,” he said. “We expect the marketplace will ultimately make up its mind.”

Clement’s ward covers the store and many of the neighborhoods that the people who’ve complained about it call home. He pressed council colleagues to intervene in some way, at least to see if they could get the two sides to sit down and talk.

Officials have maintained that beyond that there’s nothing they can do about the situation because Adam & Eve is a law-abiding retailer that’s moving into a space that’s zoned for retail use.

Mayor Bill Bell responded to Clement’s prodding by assigning the Ward 2 councilman to orchestrate the proposed talks.

But Clement acknowledged just before the Christmas holiday that Goswick had rejected the suggestion that he meet with the store’s opponents, who generally live in Woodcroft and some of the newer neighborhoods in the Fayetteville Road corridor.

One Woodcroft resident, Joe Mayer, emerged as the store’s chief critic and relayed to city officials what Clement termed “a mountain of briefs” arguing that they had the latitude to subject Adam & Eve to the stricter zoning rules that apply to strip clubs and other so-called adult establishments.

But City Attorney Patrick Baker “in my opinion demonstrated that we knew what we were talking about [and that] we were going to hold fast to our position” that the store qualifies as a retailer, Clement said.