At Magic Laundry & Dry Cleaning, late afternoon, it’s the hour of sonic adrenaline. Traffic jams of laundry carts, near-collisions around blind corners. A motorized toy car zooms underfoot, past the basket of lost clothes with its 14 stray socks, past the baby sleeping in a car seat, past the teenager in white shirt and tie using the Internet to research colleges.
No ambient music but the drone of the wall-mounted TVs and constant clink of coins falling from bill-changers, like Vegas slot machines without the thrill.
This, after all, is only the laundry. That’s why people dream up book titles like “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.” It’s not exactly bling-bling.
“I got, like, so many clothes!” says Monica Gonzalez, 28, into the cellphone cradled to her ear.
Two weeks of dirty laundry, to be exact, enough to fill two triple-loaders, one double-loader and one regular-loader.
Her two oldest kids – ages 12 and 8 – join her at the folding table, an assembly line of prepubescent helpers who frequently announce they’re very hungry.
Sometimes, to break the monotony, they launch into a clothes fight. Shorts, washcloths and T-shirts fly through the air, some landing on heads and some on the floor.
“Omigod! Never-ending clothes!” says Gonzalez, shooting a look at a row of dryers, all stopped, filled with warm and fragrant garments ready to fold.
For many families today, the great American Dream of home ownership is vanishing faster than Western ranchland, and with it goes the joy of your own brand-new Maytag or Speed Queen, where you can do the wash without having to check if the stranger before you left a bunch of cat hair in the spinner.
Across the United States, an estimated 30,000 to 35,000 coin-operated laundries earn several billion dollars in annual revenue. About 20 percent of all renters in the United States use self-service laundries, according to a survey by the Coin Laundry Association.
Add to that the countless homeowners who frequently haul their heaviest stuff – comforters, sleeping bags – off to the laundromat.
“The primary reason people use coin laundries is the time-
saving element,” says Michael Sokolowski, executive vice president of the Coin Laundry Association. “In the average household, especially if you do the laundry all at once, you could easily spend all day. But self-service laundromats can cut that time down drastically.
“It’s convenient – they have larger machines, and you can wash more loads at a time, and dry them faster.”
Unlike homeowners, however, renters often have little choice. The hassle factor at their apartment complex – only one washer and dryer for hundreds of people, for example, or inconvenient hours at the laundry room – forces them to join this thriving subculture.
“Those who have washers and dryers of their own don’t seem to understand the lifestyle of us who have to go to the laundry,” says David Watters, a music teacher at Denver Arts & Technology Academy who once owned a home but now lives in an apartment.
“I miss having my own washing machine in the house, where I could do laundry in the middle of the night for the next day.”
Before discovering Magic Laundry, he’d spent a decade hauling his clothes to Smiley’s Laundromat and Cleaners on Colfax, which bills itself as “the world’s largest laundromat.”
“Smiley’s is very scary,” he says. “People are always inside there asking for change, saying they’re hungry. And one time a guy from Papa John’s came over and tried to sell leftover pizza.”
In Denver, each laundromat offers its own distinct character, the essence of its neighborhood. Smiley’s offers edgy urban attitude. Capitol Cleaners & Coin Op attracts hipsters in bohemian sunglasses. Sunnie’s Ice Cream & Laundromat catered to those with a sweet tooth, but went out of business, so perhaps that wasn’t the best idea.
Coin-op connoisseurs say they come to Magic Laundry on South Monaco Parkway because it’s clean, the washers and dryers are new, and it’s open 24 hours.
And it’s probably the only neighborhood laundromat in Denver with a large map of the world on the wall.
“We’re a community on Earth itself, and I put it up so that we could understand each other better,” says owner Kenneth Yi , an immigrant from South Korea whose clientele reflects America’s diverse demographics.
Many were born in Mexico, South America, India, Indonesia, Japan, China, Somalia, Ethiopia, Morocco and Korea. All share one commonality: In every country in the world, people have to do their laundry.
Yi even took time to go on the Internet and buy 55 flags from different countries to place on his map of the world.
But so far, working 12-hour days, he’s been too busy to stake those flags, instead mopping the floor till it gleams, repairing his own dryers – disappearing under a giant 50-pounder with flashlight and pliers until only the soles of his Nikes are visible – or dry cleaning 25 garments an hour, the hiss of the stream press billowing from behind the counter, regular as clockwork.
“You meet very few people in this world who give such personal and individualized service, and he always does it with a smile,” says Ann Writer, who loves Magic’s laundry and dry-
cleaning services, and is picking up nearly 50 pounds of clothes.
“Everything is laundered to perfection,” she says, loading a giant cartload into her car.
As she rushes off, Robert Gormley pulls up in his raspberry-pink VW bus with a hula girl swaying atop the dashboard and his 13-year-old nephew, Miller Gormley, riding shotgun.
Their laundry style is vintage drive-by, dumping their stuff in the washing machine, then heading out to Starbucks, AutoZone and the car wash.
They touch down ever so briefly – transferring wet wash to dryers – then zoom off to cruise a secondhand store, returning to fold the laundry in time for Gormley, director of the Denver Lacrosse Club, to get to work.
Like many of Magic’s denizens, Gormley does his laundry only when totally necessary: about every three weeks.
“I wait till I run out of underwear,” he says.
As he backs his VW bus out of the parking lot, Michael Sherman roars up in his red 4×4 Blazer with crushed front bumper.
He jumps out, waist-length dreadlocks swaying, grabs his mother’s laundry and carries it inside for her.
Evelyn Sherman, 78, has her own washing machine at home but – like some who frequent commercial laundries – she likes to do her large blankets here. It’s just easier.
Her son, on the other hand, lives in an apartment complex with just 12 washers for 800 people, and he happens to have a lot of laundry.
A trainer at Focus Gym, he owns six pair of Nikes, which he frequently washes at Magic Laundry. He also plays in two bands, Intherium and Project Mayhem, onstage at venues like the Bluebird and the Gothic, and his rock-star gear gets so trashed it requires the Magic touch.
“I sweat through my underwear and my pants,” he says, gesturing to knee level, “in about an hour and a half.”
As he loads up his mother’s blankets, he walks past the wood-and-wrought-iron benches outside Magic Laundry, where people sit to enjoy the breeze, a smoke or a sandwich.
A young woman with spiky hair is there, dressed in jeans and a sleeveless undershirt, dragging on a cigarette.
“Hey, what’s up, dude?” she says into her cellphone. “Your mom’s doing the laundry? Funny you should mention that, because I’m doing laundry too.”
Staff writer Colleen O’Connor can be reached at 303-820-1083 or at coconnor@denverpost.com.
