The Riverpoint Coin Laundry is not the most comfortable of places. It’s got 29 washers and 44 dryers but only 10 chairs and a handful of stools. So when it gets crowded, it’s no surprise to find customers leaning against the machines and on counters, sometimes sitting on the floor, or walking around outside in the shadows of a huge Dominick’s food store.
But when it’s 3 a.m. and the windows are frosty, there’s no reason not to take residence here, at 1730 W. Fullerton Ave. The walls are cheery, with colorful murals defining a fish and coral motif that also finds expression in a good-sized aquarium that rests atop one of the green and yellow folding counters. Inside the tank, bright yellow and blue piscine critters flit around red and white coral.
On a recent Monday night, though, the laundry’s only customer was a smooth-skinned Mercedes Ruehl look-alike who fed a quarter’s worth of time into each of five dryers, then split. Her eyes were glazed, her steps unsure. Within minutes, the dryers – all overstuffed – began to cough up their goods, red and yellow socks dangling like tongues.
At first, Raul Santiago, the five-year veteran night manager at Riverpoint, just crammed the clothes back in: the many sloganed T-shirts, the permanently stained towels and the toddler-sized jeans. But the dryers, loaded beyond capacity, vomited their loads again.
Frustrated, Santiago lined up trash cans and brooms against the dryer doors in a futile effort to keep things contained. Finally, he surrendered, leaving the doors slightly ajar, their windows steamed from the humid heaps inside.
More than an hour later, the look-alike trotted back inside, ambling uneasily up to the dryers. “Hey, these are still wet,” she complained as she felt the warm, wet clothes inside.
“You put too many things in there,” said Santiago.
“Oh, yeah,” said the woman, her eyelids dropping.
She fished out a few more quarters, deposited them through the dryers’ slits and, without snatching a single T-shirt out of the clumps, sauntered back out to the parking lot. There she climbed into a midnight blue midsized car and, with her boyfriend, steamed up a few windows herself. As the car rocked, the dryers once more rejected their loads, spilling the woman’s intimate apparel onto Santiago’s spotless floor.
He shrugged and sighed. “She’s been doing her laundry since about 7 o’clock,” he said. “It may be the longest wash ever in history.”
Mercedes can take her time, though. Santiago’s not going to close shop on her anytime soon. As the only 24-hour laundromat on Chicago’s North Side, Riverpoint is a constant beacon for those with grungy garments. Since 1990, it has been the court of last resort for folks who must report clean and tidy at the crack of dawn and aren’t lucky enough to have a washer and dryer under their own roof.
This is why Al Singh motored up, his yellow cab parked along the curb. Singh, who swears he’ll drive a taxi only until a better job rolls along, leapt from his vehicle, his feet in sandals (with socks) even in the near-zero cold, and shoved a basketball-size load of clothes — all white — into a washer.
“I have a job interview tomorrow,” he said. “It’s at 9 o’clock and I’ve been working all day.” He looked exhausted, his eyes fringed by fatigue. “In my country — India — I’m an engineer, here a cab driver. Okay. But tomorrow, I could be a building manager in Rogers Park. Free apartment. Free laundry. Good, no?”
As he talked, a young woman strolled in, her fists balled up inside the pockets of her floppy sweatshirt. She had a baseball cap on backward, baggy jeans. She greeted Santiago and took her place next to one of Riverpoint’s two public telephones. She’ll sit there sometimes for three or four hours at a time, chatting amiably, mostly listening in the plastic earpiece.
“She’s a regular,” said Santiago, now standing on a stepladder, his mouth covered by a mask, and a huge brush in his hand for cleaning the dryers. “She doesn’t do laundry. Just comes in to talk to her boyfriend on the phone. I let her because she’s real polite. If somebody needs to use the phone, I let her know and she always gets off without a problem. She has a phone at home but her bill’s too high. This is long distance, that’s all I know.”
As the young woman talked, a fastidious fellow walked in, carefully pulled the already-separated clothes out of his bag and deposited them into washers. He measured his detergent with the precision of a pharmacist, then counted out exact change for each machine. Once they kicked in, the suds clinging to the front windows, he made his way to Santiago’s coffee pot, which is free to customers.
“I come here every two weeks,” said Gino Rodriguez. “I get up early and come here before work. I’m a manager at a warehouse. I have laundry in my building but I don’t feel comfortable there.”
At Riverpoint, some nights the comfort level’s so high it feels like a party. Consider a recent Thursday night, when Bob Floyd ordered a massive pizza for the handful of folks stuck doing laundry at 4 a.m.
“Here, there’s a veggie half and a carnivore half,” he explained to a mother and daughter whose English was a little weak. Floyd pantomimed meat by pretending to be tearing through the pizza slice like a boar, vegetables by mimicking a rabbit’s finicky eating. The mother-daughter team cracked up laughing, accepted his pizza and returned to watch their clothes drying on the other side of the room. After a while, the daughter stepped out, fetched some soda cans from a car and offered Floyd a Dr Pepper.
“It’s nice here, see? Everybody gets along,” he said, his arm sweeping a near-empty laundromat.
It gets busy, though. Just come on a Saturday night. Suddenly, there are kids underfoot. A group of little girls are playing with a Barbie, tossing her in the air. Not far away, a toddler starts to crawl into the mouth of a cavernous triple washer, only to be saved by a quick-thinking grandmother who snatches him out by the waist. He responds by strutting up and down the aisles of washers, opening and shutting their doors, pulling with all his might on the locked ones to no avail.
In a nearby aisle, two young girls toast each other with their sticky bottles of Sunny Delight. “SALUUUUUUUUUD!” they shout, clicking their juices, spilling some all over their clothes. A man doing his laundry at their side appears horrified. He is folding his T-shirts with dramatic flair, first tossing them in the air as if they were pizza dough.
“There’s a baby goat in there!” one of the little girls says cryptically to the other, pointing to a washer whose window shows soapy threads oozing down the glass. The girls run off, careening past laundry carts and round, elderly women who barely keep their balance in their wake.
Another little girl — this one wearing a T-shirt that says “Authentic U.S.A.” — is snapping all the coin slots, one by one, saying, “money, money, money” like Joel Grey in “Cabaret” as she thrusts the metal shaft in and out of the machines.
Sitting in one chair, a man is reading the Bible. Next to him, even more intensely, another man is poring over the classified ads, looking for a used car. A woman has brought “The Assembly of Woman” for her laundry-time read.
Now there’s another young woman on the phone, this one chugging on a long-necked bottle in a paper sack. “Is it like more close to Belmont and Western? Yeah, yeah. Belmont and Ashland, okay. Don’t leave, don’t leave until I call you back.”
Her girlfriend yanks a slinky little blue sweater from the dryer which crackles with static electricity.
“Perfect,” says phone girl. “I’ll change in the car.”
“It’s all warm and everything,” says her girlfriend as they stroll out, leaving behind the smell of detergent, the shuffling of gigantic laundry bags, the clanging of hangers on the carts, the TVs and radio, and the heavy breathing of the laundry machines.
