A horseshoe of giant washer drums surrounds a calm central court, with art on flat enamel panels.
The coin laundromat is a New York institution: the place where a new arrival first pays their own way, and where the night shift folds its clothes at three in the morning. The city licenses every one of them through the Department of Consumer Affairs. In February 2015 there were 2,570 licensed coin operated laundries in the five boroughs, a 10 percent drop from a decade earlier. Rising retail rents from Harlem to SoHo had pushed longtime laundromats out of Manhattan, which counted fewer than 400, into the outer boroughs where costs are lower.
Source · Crain's New York Business ↗
Horseshoe machine bank; chrome drum mouths; folding island; fluorescent canopy. Surreal neighborhood laundromat. Mood: one more quarter. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.