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View ProfilesPublished October 4, 2023 at 10:00 a.m.
Eugene Blake sat by the front window of the King Street Laundry in Burlington. He wore a Houston Astros baseball cap, though he said he doesn't particularly care for the team. His backpack and bedroll lay underfoot while his clothes tumbled in a dryer.
He was chatting with Carole Ricciuti, an employee of the nonprofit staffing agency Working Fields, about how he might get a job at a local restaurant, when a woman with a walker shuffled through the door. The man who accompanied her announced: "We're trying to get some laundry done. She's homeless."
Ricciuti turned her attention. "Let's get you started," she said, then used an app on her phone to start Washer No. 3.
But as soon as the man had stuffed his friend's clothes into the front-load machine, he realized they'd forgotten to bring detergent.
"Would you like some Tide pods?" Blake offered. "I have two left."
Word had gotten around: On Wednesday afternoons, between 1 and 3 p.m., Burlington's homeless residents can come to King Street Laundry and wash their clothes for free.
When the program began last year, the pocket-size laundromat at 72 King Street became the second place in Vermont's largest city, along with a homeless shelter, to offer such a service. The initiative is modest in size — on this particular Wednesday, six people came through — but it signifies a remarkable turnaround at an essential neighborhood business.
For decades, King Street had been the only walkable laundromat in the neighborhood. Yet by December 2021, the typically unattended business had become a magnet for drug use during a resurgent opioid epidemic, and its frustrated owner closed up shop.
"I went down there one day and it was a bunch of vagrants hanging out, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and you know, there was needles in the back corner," former owner T.J. Riley told VTDigger.org at the time. "I said, 'You know, fuck this,' and I locked the door."
Andrew Christiansen and his wife, Hannah, had just purchased a small apartment building down the street. Andrew asked Riley if he could buy one of the dormant machines for their tenants to use. Instead, the couple bought the building, including the laundromat and an upstairs apartment, for $435,000.
The Christiansens, who live in Williston, didn't know how to run a laundromat — Andrew works in marketing for a biotechnology company, and Hannah is a doula. They sensed, however, that with more active management, King Street Laundry could successfully reopen. A grant from the King Street Neighborhood Revitalization Corporation helped them get started.
Their effort began with measures Andrew described as "low-hanging fruit." They adjusted the closing time from 11 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. The couple secured a state grant to help pay for a heat pump to make the space more comfortable. New security cameras allowed Andrew to watch over the laundromat from afar and even speak to patrons through its intercom system. Some customers told Andrew that the heightened surveillance was "creepy," he said. Others reported feeling safer.
At the same time, the couple looked for ways to foster a more neighborly atmosphere. Artist Elizabeth Emmett created an outdoor mural of birds and wildflowers. Inside, Corrine Yonce, a Winooski artist, housing justice advocate and former laundromat patron, installed collage paintings that depicted the quiet intimacy of doing laundry in a shared space.
The new owners also employed the same principle that Burlington officials have been using, with limited success, at nearby City Hall Park: "A laundromat that's filled with positive people doing good, constructive things," Andrew said, "creates a virtuous cycle that will prevent the bad stuff from happening."
The couple asked social services agencies to host events and programs at the laundromat during business hours. ReSOURCE, a jobs training nonprofit that does workforce development, created a six-week Hospitality 101 course last winter that three people completed. Groups such as Working Fields have hosted well-attended job fairs. Feeding Chittenden's Good Food Truck has offered free meals on the sidewalk. On Saturday, October 7, the artist Teresa Davis will host an art class, developed with youth from the nearby King Street Center, in which participants will paint some of the laundromat's ceiling tiles.
The events are experiments, more or less, in learning what the space is "truly capable of," Andrew said. Occasionally no one shows up. But the cumulative effect of the trial-and-error approach has been a busier and safer laundromat. Police investigated criminal activity there more than 20 times in 2021, according to city data. In the 12 months since the laundromat reopened in June 2022, police responded to crime reports just twice.
Free laundry day for homeless patrons was one of the new owners' first and most successful programs. The Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity pays for the free loads via coupon codes that can be redeemed anytime through a phone app. With a staffer on-site to help turn on the machines, the Wednesday afternoon events serve customers who don't have a smartphone or want to connect to social services while completing their weekly chore. The program, which has cost $855 so far, is funded through the spring.
Initially, CVOEO employees worked as attendants each week. With just a handful of patrons using the service, however, the organization couldn't justify the staff time this summer, according to homeless outreach services coordinator Adam Hall. So, in recent weeks, Andrew began tapping his growing network of partner groups to keep the afternoon events going.
Working Fields' Ricciuti was covering her first free-laundry shift when she met Blake and the woman with the walker, Tina Cusson.
Cusson, 55, was having a bad day. She'd recently been evicted from an apartment on Pine Street and was staying with a friend. In a few days, she'd have to leave his apartment, too. She was using the walker while recovering from a leg injury that had sent her to the hospital. During the summer, her daughter, Kelley, was murdered in a public park a block and a half away. As Cusson explained her situation to Ricciuti, she began to cry.
Ricciuti called the Committee on Temporary Shelter, a local homeless shelter. "There is a lady here. She's broken her leg. She's having a hard time, she's not really mobile, she's unhoused and she's in desperate need of a place to sleep," she said. "How can we support her?"
"You're full?" Ricciuti said. "OK." She relayed the disappointing news.
But Cusson, separately, had asked her caseworker to meet her at the laundromat. With her clothes sudsing in front of her, Cusson and the caseworker began completing housing applications. They had a lead on a place on Shelburne Road.
While Cusson waited, a friend of hers happened to come by with a garbage bag full of clothes. The friend leaned over and gave Cusson a long, warm embrace.
Cusson said she appreciated the laundromat, which she had used before its reopening last year. "It's better now," she said.
As Blake finished up, Cusson thanked him for giving her some of his detergent. He told her not to worry about it.
"We gotta take care of each other," Blake said. He tucked his clean, dry clothes into his backpack and went on his way.
The original print version of this article was headlined "'Virtuous Cycle' | An abandoned Burlington laundromat rumbles back to life by embracing its neighborhood"
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