ONLY in the ‘dirty 30s’ (as weatherman Tex Antoine used to say) could a laundry be named the most beautiful building in Queens…though in the borough of Archie Bunker, maybe that isn’t such an anomaly after all.
I have been riding the Long Island Railroad from Queens to Manhattan since 1992 and on each trip on the north side of the tracks, you could always see the Knickerbocker Laundry. The 1936 building was an exaggerated streamline design, a side category of Art Deco called Streamline Moderne. (Other examples are the Triborough Bridge approaches and the set design of 1936 H.G. Wells adaptation, Things To Come.)
Curvilinear lines, perfectly symmetrical design, and a huge clock above the front entrance earned the “Beautiful Building” accolade from the Queens Chamber of Commerce soon after its opening. It was quite modernistic for its time and its design would be echoed in the futuristic buildings featured in the 1939-40 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows.
An expansion of the Knickerbocker Ice business, which was seeking to expand into other ways to make money, the Knickerbocker Laundry was constructed in 1931 with a design by architect Irving Fenichel.
Inside were huge washing, pressing, ironing, steam, dry-cleaning and other machines, and a separate boiler room. Huge windows and tiled surfaces made the interior appear as clean as a hospital. Everything from fragile linens to great rugs were cleaned in a carefully air-conditioned, dust-free atmosphere, but the most striking quality of the Knickerbocker Laundry building was its near-public character. {Christopher Gray, New York Times]
The Knickerbocker Laundry, and later, Naarden Fragrances, occupied the structure until 1986 when it began a slow slide into utter oblivion and disrepair, which is how I encountered it in 1992. But just a couple of years later, there was a renaissance as the New York Presbyterian Church, with a primarily Korean congregation, purchased the building, and as you can see, renovated it from stem to stern. Very few of its original Streamline Moderne Le Corbusier-ish touches remain.
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6/21/23