In Montauk, a Startling Realization of What Losing a Laundromat Would Mean

The family that founded and has run the Montauk Laundromat for just shy of 40 years has decided to move on and have listed the small building off South Elmwood Street for sale.

Joan Lycke, the matriarch of the family that opened the laundromat in 1985, is in her 80s and has had some recent health concerns. Her son, John, says that running the business and caring for her simultaneously has gotten difficult.

The decision would be of minor interest to most — just another small family-owned shop closing up amid the remaking of Montauk — except that the laundromat and its 40 washers and dryers plays an integral role in the Montauk community, where thousands of seasonal workers live in dormitory housing in the summer and the full-tilt home rental market relies on its large-capacity washers to flip an entire home’s worth of linens in a matter of hours between tenants.

“Oh no, that would be terrible — it’s much too far, much too far to Amagansett,” said Claudia Verdugo, as she loaded two brimming baskets of neatly folded laundry into the back of her car outside the laundromat on Tuesday, March 7. She does the laundry for her family of four, who live in a second-floor rental apartment near the downtown, every Tuesday, she said. It takes her about two hours, she said, sighing at the prospect of having to go to Amagansett. “That would be very sad. It would take so much time. In summer? Aye, no.”

On a winter Tuesday afternoon, the laundromat was mostly empty. Two men sat in chairs off to one side, four or five machines were tumbling. But in the summer, it’s a very different story.

“The Airbnb people who are flipping one month to the other and doing every linen, every beach towel, every napkin in 12 hours — they are lined up outside waiting for us to open with their egg sandwiches and coffee,” said John Lycke, whose parents opened the laundromat in 1985.

Jennifer Fowkes, the executive director of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, said that the loss of the laundromat would be “a real problem.”

“I’m not really sure how some people would even manage — all the kids who come here in the summer, some don’t even have cars, the boats use it, the businesses use it — it would be a such a shock,” she said. “The laundromat is not the most glamorous business, but it is totally, totally necessary. People don’t even think about it, you know, you just take it for granted that the laundromat is there.”

The next nearest laundromat is in eastern Amagansett, 13 miles to the west. For those with vehicles making the run there would be an inconvenience but doable. For those without transportation of their own, the need to do laundry could be an entire day lost.

“As grateful as we are for the 10C bus, it doesn’t run nearly enough to be convenient for getting to Amagansett and back in a few hours,” Fowkes said. “Kids who live in dorm facilities like Gosman’s and have no transportation, I doubt they could even do it and still get back in time to go to work in the afternoon.”

“There must be 50 apartments in the downtown, none of them have washers and dryers, the Coast Guard uses it, Tiny Underwoods, the Rendezvous, Gosman’s housing, the Lido, the whole fishing industry relies on it — if it closes, it would bedlam,” said Paul Page, a property manager who said his and other businesses like it rely on the laundromat. “If I had $2.5 million I’d buy it myself.”

Actually, the listing price is $2.75 million, currently — which is down from the original $3 million ask.

John Lycke said that he and his sister decided to sell the businesses when their mother fell ill last year. The cost of home health care and the hurdles of running a local business — hamstrung by the same difficulty finding employees that nearly every business in the region is wrestling with — did not jive, he said.

“My mom and dad built the laundromat 40 years ago — the church, the library and the laundromat were necessities in the community,” he said. “My mom, she worked there until she was 80 — and she didn’t leave willingly, we had to fire her when COVID hit.”

Nodding to the steady stream of business, lack of an alternative and the near impossibility of creating a new such facility, Lycke says it’s entirely possible that a potential buyer of the building could choose to continue running the laundromat.

Current county wastewater rules would require a property of at least 3 acres in order to create a new laundromat with the same 43 washers he has, he said. The current laundromat property, comprising just the 2,000-square-foot single-story building and its small slice of the common parking area behind it, is less than a tenth of an acre.

The downtown sewer system that East Hampton Town has been hoping to construct would expand the possibilities for a new laundromat — but was dealt a crippling blow when opponents won a thumbs down vote last month from the Suffolk County Parks Board of Trustees, with whom the town had proposed making a land swap to make way for the associated treatment system.

“A laundromat is definitely still in play for anyone who wants to do the work,” he said. “The profits are there.”