I'm stunned that Greg's is actually on Yelp, and wondering why I'm going through with writing a review that will almost certainly never be read by anyone else, ever. Maybe out of a need for catharsis.
Where to begin? Have you ever seen another business that employs the typical hideous Williamsburg faux-shingle-style vinyl siding as an interior finish? I hadn't, either. "Greg" is most decidedly out of the picture, but evidently little has changed since his departure, which seems to have taken place maybe during Operation Desert Storm. The current proprietors are a very hard-working couple (they're opening up when I get out of bed around 7:00AM, and often still madly folding and sorting sometimes until after midnight, or else waiting for the bus to take them back to Sunnyside or wherever they live -- I'm certain it's very far away). You want to dislike them automatically, especially the man, who's normally incredibly curt and surly, and plainly dressed in someone's once-abandoned laundry (he wears a lot of sweatshirts emblazoned with the crests of big state universities). He seems to go out of his way to avoid helping you at the counter, shifting around laundry bags to no benefit or storming past you to start one of the dryers as you stand there, laundry bag over your shoulder. If you try to drop off your laundry anytime after mid-morning any day of the week, he glares at you as one might glare at someone beating her child in the supermarket. The woman (his wife?) is actually very nice, she just seems unbelievably exhausted, and consequently short-tempered. Together they seem to have suffered an extreme ordeal of some kind; they're ground down, defeated. There is a deep, palpable pall of sadness hanging over this place. If you go in late to pick up your laundry, most of the lights are off (to conserve energy, I guess) and the mindlessly cheerful Big Radio that makes the ambience all the more perverse during the day has been replaced with a Chinese shortwave news station, full of hiss and static, turned up very loud. Bleak doesn't even begin to describe it.
How could I give this place one star? It would be cruel. The fact is my laundry comes back very clean and well-organized, and as much as I dread going to Greg's and grit my teeth for every second I'm inside, I appreciate these people's hard work. read more