Because cleaning this shirt costs $6 in New York City
There's an extravagant level of cleanliness just behind an unmarked door in a corner of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.This is the home of Kingbridge's huge new cleaning facility, which opened in January 2020. This is where a meticulous, labour-intensive process takes place, which Aviles says is necessary for clothes to be cleaned properly.He learned the trade when he was 5, when his mother Victoria, who still helps run the decades-old family business, dressed him in a suit and took him to work on Saturdays. He offered customers hot chocolate in the winter and lemonade in the summer, and soon learned to iron his own shirts.Today, workers pile dirty shirts – undignified with faded collars, chipped buttons and sweat stains – into a huge bin to be manually sorted by color and condition. Then they p...