If you have an appointment at Citibank you will be separated from your clerk by a plexiglass shield most likely procured from a corporate vendor. If you’re picking up your dry cleaning at San Toy you will hand over your ticket through a shower curtain most likely purchased at the local dollar store.
I have been sending my laundry to the lovely folks at San Toy since I moved to Brooklyn in 1988. And nothing has changed. “The place looks like it’s held together by matchsticks,” my friend, Steve, once commented. Indeed, it’s still about as low tech as you can get. There’s a rotary dial telephone on the wall and your ticket is old school -- colored paper with the name, address, telephone number, and ticket number on it. At my newer, computerized dry cleaner down the street, the ticket seems to be a formality; if you don’t have one, the nice lady behind the counter simply looks up your name. I shudder to think what would happen to my shirts if I had no ticket at San Toy.
That said, I was recently convinced I had dropped off some shirts for my dad and had misplaced the ticket. I wandered in, weeks later, and a nice young man, who is most likely the son of the owner, was more than happy to help me. “What day do you think you brought them in?” he asked, as he fetched a Composition notebook and started looking up my supposed shirts in the “system.”
While we never found said shirts -- I think I imagined I had brought them in and lost the ticket -- I was so grateful for the time the young man took to help me. And always, at San Toy, there is a smile, whether it is just to greet you, or to help you in your crazy quest to find some shirts you never dropped off.
The calendar hanging off a shelf of “brown-paper packages tied up with string” says that San Toy has been serving Park Slope for 60 years.
Thank goodness they have. It is an absolute pleasure doing business with them.