- URBAN GARDNER
- JULY 25, 2011
- By RALPH GARDNER JR.
I like to think of ours as a commonsensical family. But there's one area where we threw wisdom to the wind many years ago. We bought a white carpet. White carpets are fine if you never plan to set foot on them, if you put your living room behind bars and hire a security guard. But it's probably not the shrewdest color choice if you have dogs and small children and friends who are prone to overindulge and spill red wine—no matter that they apologize profusely or rush to pour club soda over the stain.
Mimi Ritzen Crawford for The Wall Street Journal
Employees of Metropolitan Carpet Cleaning at work in the company's Hunts Point building.
Nonetheless, we still own the same white carpet we bought two decades ago and it still looks pretty good as long as you ignore a couple of small blemishes, such as the spot where sap from the Christmas tree turned black in 1996 and the hole where our bunny rabbit, named Bunny, tried to burrow through to the next apartment in 2005 (these dates are approximate).
Credit for the presentable condition of our carpet goes to Metropolitan Carpet Cleaning, an outfit in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. I found them in the Yellow Pages during the first George Bush presidency. And in all the years since, give or take a couple when we decided the carpet wasn't sufficiently embarrassing to clean, Metropolitan Carpet has dispatched the same gentleman, Hernan Guzman, usually with an assistant in tow, to pick up and return the rug. And every time Mr. Guzman examines it before he rolls it up—by the time we send it away the rug typically resembles a Pollack—he shakes his head disapprovingly and asks whether the time hasn't come to buy a new one.
Mimi Ritzen Crawford for The Wall Street Journal
Metropolitan Carpet Cleaning in Hunts Point
Mind you, Metropolitan Carpet doesn't sell rugs. Mr. Guzman's analysis is entirely disinterested, though I sometimes suspect he's operating by Park Avenue standards, where people have their carpets cleaned every year regardless of need.
The reason we don't splurge on a new carpet is because we have no occasion to. No matter how disgusting it looks when it's carted off (and I confess there are occasionally stains so brazen you'd bet your children there's no way they'll ever be exorcized), it comes back looking like a million bucks, almost brand new, and certainly attractive enough to resume having guests and putting off investing in a new floor covering through one more presidency.
I've often tried to visualize what sort of alchemical processes our carpets undergo in the Bronx, how many times they're run through the wringer, to achieve the resulting masterpiece. Last week, Howard Katz, whose father and uncle started Metropolitan in 1946, and who himself has worked in the business since 1959, agreed to let me watch. Not only that, but also to experience the catharsis of observing my own carpets—all told there are three (the 11- by 14-foot woolen white carpet, a slightly larger green rug and a turquoise throw rug)—undergo their spa treatment.
Visiting Metropolitan was like stepping back into the '50s—the 1850s. It was like a Goya painting: Men, their muscles rippling and bodies glistening in the 90-degree heat of the warehouse, fed carpets onto a conveyer where they were soaked with jets of soap and water. Then bristles softer than those on a toothbrush agitated the soapy mixture, scoured and rinsed the rugs, which proceeded through a ringer. The process might be repeated several times on each carpet, depending on whether the workers were satisfied with the results. Finally, the rugs were carted off to a drying room to be hung overnight and blasted with 120-degree heat.
"Basically, it's a car wash," Mr. Katz stated modestly.
He said he has a customer who cleans her rugs every two weeks. He has other clients who haven't cleaned their rugs in 20 or 30 years before they arrive. The occasional piece must be sent to a specialist for stain removal. Sometimes the carpet is even cut to remove an especially recalcitrant spot; Mr. Katz is also an expert tailor and tapestrist, mending rugs, restitching them and even replacing whole areas, the results all but invisible to the naked eye.
When he started in the 1950s, most of the company's business came from the Bronx (now it's Manhattan), and there were four rug cleaners in Hunts Point alone.
"Air-conditioning came in," he said, which hurt business because New Yorkers stopped automatically storing their rugs for the summer.
In the '60s, wall-to-wall carpeting dealt the industry another blow. Finally, these days Metropolitan is forced to compete against anybody with a website and a shampooing machine.
Mr. Katz, who runs the company with business partner Jeff Sackett, contends that his is one of the only operations in the city with a drying room. "Everybody else does it in a garage," he said. "They throw it over a chair, over a pole." He also claims to have the last industrial rug-cleaning machine of its kind operating in New York. It was manufactured in Indiana and purchased by his family in the '50s. He estimates Metropolitan cleans approximately 200 rugs a week.
"We have a lower overheard," he said, explaining Metropolitan's ability to stay in business. "The trucks are paid for. The building is paid for. It's a very labor-intensive business."
As challenging as some of his customers' carpets certainly must be, I sincerely believe ours were the nastiest the day of my visit, particularly since we bided our time for our incontinent mutt Mimi to expire before we called Metropolitan. Even before they were loaded onto the conveyer, workers sprayed them with a stain remover-dispensing wand and poured spot remover onto a couple of the more diabolical blotches. And once a rug went through the machine, employee Rafael Borbon examined it and sent it back for a second washing.
Mr. Borbon had no idea who I was or that I was writing a story about the company, though Metropolitan probably doesn't get many sightseers taking notes. "I didn't say anything," Mr. Katz said.
My rugs will be back this week—the fast turnaround another selling point—and I'm confident our apartment will feel reborn, just as it always has in the past.
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved