New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Cleaners making customers ‘look sharp’ for 65 years
NEW HAVEN — A threegeneration business, 65 years of ups and downs, a place to catch up on city and personal news.
That is Jet Cleaners on Upper State Street.
Neighbors stopped by this week to celebrate its current owner, Mike Amore Jr., and its more than six decades of serving customers.
The personal stories were the best.
For Carlos Eyzaguirre, city deputy director of economic development, Amore three years ago helped pull him together on a more than routine stop.
He had gone to Jet the day of his wedding to pick up his tuxedo, and realized he had no bow tie.
“Mike found a bow tie tie in the back. That is what I wore to my wedding that day. It’s in all the pictures,” Eyzaguirre said.
Eyzaguirre said it speaks to the interest Amore takes in his customers and the resilience of this section of State Street, surviving the coronavirus pandemic shutdown.
A booming business when men’s required office dress was a suit, shirt and tie, Amore said cleaners have experienced a slow, steady decline for the past 25 years only to come to a halt when the pandemic hit a year ago in March.
In 1988, when he stepped into the family business, “we were rocking and rolling. We were the established cleaners,” he said.
Amore said he has survived by taking on a tunnel-vision focus in the last 16 months to stay in business.
“I think I drew on my ancestry more than I thought, that ethnic pride that the Italians had, my father and grandfather and ... uncle starting this place from scratch,” Amore said.
He said 22 years after his father died, he became his father in the sense of understanding what it is like to struggle to survive.
“All the steps and the people before me were the stepping stones to the point I am now,” Amore said.
He said he has done it by reinventing himself and having a loyal staff. “They were tremendous,” he said.
When business came to a pandemic halt, he had “all this money on the rack that is not money until it gets delivered,” referring to the shirts, dresses and pants hanging inside the small 762 State St. site.
Amore said he texted and phoned customers and set up a delivery service.
He said he would pick up his wife and every one of those road trips, versus the usual lockdown, “was exciting. It was like a vacation.”
Amore said they added
“wash, dry and fold,” which was a hit with older customers. The best thing, he said, were the customers who reached out and posted positive reviews. It is the kind of business that only attracts negative comments, he said, rather than praise for a job well done.
Amore also enhanced his tailoring skills, making masks out of shirts customers had left there for over a year, as well as traditional tailoring. “It was a great byproduct,” he said.
Mayor Justin Elicker, who picked up some dry cleaning, said Amore always shares the history of his family who have made this place their home, “but also made New Haven look sharp, look clean.”
Lindy Gold, a senior development specialist with the state Department of Economic and Community Development, thanked Amore for the coats cleaned in the numerous drives for the homeless and others in need.
“It is more than a dry cleaner. It really operates as a neighborhood watering hole, as a neighborhood barber shop. You trade notes. You talk politics. You talk about your kids, your grandkids . ... It really has been another home for those of us who live in the neighborhood,” Eyzaguirre said.