Stryker Avenue is not a place most people visit, a quiet St. Paul street on an infrequent bus line that serves the community and not much else, which means there are few urban spaces more mundane than a Stryker Avenue laundromat. But since 2019, a business named Beautiful Laundrette has been quietly improving people’s lives on this West Side street. By working a little bit at a time, it transformed a utilitarian cleaner into a community “third space” and a pillar of a working-class neighborhood.

I have long had an interest in laundromats. I went for more than a decade without my own washing machine, and while that’s mostly a big inconvenience, there are silver linings. For one, I became a connoisseur of laundromat design. I wandered the city for years in search of ideal architecture and v

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