The Last Word

Sam Sing faces closing; laundry business will cease at 121 N. Main after 90 years

By John Eng-Wong

On March 20 the Lai family plans to close the doors of Sam Sing Laundry for the last time. They will also be closing a chapter of R.I. business history dating from the beginnings of the 20th Century and before. The gentrification of the 100 block on North Main Street has brought the sale of the building where they operate their laundry. Notice has been served, forcing the closure of the last remaining Chinese laundry in Downcity Providence.

The Lais' tenure has lasted only 13 years, but for them, as for former generations of owners the laundry business was an entry into American life, a precious opening, but one also that required long hot hours of hard work. The laundry has allowed the Lais' to build a small platform of economic security and stability, enough to raise two sons who have learned language and lessons enough to look beyond the laundry as a livelihood. The elder, David, is now a junior at Providence College; the younger, Vincent, is a senior at Classical High School and plans to enroll at Brown this fall.

It appears that 121 North Main was an address blessed by the laundry god, at least until this last year when the real estate spirit assumed a more dominant presence. Providence business records reveal that 121 N. Main St. may have been the site of a laundry business as early as 1910.

Frank Low was the man associated with the address then. The Chinese laundry was a familiar establishment in that day; 87 are listed in 1910 edition of "Samson's Providence Business Directory." Chinese men, some who had worked on the railroads, and their later-arriving relatives flocked to domestic service occupations once the transcontinental railway was completed and anti-Chinese sentiment made only the most menial of work accessible. As early as the 1870s Chinese laundrymen were doing business on the first blocks of North Main. Of the 272 Rhode Island Chinese counted in the 1910 census, the overwhelming majority likely worked in hand laundries. The survival rate of these businesses was not impressive, but a small number of Chinese laundries survived even as the Chinese population in Providence dwindled.

Mr. and Mrs. Lai are anxious about their impending loss of livelihood. They are approaching a natural age of retirement, and had hoped that they could bow out of their business once their sons were through their schooling. Now a forced retirement is forcing unwelcome changes, anxiety about college tuitions, and regrets at a recent investment in new steam boiler. Relocation does not appear to be an option. There are thoughts of moving some of the laundry equipment to a museum, but the expense of that may be prohibitive.

For the customers this retirement is also cause for regret. They have become accustomed to the warm greetings and accommodating manner of the Lais' and their boys. And now they will have to search elsewhere for the smooth pressing and flat folding that have become a trademark of the Chinese hand laundry, a trademark now apparently disappearing from the business scene.