• Hippodrome

  1120 Sixth Avenue, at 44th Street; 212-768-9080

  You were expecting to go straight from the office to a big dinner—until that lunchtime incident turned your poplin jacket into a Jackson Pollock. Regrettably, since most cleaners have moved their machines to remote corners of Queens, they can no longer do a same-day job brought in after 10 a.m. But if you can get your stained self over to Hippodrome Cleaners by 2 p.m, that splotch will be history well before your Lever House reservation, for prices that start at $2.25 with no same-day markup. Hippodrome serves many of the area’s swank clubs and hotels like the Hudson and the Royalton, whose Fashion Week models often send their delicates. Then there was Britney’s special order a couple of months back. “It was 132 pieces, in four hours. We did a tremendous job in no time,” owner Sam Pritsker says with justifiable pride. “They were very thankful.”

From the 2004 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine