Part 3 of 9 in Philadelphia Code: Accidental Anthropology

The first self-service laundromat in the United States opened in Fort Worth, Texas in 1934. Before that, laundry was a household chore, and after that, it was a 24-hour amenity run by industrial washing machines. The Philadelphia Code, however, predates 1934 — but the laundromat curfew itself does not. § 9-609, in its current form, was added to the Code in 1961.

The section is short, and the prohibition is direct. § 9-609(3)(a) says: "No person shall … operate a self-service laundry during the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m." That is the curfew. It is a black-letter prohibition in the Code, not an interpretation. The subsection that requires exterior lights off after midnight, § 9-609(3)(b), is a separate rule but lives in the same section. A third rule in § 9-609, also dating to 1961, requires every self-service laundromat to maintain a public payphone on the premises — I covered that in The Laundromat Payphone Rule.

The result is that Philadelphia laundromats have to close between 1am and 6am. None of the machines are loud enough to violate the noise ordinance. None of the customers are. The rule is structural, not acoustic. The Code treats laundromats as a category of business that does not operate overnight.

If you have ever worked a service job in this city, you know what that means. The 1am-to-6am slot is the working-poor slot. The third shift. The hospital orderly, the warehouse picker, the line cook prepping for the morning. The shift workers do laundry at 2am because the laundromat is empty, the machines are free, and they are awake. The curfew takes that option off the table.

New York does not have this curfew. Chicago does not. Boston, San Francisco, DC, none of them. The 1961 logic is Philly-specific. The Code requires a laundromat to be a daytime business. The reason has not been re-examined since the first laundromat existed.

The Code editor's note on § 9-609 is instructive: "Amended, 1961 Ordinances, p. 517; amended by deleting former subsection 865 (8), 1990 Ordinances, p. 715; former subsections (1) through (4) deleted and remaining subsections renumbered and amended, Bill No. 090777-A (approved February 17, 2010)." A 2021 bill, Bill No. 210481, made the most recent amendment. The curfew has been on the books for 65 years. It has been touched, here and there, by amendment. The operating-hours rule itself has not been revised.

Most laundromat owners in the city comply with the curfew by closing. Some do not. The 1am-6am slot is enforced the way most Code rules are enforced: rarely, and after a complaint. The laundromats that stay open past 1am in neighborhoods with a third-shift population are operating in a gray zone, and the gray zone has been gray for over half a century. A parallel curfew on street vendors, midnight to 7am, sits in the same Title 9 — I wrote about that one in The Midnight Vendor Ban.

The third shift in this city is still awake at 2am. Bill No. 210481 made the most recent amendment to § 9-609, in 2021. It did not touch the curfew.

Sources: Philadelphia Code § 9-609 (codelibrary).