Chinney Retiring After 21 Years in Cleaning Business

Nobody knows the contents of closets in Wayland quite as well as Chinney Rosenberg. 

For the past 21 years, Rosenberg, a Sudbury resident, has been the smiling face and skilled hands behind the success of . But Friday will be her last day in the shop located in the Whole Foods Market shopping center. 

“Everybody has been so wonderful. I will miss the people,” Rosenberg said, explaining that she has customers who have been coming to her since 1989 when she first opened an alterations business on Pelham Island Road. “We’re growing old together,” she said, smiling. 

At the beginning of 2012, Rosenberg turned over her business, which she moved to its current location in 1990, to her longtime colleagues, husband and wife team Chond Yoo and Jung Hong. It’s a transition that will be difficult for Rosenberg, but she’s confident the Hongs are up to the challenge of maintaining the quality for which her two-decades old business is known. After all, the Hongs have been a part of the business for many years.

Rosenberg does alterations in her shop and accepts clothes for dry cleaning and cleaning, but she can’t do any of the cleaning in-house because the shop sits in a watershed area. She never even attempted to get a permit to have the cleaning machines in the shop, since, Rosenberg said, she knew it would never be permitted in an area known for flooding.

Instead, the Hongs handled the cleaning off-site.

Rosenberg joked that Jung Hong knows the names of all the regular customers from reading the tags on their shirts and pants, but now she’ll have an opportunity to put faces with the names on the tags. 

“He [Chond Yoo Hong] always said, ‘If you ever want to retire, I’m taking over,’” Rosenberg said. “I never had a thought of anyone else. I feel good about leaving. It’s in good hands.” 

Looking around the open and airy shop, it’s easy to believe you’ve been invited into someone’s busy living room. Books and magazines line a bookshelf and a dozen or more houseplants add green cheer to the space even during the winter months. 

Those houseplants, as it turns out, are as much a part of Chinney’s Cleaners as the cleaning service.

Rosenberg points to two large potted palms and explains that a customer brought them to her years ago. They were wilted, dying plants the customer had gotten from a grandparent. Rosenberg cut the plants back to the soil, and today they stand about 2 feet tall, proudly framing the shop window. 

An aloe plant from a customer who moved to Florida, Christmas cactus from another customer moving to North Carolina, a number of plants received as Christmas gifts from customers over the years – all pieces of the history of Chinney’s. 

The plants will remain at the shop even after Rosenberg leaves. They, along with the shop’s name, won’t change just because the founder has decided it’s time to travel some and spend more time with her husband, two sons and granddaughter. 

Rosenberg said some customers joked that they would stop bringing in their clothes if the name of the shop changed.

Since handing over ownership of the shop, Rosenberg has continued to come in as the Hong’s transition into running the shop fulltime, but that will end Friday, Jan. 13.

“Time’s gone so fast,” Rosenberg said. “I was surprised it had been that long. I appreciate their [customers’] trust in me with their clothes. They were so wonderful to me.”