As Peter Ash walked slowly through the empty rooms of John Ash Cleaners, his voice carried both nostalgia and gratitude.
“This is our last day,” he began in a video posted on Facebook. “We sign the papers over later today.
“And I thought I’d do one final walkthrough.”
For more than 100 years, the Ash family’s business on West State Street was a fixture in Olean. Founded by John Ash Sr., a World War I veteran, in 1919 as an alterations and tailoring shop, it grew into a full-service dry cleaner by the early 1920s. Generations of Ash family members devoted their lives to keeping the community looking its best.
But changing times and, most critically, the COVID-19 pandemic, forced the difficult decision to close. The store officially shut its doors in spring 2024, ending more than a century of service, and was officially sold to new owners on Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025.
A walk through history
In his video tour, Peter Ash pointed out the spaces that once bustled with life — the seamstress area where his grandfather fitted St. Bonaventure basketball legend Bob Lanier for a suit, the boiler room where countless customers waited during inspections, and the leather cleaning area added in the 1990s.
He recalled break times in the upstairs room, where his uncles would sit with coffee and rehash old stories about sports and politics. He even chuckled over a spooky basement memory, where his son once compared the storage area to “a place Freddy Krueger would live.”
One small detail captured the spirit of the place: a simple orange light bulb above the presses, glowing for more than 60 years without ever being replaced. “If that bulb could talk,” Ash reflected, “it would have a million stories.”
A family business, a community mainstay
John J. Ash, who worked at the store into his nineties, often said he never thought he would see the day the family business would close. “I just assumed we would be lucky enough to have someone to purchase the business, but that didn’t happen,” he said to WKBW about the closure last year.
Longtime customers described the store as a “mainstay of the community.” For decades, residents dropped off everything from winter coats to wedding dresses, confident that the family-run team of pressers, seamstresses, and cleaners would take care of them. At the end, John Ash Cleaners employed about 15 people.
End of an era
The decline of the dry-cleaning industry is not unique to Olean. Nationally, the number of dry cleaners has fallen by more than 40% since 2001, with the pandemic accelerating the trend.
But for Olean, the loss is personal. In his farewell, Peter Ash made sure to thank the employees, customers, and family members who sustained the business through more than a century. He even left behind one final inside joke for his daughter Sarah — a stubborn old tape dispenser she once begged him to throw away.
“It’s been a long run,” Peter said as he closed out the tour. “Over a hundred years. Whoever sees this … you’re a customer, thank you. If you worked here, thank you. And thank everybody. My family … and especially my wife, for putting up with me and the long hours.”
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