Penny Lane Salon Perseveres Through Sunday Flooding

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Mary Nowicki’s career as a hair stylist started back in the 1980s when she’d visit her aunt’s hair salon and smell the perms. She soon started practicing on her sister’s Cabbage Patch Kids dolls.

“It was awful,” Nowicki said.

She went from butchering her sister’s dolls’ hair to a burgeoning career as a hairstylist, starting beauty school at 21 years old. She spent the next 12 years working for a handful of hair salons. 

Eventually, Nowicki began looking for a new place to work, and there was a gal she had gone to beauty school with who was also looking for another location to style hair. The family of one of Nowicki’s clients owns the Eubanks Glass building, which had an extra store space on the side, so it all worked out for Nowicki to move in and begin Penny Lane Salon in May 2016.

She feared the transition from employee to business owner would be a tough change, but luckily it was much easier than she anticipated. Thankfully, she doesn’t have a super-high overhead, which helps keep her business profitable.

The bulk of Penny Lane Salon’s customers come in for hair coloring, though it also offers women’s, men’s and kids’ haircuts. Tawny Coulter, another hair stylist, also runs her salon, Hair by TawnyAnn, out of the same space.

“She’s amazing,” Nowicki said. “I love her and she puts up with my bold attitude. It’s an easy working environment, so that helps.”

The pandemic hasn’t had much of an effect on either of their businesses. Coulter has had a few cancellations because of clients concerned with COVID-19, but for the most part, she and Nowicki have been busy.

The salon was forced to shut down for 10 weeks at the beginning of the pandemic while it was listed as a non-essential business, but was able to reopen before salons in Thurston, Pierce and King Counties. Nowicki and Coulter had people driving all the way from Seattle trying to get an appointment with them. They had a waiting list of 30 people at one point.

“I think, with the shutdown, people realized just how important their hair stylist was,” Nowicki said. “After the first couple weeks of initial shock, it was fine. People were happy to come in.”



More recently, Penny Lane Salon was flooded on Sunday when 3 inches of rain fell over the weekend and flooded China Creek, which runs directly under the salon on West Main Street. China Creek is notorious for flooding when heavy rains push the Skookumchuck and Chehalis rivers out of their banks.

Nowicki received a photo of the outside of the building Sunday from Keysar Center of Massage’s owner, which showed water creeping up to the storefront. She’d seen the water reach the front of the store before, but never in her five years there had her salon ever flooded inside.

“I drove down there just to investigate and I couldn’t even cross the road, so I had to hike up my pants and walk through the water,” Nowicki said. “And, yeah, there was about 4 or 5 inches of water in there.”

Typically, Eubanks Glass places sandbags around the building and plastic sheets in the doorways, but someone had checked the creek at 1 a.m. and said there was still plenty of space for water. And the city of Centralia normally pumps water from the street back into the creek, but wasn’t able to do that because it was flooded early Sunday morning.

The city of Centralia completed phase one of a two-part China Creek project in 2019, which is aimed at creating a more natural path for the creek to mitigate flooding in the stretch that meanders through downtown Centralia.

The project cost $2.1 million and has prevented at least one flood in early January 2020. Phase two will involve the raising of the Angew Mill Ponds near Gold Street to increase the amount of water that can be stored at the ponds. Phase two construction, which will be put out to bid in the next month or two, is expected to cost $2.4 million and begin in the spring or summer of 2021, said Kim Ashmore, public works director for Centralia.

Nowicki was at her store from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. Sunday, and it was still full of water. Eubanks hired a crew to clean out the water, and within an hour, they emailed her a picture and the water was already cleaned out of her salon. The crew also sanitized and bleached everything, basically cleaning up her entire store.

“I’m very grateful to Eubanks because they’ve been through this a time or two and they know how to fix it quickly,” Nowicki said.

Nowicki had to throw a couple store items out that were damaged by water, but nothing major. It needed a good cleaning anyways, she said. For now, she’s just grateful the flooding did minimal damage and that her loyal clientele are helping keep her afloat during the pandemic.

Penny Lane Salon is located at 501 W. Main St. in Centralia and is open from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., Tuesday and Saturday, and 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday to Friday. To book an appointment, call 360-827-3546.

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Reporter Eric Trent can be reached at etrent@chronline.com. Visit chronline.com/business for more coverage of local businesses.