Window cleaning in Downtown LA, where the glass is the storefront.

Usually no, and you deserve to hear that on the first visit rather than after a few hours of billed labor. There are two different marks that get called graffiti downtown and only one of them is ours. Paint, marker, vinyl decals, sale signage, flyer glue, tape, and old price-window lettering are surface material - they come off with solvent, dwell time, and patience, and that is a real service we perform. Acid etching is not surface material. Taggers use a bifluoride etching cream that chemically bites into the pane, and scratchiti is cut in with a stone or a blade. In both cases the mark is in the glass, below any surface a cloth can reach, and no cleaner, compound, or polish removes it - anyone who tells you otherwise is either going to buff a distorted lens into your window or charge you for a pass that changes nothing. What we do instead is tell you which mark you have, photograph it, and point you at the two real options: a glazier replaces the pane, or an anti-graffiti sacrificial film goes on so the next hit peels off with the film instead of costing you a pane. One related thing most cleaners never ask: if your glass already carries that sacrificial film, it must not be cleaned like bare glass. A blade or an ammonia product will haze and lift it, and it is designed to be peeled and replaced rather than restored. We ask before we touch the glass, and we treat filmed panes with the method the film requires.

Yes, and for retail frontage it is the only sensible way to do it, so it is how we schedule Downtown by default rather than as a special request. A shop window cleaned at two in the afternoon is cleaned in front of your customers, with a hose and a pole between them and your door, which costs you more in walk-ins than the service is worth. We work the early window instead and finish before the gates go up. Downtown makes that easier than most places because the district never fully agrees on when morning is: the Flower District has been trading since the small hours, the Fashion District is loading and receiving well before storefront hours, and the Historic Core restaurants and bars are opening late and closing later. So we build routes around your block rather than ours, and we ask what your actual first hour is instead of assuming nine. Because the work happens in a public right-of-way, we run it properly: cones and hose routed so the sidewalk stays passable and accessible, water managed rather than sheeted across a walkway that people are using, and nothing left leaning against a neighbor's frontage. We run weekly, biweekly, and monthly routes here - weekly is common on food and beverage frontage and rarely excessive - and we are licensed and insured, with a certificate of insurance available for landlords and property managers.

That band is the most misdiagnosed thing on a storefront, and it is why retail glass that gets wiped constantly can still read dirty. It is the splash line. Every morning the sidewalk in front of you gets hosed down, and that spray lifts street grit and throws it against the lowest eighteen to twenty-four inches of your glass along with Los Angeles tap water, which is hard. The water evaporates on the pane and leaves its dissolved mineral behind. Do that daily for a year and you no longer have soil sitting on glass, you have a bonded mineral film with grit locked into it, and a cloth and spray bottle simply slide over the top of it. Worse, it does not stay cosmetic: mineral scale left long enough begins to etch the surface it sits on, and at that point the damage is permanent and the pane never fully clears again. So the splash band gets treated as its own step - grit flooded off first so nothing abrasive is ever dragged across the glass, then the mineral deposit taken down chemically rather than by force, working up from the bottom. Above the splash line, the problem is the opposite and entirely human: your door glass and the first few feet beside it are touched all day by hands, bags, strollers, and dogs, which is body oil rather than mineral and wants a different treatment. Two problems, one pane, and calling both of them dirty is how they both get half-solved.

The quote comes from what is actually on your frontage rather than a per-window rate, because two shops on the same block are rarely the same job. What moves the number here is pane count and glass area, how much of it is at the splash line, whether there is a transom band above the display glass and whether that band is flat or figured, whether the interior face is blocked by shelving and merchandising that has to be worked around, how much adhesive and old signage residue is on the panes, and how early we have to be on site. Recurring routes cost less per visit than one-off cleans, and on food and beverage frontage a weekly rhythm usually costs less over a year than a quarterly rescue of glass that got away from you. Our minimum service is $250, you get the exact figure in writing before anyone starts, and the instant quote calculator will give you a number right now. On height, the honest answer: we work to three stories and under. That covers essentially all of the ground-floor retail, the low-rise frontages, and the loft floors above them, which is the great majority of glass down here that anyone actually hires out. The towers are not our work, and we will tell you that immediately rather than quoting a job we should not take - if you are above three stories we will say so on the phone and point you toward a high-rise contractor.