At the base of Crescent Street in Long Island City, Queens, you will hear the hum of traffic heading to and from the Queensboro Bridge and the rattle of subway cars hustling over elevated tracks, the same rumblings heard in that spot 20, 40 or 60 years ago. But if you look around, you will see signs of a neighborhood changed.

A glassy condominium project is on one corner, two new rental buildings are right down the block and a small flower shop has orchids arranged in the window. There is also a dry cleaner that has been operating in the neighborhood for over 40 years, which, on its Web site, proudly advertises a relatively new service: organic dry cleaning.

“People started asking for it,” said Jose Rojas, a manager at Packard Square Cleaners, nestled at the base of a recently constructed rental building. So to oblige new customers, he said, the cleaners started offering it.

Dry cleaners in the United States first began to avoid traditional chemicals and embrace words like “green,” “natural” and “organic” about 15 years ago, and they have since blanketed the affluent sections of Manhattan, from the Upper East Side down to TriBeCa. In recent years, they have crept farther afield, up to Harlem and out to places like Greenpoint and Bushwick in Brooklyn, joining the head-to-tail butchers and the boutique bike shops as an unofficial marker of gentrification in New York.