Memphis Steam Laundry – Memphis Flyer

Medical Center – Late 1950s

I was rooting through the basement of the Lauderdale Library the other day, seeing if I could turn up a dusty bottle of Kentucky Nip to ease my lumbago, when I came across a stash of nice old aerial photographs of Memphis.

So I might share some of them with you from time to time. This one is an especially clear view of Russwood Park, destroyed by fire in 1961 in one of our city’s biggest blazes. So there’s one clue to the date of the photo: before 1961.

That’s Madison Avenue running diagonally across the top part of the photo — just about the only manmade object in this whole sweeping image that has survived, 40 years later. Across the street from the old baseball stadium is the original portion of the old Baptist Hospital. In the foreground you can see the incredible Italian Renaissance-designed Memphis Steam Laundry building, with one of the tallest smokestacks in town.

To the right are various older hospital buildings in our city’s medical center, most of them replaced by The Med complex. And if you squint your eyes and look very carefully, you can barely make out the circular Duke Bowers Wading Pool in the corner of Forrest Park.

Not a trace remains of any of these things, not even the little neighborhood down in the bottom left corner, so it’s a good thing somebody held onto these old photos after all these years, isn’t it?

Why does our fine city have such a penchant for tearing down some of the coolest-looking buildings ever constructed? Case in point, the Venetian-inspired Memphis Steam Laundry building, designed by noted architect Nowland Van Powell.

Begun by Jules Rozier way back in 1882, the Memphis Steam Laundry Company operated downtown for many years before moving to 941 Jefferson in 1927. Except for Dryve Cleaners, laundries aren’t usually noted for their architecture, but for some reason, Powell — at the time the principal designer for architect E.L. Harrison — decided that this normally humdrum industrial building should be modeled after the Doges’ Palace in Venice — much like the north wing of the Lauderdale Mansion. The facade was just slathered with patterned brickwork, elaborate arches, and terra-cotta ornamentation. The sides and back, however, were just plain brick. Much like the north wing of the Lauderdale Mansion. Hey, we had to cut costs somewhere.

“Few cities are lucky enough to have a genuine Venetian palace in which the citizens can have their shirts laundered,” wrote Eugene Johnson and Robert Russell in Memphis: An Architectural Guide. “What connection Harrison and Powell saw between cleanliness and Venetian Gothic we shall probably never know.”