postcard courtesy lauderdale library
An old postcard shows the Memphis Steam Laundry shortly after it opened in 1927.
Dear Vance: I’ve read that the Memphis Steam Laundry was one of this city’s most distinctive buildings. If so, where was it, and what happened to it? — B.P., Memphis.
Dear B.P.: By any standards the Memphis Steam Laundry was an architectural marvel, but don’t take my word for it. “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.”
E.L. Harrison and Nowland Van Powell weren’t the owners of this establishment; they were the architectural team who decided to model a commercial laundry — normally a humdrum, cinder-block structure — after the Doges’ Palace in Venice, Italy. As you can tell from the postcard, the façade was completely slathered with brightly patterned brickwork and terra-cotta ornamentation.
The founder of the business was Jules Rozier, who first opened his Memphis Steam Laundry Company in 1882 on North Second Street. In 1927, he decided to erect a much larger building at 941 Jefferson, in the heart of the present-day Medical Center, and the result is what you see here.
photograph courtesy tina ciliberto
The view from home plate, with the Memphis Steam Laundry buildings and smokestack just beyond the outfield wall.
One detail that invariably comes up in any discussion about Rozier’s enterprise is its location — right behind Russwood Park, then this city’s minor-league baseball stadium. Originally constructed in 1896, owners had expanded the ballpark over the years. By the 1950s, the seating capacity was about 7,000 (sources vary on the precise number).
The laundry and the stadium, in fact, shared the same back wall. In fact, here's a great aerial view showing just how close they were to each other. Any home runs hit over the outfield fence landed on the roof (or grounds) of the laundry. And that brings us — finally! — to a unique promotion that I wanted to share with my readers.
When her family was still living in Memphis — this would have been in the 1940s — her father, Robert Heslep, became vice president of the Memphis Power & Light Company. “He was born in Helena, Arkansas, but came to Memphis as a young man,” says Tina. “He was known by his co-workers as ‘the boy genius’ because he had an ability to figure out the power grids and restore interrupted power more quickly than anyone who had previously held his position.”
Even so, he left this nice job on a bet. It seems he was friends with Jules Rozier, who told him his laundry wasn’t doing as well as he had hoped and made him an offer: Could Heslep turn around the struggling business if he was named vice president and given free rein to do whatever he needed? According to Tina, “He did win the bet — though he never specified what he won. I do remember as a child that he expanded the laundry by adding linen supply to the existing plant and oversaw the opening of branches in several cities in the Mid-South.”
Tina remembers the laundry almost became a second home for her. “My father used to go there every Saturday morning and would take me with him. He had a very luxurious office with floor-to-ceiling red velvet curtains. We would walk around the plant and he would check with everyone on how things were going.”
Of course, the Heslep family went to Chicks games at Russwood Park. “Our family got to sit in the Memphis Steam Laundry box,” she says, “but sometimes we would bring lawn chairs to the roof of the laundry, where we perched above the outfield to watch a game.”
photograph courtesy tina ciliberto
Players could "Send It to the Laundry" and earn $200 — or hit the sign itself and win $1,000.
In 1952, somebody with the Memphis Steam Laundry — I like to think it was Heslep himself — came up with the unusual promotion shown here. They erected a billboard atop the left-field wall, presenting the batters with a special challenge: “Send It to the Laundry.” Anyone who clobbered the ball out of the park for a home run got $200, a nice bonus in those days. But if they hit the actual sign — 475 feet from home plate — the player would pick up a whopping $1,000.
According to Tina, only one player ever hit that sign. “Ed White was my favorite Memphis Chicks ball player. He hit the sign in 1955. I was very proud that my father got to present the $1,000 check to Ed.” She shared this old photo of that occasion.
photograph courtesy tina ciliberto
Memphis Steam Laundry vice president Robert Heslip presents a check to outfielder Ed White as a bonus for the Chicks winning the 1955 Southern League pennant.
White had been a star athlete at the University of Alabama, playing football and baseball. After college, he signed on as an outfielder with the Double-A Waterloo White Hawks before joining the Memphis Chicks in 1951. According to BASEBALL-REFERENCE.COM, “he was a .300-plus hitter for three straight years from 1953 to 1955. This earned him a short stay with the Chicago White Sox, his only time in the major leagues.”
After just one year, he returned to the Chicks, playing one year before the New York Giants acquired White in 1957. He didn’t stay there long, moving to the Sacramento Solons and the Minneapolis Millers. Despite playing in more than 900 minor-league games, White hung up his cleats in 1957, at the young age of 31, and took a job as a high school teacher and coach in Lakeland, Florida. He died there in 1982 at the age of 56.
But wait: It seems Tina’s memory about White’s famous home run wasn’t accurate.
In my lonely nights in the Lauderdale Mansion, I recently pored over hundreds of old newspaper articles about the Memphis Chicks. Ed White was indeed quite a slugger, but he never managed to hit that laundry sign. Instead, it was a teammate — Chicks first-baseman Jim Marshall — who did it during a game on May 6, 1956, against the Chattanooga Lookouts. The Chicks won that game 4-0, and The Commercial Appeal story makes his accomplishment (“the most valuable home run in Southern League history”) very clear, with a subhead reading: “First To Hit Sign.”
card courtesy tina ciliberto
Jim Marshall's rookie card with the Chicago Cubs.
It was surely the highlight of Marshall’s only year with the Chicks. According to BASEBALL-REFERENCE.COM, after playing for other minor-league teams in Albuquerque, Oakland, and Nashville, he joined the majors, where he played for the Chicago Cubs, Baltimore Orioles, and New York Mets. He even played for the Chunichi Dragons in Japan before retiring in 1965.
But what about the check presentation photo (shown here)? The Memphis Steam Laundry was a very generous supporter of the Chicks, and that is indeed Robert Heslep with Ed White. A photographer clicked the shutter to record Tina’s father presenting the entire team — not just White — with a check for $8,300 as a reward for winning the 1955 Southern League pennant. As one of the Chick’s most popular players, it made a nice “photo op” to pose White as the recipient, but he had to share that money — enough to buy a house in the mid-1950s — with the other players.
Although the baseball stadium packed in the crowds for many games, and the laundry was an architectural gem, no trace remains of either place today. Russwood, an old-fashioned park with wooden bleachers and decking, burned to the ground after an exhibition game between the Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Indians on the night of April 17, 1960. It remains one of our city’s most spectacular fires, the blaze so intense that Baptist Hospital, just across Madison, had to evacuate patients when the flames melted the windows.
The Memphis Steam Laundry’s demise wasn’t so dramatic. While Johnson and Russell called it “the best piece of eclectic architecture the city ever had,” a city planning official considered it “a monstrosity and an eyesore in the whole area where new buildings are going up.” In 1973, under the guise of “urban renewal,” bulldozers pulled down the “Venetian palace.”
“Why they could not have found a place in the Medical Center, many of us will never understand,” lamented Johnson and Russell in their book. Regional One Health stands on the laundry site today, and UTHSC buildings occupy the site of the old ballpark.
Got a question for Vance?
Email: askvance@memphismagazine.com
Mail: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis magazine, P.O. Box 1738, Memphis, TN 38101
