I thought this was interesting: Being Chinese in the U.S., of course my mum's parents ran a couple of laundries in the 1930s & '40s. My architect Uncle made some drawings of the first one.

Like a lot of people, they lived above their store until they found a house a block over (no car until maybe the late 40s!). The building had no hot water. They boiled water in a giant kettle. Can you imagine anyone building a building today and thinking a hot water heater was some kind of luxury? Anyways, they'd take in clothes, give every customer their own laundry mark, send them out to a commercial washer, and the clothes would come back wet. They had to then sort and dry the clothes (hung in a room with gas heaters).

The bread and butter of laundry then was shirts, which had to be starched and nice for the office. Wives would do the other things. This was fascinating to me, because I only know spray starch. No idea how you get low, medium, and heavy starching. Well, they'd have three basins they'd mix up with starch water (high, medium, and low). Then fold the clothes a certain way. Dip once for collar, re-fold and dip for the placket, re-fold and dip for the cuffs. Then they'd be left to dry a bit overnight, and the drying was finished by the ironing.

They had four ladies to do the ironing (not Chinese by the way). The rate was $5 a day, $25 a week, if you were good at ironing. Which meant 12 shirts an hour.

Other interesting factoids: They had an ice box, and ice was only delivered in summer. (I'd like to know what happened in winter.) There was a ragman who'd come around once a month in a horse-drawn cart and ask if folks had rags to give away. (No idea what was done with the rags.) They had a tin bathtub for baths.

Also, across the street was a bar. Nice women did not go into bars and not alone. What's interesting about this was, this was visibly made clear and real with a separate entrance for *ladies.*

p.s. The attached drawing is not quite correct. My uncle was drawing from a child's memory. The bathroom was one room, and the sleeping loft held two double beds and two cribs.