Hillyard Laundry Building has colorful past
For a structure listed on the Spokane Register of Historic Places, the Hillyard Laundry Building at 3108 E. Olympic Ave., between Market and Green streets, is remarkably – well, colorful.
Painted bright yellow with an even brighter blue trim, this two-story, formed-concrete block structure was built a stone’s throw from the railroad tracks in 1906 by blacksmith Charles Carr. It was the longtime home of a hand laundry operated by a group of Japanese immigrants.
Fred Shiosaki, who was Spokane’s air pollution control officer in the 1960s and ’70s and Washington Water Power’s environmental safety and health officer after that, knows the building well. His father, Kisaburo “Kay” Shiosaki, brought his bride, Tori, from their native Japan to the Hillyard area and operated the laundry with some partners, becoming the sole proprietor in about 1917. The couple raised their four sons and one daughter for many years in the two-bedroom apartment upstairs.
Kay picked up work clothes, butcher aprons and other garments from neighboring businesses in the booming railroad town that was Hillyard in those days; Tori did the mending. And they both did the hand washing and ironing. Later, as machines and dry cleaning equipment became available, the laundry grew to incorporate modern technology.
“Everybody worked at something,” Fred Shiosaki, now 84, remembers. “I learned how to press clothes, and later, when I was in college at Gonzaga (he earned a chemistry degree in 1949), I’d come home after class and work in the laundry.”
He especially remembers the days before World War II when the building’s steam boiler was fueled by cord wood. Huge pieces of wood had to be cut into 18-inch lengths, a chore which fell to the Shiosaki brothers.
Read on at the Spokane Spokesman-Review