The Spokane Spokesman-Review has done a great many historical articles on the heritage buildings of the city and environs. Their choice of subjects for a December 11, 2008 article was the Hillyard Laundry Building, a contributing resource to the Hillyard Historic Business District in northeast Spokane. The beginning of the article can be read further below. Incidentally, in 2008 the building was painted a bright yellow with blue trim - today it is a much more subdued grey.
The small, two storey Hillyard Laundry Building was originally known as the
Hillyard Hand Laundry, established by a trio of Japanese immigrants, one of whom operated the laundry from 1906 into the 1990s. In 1950 the laundry changed names, becoming
Hillyard Laundry and Dry-cleaning. It may have been at this time that the neon sign above the entrance was erected.
When
James Jerome Hill, generally known as J.J., brought his
Great Northern Railway to Spokane, the decision was made to set up the railway shops, service center and roundhouse adjacent to what became the town of Hillyard, named, naturally enough, after J.J. himself, literally,
Hill's Yard.
In the early twentieth century the prosperity brought about by the presence of the Great Northern yards gave rise to much new construction, primarily of much more substantial brick and stone buildings, forming the Hillyard business section we see today. Prosperity continued until the closing of the yards in the early 1980s, a culmination of the mergers of the Great Northern into the Burlington Northern Railroad and eventually the BNSF Railway, resulting on the relocation of the railroad yards to Yardley. The loss of their only industry to speak of created instant economic woes for Hillyard, which continue to this day, with its continuing to be the poorest neighborhood in the state of Washington.
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