G & H Wet Wash Laundry, 6633-37 S. State St., Chicago

Most of the industrial laundries built around Chicago in the 1910s have since been demolished, and the old G & H Wet Wash Building on State Street had the added complication of the federal government plowing TWO highways through its direct surroundings. Built in 1918 and designed by A.G. Lund, a prolific Chicago residential architecture firm, I guess it’s impressive that even half of the building is still standing. Although—vacant and owned by the city for 15 years—likely not for too much longer.

So, what’s changed? Obviously a bullshit question here—really, with two-thirds of the buildings here demolished and the State Street streetcar ripped out and replaced with a busted-up median, what’s stayed the same?

• The little crenelations on the roofline of the surviving half of the building. 
• 66th Place, a glorified alley, still meets State Street at the same spot. 

…and that’s it. That’s what white flight, disinvestment, and a highway will do to you over a century. 

G. & H. Wet Wash Laundry opened here, on State Street & 66th Place on Chicago’s South Side, in 1918, named for owners Joseph Graf and Frederick Huth. The building's developer, Gust Johnson, hired A.G. Lund to design this little light industrial building, which was a slightly odd choice—the firm designed thousands of buildings all over Chicago’s South Side from the 1900s into the 1920s, but an overwhelming majority of their commissions were residential. After immigrating to Chicago from Sweden, Anders Gustaf Lund would become a major designer of bungalows and apartments in a wide variety of styles…but it looks like only a tiny portion of the firm’s output was industrial or commercial (I suspect Gust Johnson was a Gustaf as well, and this was one Chicago Swede supporting another).

A “wet wash” was the cheapest type of commercial laundry, using soaps and detergents in a similar way to what you’d do at home, but at scale. Here, G & H charged a bit over $1 per pound of laundry in 2025 dollars. In 1920, the laundry employed 15 people—12 men and three women—and within five years had grown to 31 (21 men, 10 women).

In general, commercial wet wash laundries began to decline in the 1940s, as residential-scale washing machines returned the task of laundry to the private home, but by that point G & H was long dead anyway. 

The notably racist New Harmony Laundry had moved in here by 1934 and—perhaps failing quickly as the Black Belt expanded southwest—was replaced by the (loudly non-discriminatory) Barney Rosenberg Laundry in 1936. While I can’t verify it, it seems distinctly possible that Barney Rosenberg was part of the congregation at Chicago’s “Laundrymen’s Shul”, Knesses Israel Nusach Sfard in North Lawndale. Barney’s advertising—while inclusive—was kind of weird, and that company didn’t last long either. Working in a laundry could be a tough job, and at least one worker here died in a workplace accident, Bohemian immigrant Joseph Vazak (or Vacak/Vacek).

Light manufacturing filled the building for the next few decades. In use for wartime manufacturing between 1942 and 1945, the building went up for sale for $7,500 in 1943—-the equivalent of $140k today. Companies like the Travelite Trailer Co., Metal Arts Craftsmen, Plastifab, and Associated Screw Products all passed through the building in the 1940s and 1950s.

The old G & H building could’ve been just a regular aging light industrial building coasting into mild obsolescence, but in the late 1950s and early 1960s the city, state, and federal government dumped two highways onto the building’s doorstep. The Dan Ryan blew through Greater Grand Crossing in the late 1950s, demolishing the block across the street, and the ramp to the Calumet Skyway cut through the neighborhood one block to the north—it’s kind of wild that this utilitarian little box survived at all. Mirroring the change in the immediate surroundings, the next few tenants were car-oriented—in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s the building housed South Tire Service, Richmond Tire Service, South Side Frame Works, and State Street Frame. 

A storefront church, Faith Outreach Christian Center, took over the building in 1987. The building’s final tenants were Word of Victory Christian Center, led by pastor Willis C. Collins, and J & D Auto Bumper. In 2002 or 2003 the northern side of the building was demolished, and various liens, missed payments, and building violations started to really accumulate in the 2000s. The City of Chicago assumed ownership of the abandoned building in 2010.  

Further reading:

• Julie Bachrach has written about A.G. Lund's firm and the—more interesting—career of his daughter, Vera Lund.
• A.G. Lund bio in Svenska Nyheter in the The Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey

Again, Lund's firm did like 95% residential work, but here are a few other extant commercial and industrial buildings they did.

A handful of interesting little articles about G & H, as well as its early 1920s financials.

And the corporate information of some of the other companies who once operated out of here.

I couldn't find any old photos of G & H's part of State Street, but this is one block north of here (these were all eventually demolished after the construction of the Skyway ramp).

This is where I took the photo from.