522 2nd Street, Richmond
John Woo Laundry was one of approximately a dozen Chinese owned and operated laundries that served Richmond in the early twentieth century.
Chinese laundries were located in the East End and Jackson Ward, near the central business district but within the city’s African American neighborhoods. Barred from white neighborhoods and business districts, the few Asian immigrants in the city faced de facto segregation similar to Black residents at the time.
Chinese laundries were ubiquitous around the country in areas with Chinese communities by the 1870s. Because the work involved long days of manual labor over boiling water and hot irons, and because they were often barred from other occupations and industries, Chinese immigrants established this business niche despite often rampant hostility.
Chinese laundries at the time completed all of the work manually. Less than a mile away on West Marshall Street, T & E Laundry Company expanded its steam laundry in 1915, becoming the first steam laundry in the city’s Carver neighborhood, a neighborhood first settled by blue-collar Jewish and German tradespeople. By the early twentieth century, it was increasingly a majority working-class Black neighborhood, and T & E Laundry moved there in order to draw on the neighborhood’s African American labor force.
White-owned laundries, which relied on steam-driven machinery operated by Black laborers, competed directly with Chinese-owned manual laundries, pushing many of them out of business. While Chinese-owned laundries eventually upgraded to steam, clear evidence shows that manufacturers of steam equipment across the country only reluctantly sold their goods to Chinese-owned laundries and at higher prices. The building still stands and a restaurant currently occupies it.
To learn more:
- Wang, Joan. “Race, Gender, and Laundry Work: The Roles of Chinese Laundrymen and American Women in the United States, 1850-1950.” Vol. 24, No. 1 Journal of American Ethnic History (Fall 2004): 58-99.
Image: Former site of John Woo Laundry. Courtesy of Kim Lee Schmidt, 2020.