Drying Your Clothes The Old (Old!) Fashioned Way on the Upper West Side

Love it as I don’t like putting everything in the dryer!!

Yep – made famous by the Shakers. In the Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire, they had giant racks just like the above (though all made of wood). They’d rout hot air through the cabinet, poaching heat from chimney systems. Ingenious! Found a few pictures on this site (not mine).

http://www.galenfrysinger.com/new_hampshire_shaker_laundry.htm

Hypothetically, this could have been part of a commercial steam laundry, a once-thriving industry serving those without running clean water, servants, or time to undertake the arduous hand labor of laundry. They certainly made ample use of such cabinets… but given the rather tony address, I suspect your hunch may be closer to the mark. Still, you might enjoy Arwen Mohun’s book Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880–1940 on this forgotten chapter of American urban history.

We had these in our former apartment on Riverside Drive. They were in use until one of the pieces of our clothing fell on the flames below and destroyed everyone’s clothing. When the insurance company found out what they were insuring the racks were taken out!

I grew up at East 85 & Madison. There was a laundry room in the basement with these gas powered dryers, also washing machines with rollers to squeeze out the excess moisture. The room was humming Monday through Friday with laundresses in uniform. The center of the room was taken up with ironing boards. The room must have been very hot at times, but I remember a cheerful, social atmosphere. The building was completed in about 1923. My family lived there from 1942 to 1963.

Many years ago, I lived in a building in Scotland that was built in the mid-1800’s that had a huge drying room. There were multitudes of steam pipes running through the room along the walls and open slat shelves in alcoves around the place, drying racks on pulleys you could lower from the ceiling and other nifty accessories. I really liked it and decided that if I ever built my own home, I’d find a way to incorporate the idea. No one ever stole anything in that room. I was pretty amazed by that.