Carver Residential Historic District (Boundary Increase)

A long brick and concrete laundry building stretches nearly two blocks along West Marshall Street in Richmond, between Hancock and Goshen Streets. Built in five connected sections between about 1915 and about 1980, it began as a plant for the T&E Laundry Company, formed by the merger of the Troy and Eagle steam laundries. Later additions included offices in the mid-1920s, a power plant around 1948, a large laundry hall around 1964 and more offices around 1980. The company chose the working-class Carver neighborhood partly to draw employees for its labor-intensive steam laundry, and its plant replaced a church and many nineteenth-century houses. The building was added to the Carver Residential Historic District because it had been left out of the original boundary and is the only surviving historic resource next to the district. It is valued for its utilitarian commercial architecture and its link to the neighborhood's industrial growth. The laundry operation left in 2005, and the building was then vacant.