The St. Stephen’s Episcopal congregation met at the Park Place Steam Laundry in the early days.
The first public steam laundry in the Pittsburgh-district was located in Wilkinsburg in 1879 on Albert Street, now Trenton Avenue, by Clinton N. and Napoleon C. Brace. It was known as the Park Place Laundry, and was brought here from Titusville, Pennsylvania.
Before the laundry was moved here the Brace brothers sent the clothes by express to Titusville. Two or three days elapsed before their return to Pittsburgh. The laundry office, where the packages were left and received by the customers, was at 42 1/2 Sixth Street, second floor (Pittsburgh).
The men were especially well pleased by this new venture, as shirt fronts, then, were made of double linen and were laundered stiff and shiny; this the good housewife could not effect despite all her efforts to put the polish on.
When the Brace brothers brought their business here they brought about forty or fifty employees with them. As there were no accommodations in the town for such a number, the company built a frame boarding house for their exclusive use. James J. Smith, who came with the original number, is still (1935) in the employ of the laundry.
The laundry building was a one story brick structure, about half as large as the present one. The noise that the washing machines made in the quiet neighborhood was very disturbing, and the vibrations, at times, shook the ornaments from the mantels of the neighboring houses. So to quiet the disquiet, aroused in several ways, the proprietors dug a deep cellar under the building and moved the machines down there. Water supplied from artesian wells was forced by steam pumps to large tanks built in the yard.
After a time the girls from the village and vicinity were employed and the children of the district used to enjoy hearing their very stiff petticoats rattle as they walked. This was quite the custom on Monday, for on this day the laundry was given up to the girls for their own personal work.
On a summer day it was a pleasant sight to see the fields roped with clothes-lines on which were dozens and dozens of blankets waving in the sunshine and air. It became “the thing” to escort one's visitors to see this new and novel enterprise.
In later years the name was changed from Park Place Laundry to Brace Brothers Laundry.