25th Street (1983)

This quote below is from the 1982 Church Hill Oral History Project interview with Mrs. Kitty Denis (b. 1896) and references the laundry operated by a kind man named Mr. Lee on 25th Street.

“There was Pardon’s Drug Store, which is on the south side of Broad Street, almost now across from the bank. Where the bank is, the next one was Nolde’s Bakery and Nolde had a little retail business that you went in, and I think the one thing you might be interested in that Nolde had a way of making what they called a sponge cake, which wasn’t what we really call sponge cake today at all. And they put it out into a very very flat pan so that the cake was maybe an inch and 1-2 high. And then they iced it. Well people used to stand in line on Saturday mornings to get the edges which didn’t have all the icing on the, so you got that for half price. The ones that were really iced were, for those days, quite expensive, but if you mind taking an edge then you got it for half price, and we being very poor bought as many as we could get and then next to that, no across the street there was a Chinese laundry man who we were all perfectly devoted to. He used to give all the children in the neighborhood the bracelets, the kind of bracelets that Chinese people use all the time Jade, is the Color, it was like a chain you could break it by just snapping it on the table. And we all loved old Mr. Lee and he didn’t.want to be called Mr. ’cause all our parents made us call him Mr. Lee.”

http://www.library.vcu.edu/jbc/speccoll/vbha/church/dennis.html

I’m guessing that Pardon’s Drug Store must have been where Mosha’s Grocery used to be- 2503 and 2501 East Broad (Model Logic’s two locations).