From a Scottish immigrant’s vision to one of dry cleaning’s most enduring companies
CHICAGO — In 1876, the United States was celebrating its centennial, Ulysses S. Grant was finishing his second term as president and Alexander Graham Bell had just invented the telephone. In Chicago, a city still rebuilding from the Great Fire of 1871, a Scottish immigrant named Robert R. Street saw three opportunities and decided to act on them.
“One opportunity was the boom of textile manufacturing along the Great Lakes and Mississippi,” says Jamie Mayberry, vice president of business development at R.R. Street & Co. “Two, you have the growth of Chicago as a central rail hub and general transportation hub in the Midwest. And then three, the Great Chicago Fire was only five years earlier, so you had a desire on the city’s part to rebuild and (offer) incentives to do so.”