Grand Cleaners, 801 Franklin St. SE
Charlie Gibbons, Fall 2024
Grand Cleaners was a Huntsville drycleaning business owned and operated by prominent civic-minded Black community members Shelby and Lou Johnson. Lou Johnson was one of the first six Black women to register to vote in Madison County when the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. Her husband, Shelby Johnson, founded their drycleaning business as Grand Shine Parlor at 113 E. Clinton Street in downtown Huntsville in 1920. In 1945, they began construction on a new location at 801 Franklin Street. The Johnsons built this new facility, which they renamed Grand Cleaners, on the southeast corner of Franklin Street and Townsend Avenue, with Pinhook Creek running nearby. The building site is located in what was then one of Huntsville’s historically Black neighborhoods, and in years past the site had been occupied by a school. The Johnson family lived just down the street at 704 Franklin.
The opening of the Franklin Street building was delayed for two years due to a zoning dispute with the City of Huntsville, however, when residents of the white neighborhood on the other side of Pinhook Creek objected to the construction of the facility. The City rezoned the lot as residential and revoked the Johnsons’ building permit, despite the fact that the Johnsons had already sunk $5,000 into the project. In response, the Johnsons, represented by Birmingham attorney Arthur Davis Shores, sued the City in Madison County Circuit Court. Though they lost, Shores appealed the case to the Alabama Supreme Court. Associate Justice Joel B. Brown reversed the original decision in March 1947, with the comment, “The exercise of property rights cannot be left to the caprice, whim, or aesthetic sense of a special group of individuals,” which was a significant victory for Black citizens daring to challenge the white power structure in Jim Crow Alabama. Construction of Grand Cleaners resumed, and the building opened on October 14, 1947.
In its new location, Grand Cleaners promised “more space and more modern equipment” and “quicker and better service.” Services included garment cleaning, pressing, and repair; a cold storage vault for furs and woolens; drapery and curtain cleaning; raincoat waterproofing; and hat cleaning and blocking. Advertisements emphasized quality and high-tech methods and facilities, and not only in newspapers: A 1950s Curteich postcard of the building heralds Grand Cleaners as “Huntsville’s Most Modern Wearing Apparell [sic] Storage Vaults.” The illustration on the front of this postcard is nearly identical to those seen in Grand Cleaners’ Huntsville Times advertisements from the 1950s. Compared to a period photograph of the building, the illustrations show a slightly more refined version of the building’s red brick exterior. The overhang and neon sign have been removed. The masonry appears more delicate, with the crosshatched brick pattern above the glass at the front corners barely visible in the postcard illustration. The bushes seen in the photograph have been minimized and replaced with topiary, illustrated to read “DRY CLEANING” on the left side of the front lawn, and “FUR STORAGE” on the right. The color postcard showcases the clean, shining glass expanse of windows and curved walls of glass tiles at the front corners, which draw the viewer’s eye to the front facade and emphasize its modernity, while the side of the building, unadorned, falls into shadow.
On July 31, 1975, an explosion in the boiler room caused a major fire and loss of the boiler room facility. By this time, Shelby Johnson had died (1957), and Lou Johnson had exited the business (1967). Grand Cleaners did not survive for long after the fire. Owner Earl Matthews, Jr. sold the machinery and equipment at auction on November 17, 1976. Jean’s Dress Shop took over the building in 1978, and the restaurant K Syrah, billed as an “oyster bar, wine bar, sidewalk cafe, and international cuisine bistro,” opened there in 1999. The Times reported on renovations to the exterior: “On the building’s south side is a large patio that wraps around the front of the building for open-air dining,” noting its “wrought-iron fencing.”
Now occupied by Sterling Travel Agency, the building’s shape remains the same as Shelby and Lou Johnson’s original Grand Cleaners, but its details are gone. The rounded front corners have been bricked over so that both the glass tiles and the crosshatched brickwork are no longer visible, and the red brick has been painted beige. The patio and wrought-iron fencing remain. The shining wall of rectangular windows on the front facade has been replaced with three tall, arched windows, all with black trim and darkened by the large, decorative balcony above. As such, the mid-century form of Grand Cleaners has been muddied by ill-fitting attempts to mold the building to fit contemporary sensibilities. The aesthetic changes obscure the history of the building, and they mirror the changes to the surrounding neighborhood, which was destroyed by Huntsville’s twentieth-century urban renewal efforts. With doctor’s offices lining the street and Huntsville Hospital only a few blocks away, 801 Franklin Street is now part of Huntsville’s medical district. These changes have essentially removed Grand Cleaners from the context of its original setting without the building having moved an inch. (851 words)
