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. Here 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.”

Street’s launched as a catalog business, selling everything a textile factory might need — from I-beams and pulleys to needles and spools — and quickly built a national distribution footprint. It was not the laundry business yet. That pivot was still a generation away.

Kristen Vos, Street’s executive vice president, Americas, says the founding story still resonates within the company.

“Immigrants shaped our nation,” she says, “and to trace our roots back to that kind of determination, hard work, entrepreneurship — it just gives us great pride. And that has been passed on through generations of ownership.”

The decision that would shape the history of R.R. Street & Co. came in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The company added an R&D department and began developing improved dyes for linen manufacturing and the industry then known as professional cleaning and dyeing. The textile mill business that had launched Street’s was fading; professional dry cleaning was growing.

Mayberry says Robert Street’s flexibility to let go of one business model and embrace another is a lesson the company still draws on today.

“We have his willingness to completely shift his business model from the mill business to the then-new professional dyeing and scouring — drycleaning — business,” he says. “As he started to see the things changing in terms of how the business was going, he saw that there might be something to the professional cleaning thing.”

By the 1920s and ’30s, Street’s had developed the first filter for dry cleaning and was distributing drycleaning products nationally through appointed distributors. The industry was growing. Street’s was growing with it.

Getting from 1876 to 2026 required surviving more than a few hard stretches. These challenges included two World Wars; the Great Depression; wartime supply shortages that forced product innovation just to keep cleaners running; shifting solvent regulations; and pandemics.

Mayberry says reading through the company’s archives offers a kind of perspective unavailable anywhere else.

“We have notes about just how challenging the Great Depression really was, about people’s personal losses, of loved ones during World War II,” he says. “Just reading all this leads you to see how these large changes can happen really quickly.”

Those archives became directly relevant in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic hit and the industry absorbed severe losses. 

“Seeing these voices from the past, talking about just how hard it was, gives you perspective,” Mayberry says. “But also, it’s like a hand on your shoulder, giving you a little motivation to say, ‘Come on, you can do this. We toughed it through even worse. You can do it.’”

“Our DNA has always been rooted in resiliency and adaptability, but also relationships,” Vos says. “We’ve survived and grown through World Wars, economic crises, changing technologies and major shifts in the drycleaning and laundry industry. And we’ve been able to adapt because we’ve never stood still.”

The company’s adaptability showed when it entered the commercial laundry side of the industry around 2014 with the purchase of Adco Products.

“We recognized that we need to be in the laundry business, so that’s how we came into it,” Mayberry says. “And then we made a dedicated effort to really get ourselves primed to be able to be in the commercial side of it. So, we launched our FLEX line of laundry products and the accompanying housekeeping products, since a lot of laundry customers also were looking for those. We’re relatively new to that market, but it’s clearly a very important key sector for us.”

Vos believes the constants have been just as important as the changes.

“We never lose sight of who we are,” she says. “Street’s was built on trust and service, taking care of our customers and distributor partners. And those values have remained constant across the generations, even as the products, equipment and market dynamics have evolved pretty dramatically.”

One of the threads running through Street’s history is a commitment to industry education. 

“Street’s believes that a stronger, better-educated industry benefits everyone,” Vos says. “It’s never been for us just about selling products. The more knowledgeable dry cleaners and laundries can be, the more profitable they’re going to be, and the better prepared they’re going to be for the industry.”

“We want our customers to succeed,” Mayberry says. “And we have decades of proof that the more a business operator understands their business, on both the technical and business sides, the more likely they are to succeed.”

Not many companies survive long enough to enjoy a 150th anniversary, and Mayberry and Vos say their company understands the significance of this milestone.

“It’s like having a great, magnificent old oak tree on your property,” Mayberry says. “It’s a blessing. It provides all sorts of enjoyment. It’s also a responsibility.”

That responsibility carries weight. “You not only have a legacy and a history of all these people’s hard work and fears and efforts,” he says, “but it’s the responsibility to keep it going for the future. You want to keep that tree growing.”

The company’s product line is broad for its size today. “We are probably one of the only companies that, for dry cleaning, we sell all elements of process supplies,” Vos says, “including drycleaning solvent, filter cartridges, (and) chemical products used for dry cleaning, wet cleaning, stain removal, laundry, housekeeping, warewash, and boiler treatment. We provide all those things.”

Street’s employs approximately 70 people today — all of them, Vos notes, are South Side Chicago residents. Some have been with the company for their entire careers, spanning more than 40 years. It’s a detail she wants operators to keep in mind.

“Because we’ve been around a long time and we sell a lot of products, customers think we must be this huge company,” Vos says. “But in the end, we’re a small business, and we face the same day-to-day challenges that a lot of our customers and distributors face. When our customers hurt, we hurt.”

Vos says the company’s purpose hasn’t shifted much from the days Robert Street first set up shop in Chicago. 

“We have always fought for the industry,” she says. “That has been an investment that we have made at multiple levels. We’ve always wanted to have the well-being of the industry at heart.”