Texas Medical Center Power Plant & Laundry Facility On Fannin St.

[Highrise Tower]

Found an awesome magazine called Modern Hospital, released 1952-11: Vol 79 Iss 5.  You can read the publication on archive.org.  Great website for historical items! As with any library, you can "check out" any book/magazine and "return it" an hour later.

The magazine shows an in-depth look at the Texas Medical Center portfolio (in the ~1950s) including floor plans of old hospitals! I might create new threads with the information I found, but I wanted to focus on the Texas Medical Center Power Plant & Laundry Facility On Fannin Street.

Power Plant and Laundry

A power plant and laundry, owned jointly by the Methodist Hospital and St. Luke’s and Texas Children’s hospitals, provides heating, air conditioning, engineering and maintenance service and laundry. Methodist Hospital has a 50 per cent capital investment in this facility and St. Luke’s Hospital and Texas Children’s Hospital together own a 50 per cent share. In this plant also are general maintenance shops, woodworking shop, paint shop, and so forth, all to be used for the benefit of the three hospitals.

The linen will be jointly owned by the participating hospitals and will be billed out on a pounds used basis.

A thorough analysis was made before this joint power plant and laundry was undertaken and the following savings were believed obtainable:

Initial construction saving, $40,000 to $50,000.
Laundry equipment saving, $18,000.
Power plant operation, $12,000 to $15,000 per year.
Laundry operation, $12,000 to $15,000 per year.

This joint facility of the power plant and laundry of the three hospitals will be operated by a manger of the facilities who will be responsible to the administrator of each hospital.

All service will be billed to the hospitals on a cost basis.

Building Number 11:

Building number 11:

The article that I transcribed above:

[Highrise Tower]

Looks like I located the power plant and laundry facility on an old TMC aerial photograph!

Awesome!!