Open House Café (COFFEE AND CROISSANTS) 2559 THIRD AVENUE; (718) 292-3606
M&J TRIMMINGS' BUSINESS is buttons and bows—and ribbons, rhinestones, beads, cords, tassels, braids, feathers, flowers, and fringes— everything one might imagine to embellish an article of clothing. In two storefronts and nearby stockrooms in the Garment Center, the firm stocks more than 600,000 items in a compulsive's dreamscape of meticulously arranged cubbies and reels that run from floor to ceiling. But where its owner, Michael J. Cohen, once sold his remarkable cornucopia to the gritty factories and flamboyant designer showrooms south of Times Square, his trade has shifted to craftspeople and hobbyists. The ranks of genuine garment manufacturers keep dwindling.
“It's a very romantic notion—Seventh Avenue as a fashion capital,” Cohen told me over a cup of coffee at one of the area's rising crop of outdoor cafés. “But I don't think manufacturing has a long life.”
The Garment Center, the storied heart of the city's largest industry, continues to recede, buffeted by cheap overseas labor, rising rents, and an exodus of skilled workers. The talk in the district is that it is going the way of SoHo, drawing artists, actors, and white-collar professionals into the cavernous lofts where immigrants once sat hunched over pummeling needles to make clothing for the nation. One barometer of the Garment Center's fate: When a small building on Avenue of the Americas housing one of M&J Trimmings' firm's stores burned down in 1997, Cohen joined with a developer to erect a forty-six-story building in its place. It contains upscale apartments, not sewing lofts.
These days, the area—roughly stretching between Fifth and Ninth avenues and Thirty-fifth and Forty-first streets—is often called the Fashion Center rather than Garment Center or District. It is a nod to Seventh Avenue's enduring stable of designers, including Ralph Lauren, Bill Blass, Tommy Hilfiger, Donna Karan, and Liz Claiborne, but the name betrays the sharp dwindling of actual factories and dusty stores selling notions and bolts of fabric. Already eleven small theaters, including two called the Zipper and the Belt, and three founded by Mikhail Baryshnikov, have opened in lofts that once produced dresses or suits. Marriott has built a 240-room Courtyard hotel on Fortieth Street and a forty-three-story tower around the corner on Sixth Avenue that combines a Residence Inn with ten floors of condominiums. The latter is constructed around the hoary Millinery Center Synagogue, a remnant of days when Jews like my mother knit hats. By 2006, there were a dozen new upscale restaurants and three Starbucks, to join such pricey garmento stalwarts as Arno Ristorante on West Thirty-eighth Street and Jack's Restaurant on West Fortieth Street.
The district's decline as a manufacturing hub is visible not only in the absence of “push boys” weaving racks of dresses through clogged midtown canyons but also in the presence of young thirtysomething couples pushing strollers, among them Laurie Elvove, a graphics designer, and her husband, Andy Shen, a photographer, who have a toddler, Sofia. When they moved into their co-op, Shen spied sweatshop needles in the floorboards and Elvove was struck by how deserted the neighborhood was after work. But the streets have grown livelier.
“What we still need is a grocery store,” she demurred.
Hard statistics confirm the anecdotal impressions. New York State Labor Department figures show that there were only 25,956 jobs in apparel and textile manufacturing and wholesaling in the center's 10018 zip code in 2003. That contrasts with 39,700 workers in 1996 and 159,000 employees in 1975. The once-mighty garment unions are down to 3,000 members who actually work at turning out garments. There is concern that all these trends will accelerate as the city works to revitalize the far West Side between Thirtieth and Forty-second streets. There is one plan to expand the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and build thousands of apartments on the West Side rail yards and another to transform the James A. Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue into both a grand entrance for the underground Penn Station as well as a new home for Madison Square Garden.
What will be lost if the Garment Center fades is not just another bygone iconic neighborhood like Tin Pan Alley, but the Manhattan patch where generations of immigrants—Chinese and South Americans being the latest—have found the low-skill jobs they need for a foothold. “People should care,” says Sarah O. Crean, director of the Garment Industry Development Corporation, a nonprofit group trying to sustain manufacturing. “The industry in New York has shrunk, but it is still an industry that attracts new people and new talent. It's also part of the city's cachet. High fashion is what makes New York a cultural capital, much in the way that Milan is one and Paris is one.”
Her vision of the neighborhood, though, contrasts with that of many landlords, who want to condense the district largely into haute couture and off-the-rack showrooms—there are now 1,200—and free up onetime lofts for architects, advertisers, sculptors, and SoHo-like homesteaders. With rents nearly doubling between 1999 and 2004 to $25 a square foot on Eighth Avenue and $14 a square foot on the side streets, battle lines have been drawn. The unions and apparel firms want the city to enforce a 1987 zoning resolution that requires landlords to replace closed garment factories with other garment firms. But Barbara Blair Randall, executive director of the Fashion Center Business Improvement District, which largely represents property owners, contends that enforcing that zoning rule would leave hundreds of lofts empty. She points out that there is so little demand for lofts by garment businesses that they barely take up half the district's floor space. “The days of mass production in midtown Manhattan are over,” she said.
Most people expect the designers to remain because they need to be close to advertisers, buyers, and the fashion press. But Crean warns that they too will leave if they cannot find places that make samples or supply fabrics and buttons.
Not everyone blames cheap overseas labor and high rents for the district's decline. Bud Konheim, chief executive of Nicole Miller, which makes dresses priced from $300 to $2,000, said that he still manages to manufacture half his line here because he is willing to take the trouble to supervise the scores of intricate details that go into making a dress, while a new breed of clothing maker would rather write a single check to an overseas firm. He specializes in producing dresses in two or three weeks after they've been ordered, giving him an advantage over manufacturers beholden to Chinese or other Asian subcontractors, who may require a nine-month lead time. That's why at his Seventh Avenue showroom and factory, he houses a full range of artisans: sample makers, sewers, cutters, and pressers, not to mention the designer Nicole Miller herself. “There's tremendous efficiency in that,” he said. “If someone finds something wrong at nine a.m., we can fix it here in a minute and a half. If the problem is in China, it never gets fixed.”
Nicole Miller had its origins in a firm started by Konheim's great-grandfather, a pushcart peddler. Konheim himself grew up in the bedroom mecca of garmentos—the Five Towns of Long Island—and worked his way through Dartmouth by folding corrugated cartons for shipping clothes. He is a suave, urbane man who does not play down his rag-trade roots and likes to underscore how they give him an edge over today's more generic breed of manufacturers. “My family, we understand cutting, we understand pattern making, we understand seam allowances,” he told me. “Those talents are not irrelevant. Manufacturers today just give the factory in China a picture out of a magazine. There are very few guys that understand the process. They didn't grow up in it.”
GARMENT CENTER
WHERE TO GO
Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (WORKSPACE FOR 110 ARTISTS AND A GALLERY) 323 WEST 39TH STREET; (212) 563-5855, ext. #203; www.efa1.org
Zipper Theater 336 WEST 37TH STREET; (212) 239-6200
WHERE TO EAT
Arno Ristorante (FINE ITALIAN DINING) 141 WEST 38TH STREET; (212) 944-7420
Ben's Kosher Delicatessen (CAVERNOUS JEWISH DELI) 209 WEST 38TH STREET; (212) 398-2367
Jack's Restaurant (FINE DINING) 147 WEST 40TH STREET; (212) 869-8300
Like other Garment Center veterans, he worries that the mix of adv
erse forces is setting off a vicious cycle where so many zipper makers and button makers leave for other fields that even seasoned dressmakers like his firm must farm work out overseas, which compels more specialists to leave. “If you want a fourteen-inch cobalt blue zipper, you can't go out in the street and get it anymore,” he said.
RED HOOK COULD'VE been a contender, just like Marlon Brando's character in On the Waterfront, a film that immortalized the bleak, harsh atmosphere of the Brooklyn docks (even if it was filmed in Hoboken). With acres of piers for hauling cargo and sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline, Red Hook should have become a leading industrial port or another charming Brooklyn village like nearby Carroll Gardens. But a series of government miscalculations—including cutting the neighborhood off from the rest of Brooklyn with the Gowanus Expressway and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel—left the square-mile peninsula with tumbledown houses, hollow-eyed factories, and forlorn lots.
In recent years, however, Red Hook has become vigorous again, so much so that it is now a battleground for rival visions of the city's future. Apartment developers want to cash in on the spectacular waterfront views. Artists and restaurateurs are scouring the neighborhood for cheap space. Factories pushed out by gentrification elsewhere are fighting to sustain one of their last havens. Old-time residents want to keep the old-time flavor.
Big changes are already here. In April 2006, the Queen Mary 2, at 1,132 feet and 150,000 tons the largest passenger ship ever built, docked at a newly built gangway and cruiseship terminal at Pier 12, inaugurating a site that the neighborhood hopes will funnel many of the 200,000 passengers a year through Red Hook's streets, shops, and restaurants. A month later and not too far away, the terminal was joined by a giant Fairway, a branch of the gourmet cornucopia on the Upper West Side set inside what was a brick civil war–era warehouse where coffee and cotton were stored. Meanwhile, Ikea was poised to demolish a row of factories to build an elephantine warehouse store with 1,500 parking spaces for its assemble-it-yourself furniture.
Yet the neighborhood's future is still the subject of one of those battle royals that are the glory and the bane of a city with so many gadflies, factions, and enthusiasms. Daniel Doctoroff, the deputy mayor for economic development, described Red Hook as the city's “single most complex land-use issue” because it has potential in retailing, housing, and manufacturing, uses that are not necessarily compatible. “Every conceivable issue is wrapped up in this one community, which makes everything you do there very sensitive and very difficult,” he said.
Factory owners and cargo haulers particularly fear that well-heeled residents in luxury apartments would not take kindly to their trucks barreling through narrow cobblestone streets or their middle-of-the-night foghorns and bright lights. Eventually the newcomers would pressure the city to restrict industrial uses. “You're going to be doing something they don't like, even if it's interfering with a guy barbecuing on the block,” said Michael DiMarino, owner of Linda Tool and Die Corporation, a precision metal fabricator with clients such as NASA. “I don't blame them, but we were here first.”
Most of the antagonists in the debate seemed to dread the prospect that Ikea could trigger a wave of big-box stores that would clog Red Hook's streets with traffic and shatter the sleepy ambience. But there was one notable exception. Residents of the housing projects, whose 8,000 tenants represent three-quarters of Red Hook's population, were thirsting for the 500 jobs Ikea was dangling. Dorothy Shields, president of the Red Hook Houses East Tenants Association, pointed out that one of four of the projects' tenants is unemployed.
Any change in the neighborhood's direction, even toward prosperity, would unsettle the artists and craftsmen trickling in from the once industrial waterfront neighborhood known as Dumbo and from Williamsburg. They suspect they again will be priced out of another blossoming Brooklyn neighborhood. Madigan Shive, a twenty-nine-year-old cellist, moved from San Francisco into a rental house with three other artists: “There's a good chance we could lose our house in the next year,” she said. “If I lose this space, I don't know that I can stay in New York.”
The neighborhood quarrel is embodied in two men, John McGet-trick, copresident of the Red Hook Civic Association, and Gregory O'Connell, a former city detective who is one of Red Hook's largest property owners. O'Connell, a ubiquitous figure who uses the paper-strewn dashboard of his pickup as his desk and file cabinet, wants to expand blue-collar businesses. He has revamped civil war–era warehouses and filled them with wood and glass workers. But McGettrick, the manager of a private investigations agency and the son of a man who slung cargo on the docks, favors more housing. Speaking forcefully through a waxed handlebar mustache, he contends that the city hurt Red Hook in 1961 when it zoned as industrial numerous blocks in which modest houses had always been mixed in. Homeowners could not renovate or expand because banks would not offer mortgages. The result was abandonment and arson. “There is a desperate need to rebuild the population that was lost,” he said.
Much of the war in the neighborhood has crystallized around a mammoth concrete former book-storage warehouse at 160 Imlay Street. A Manhattan developer bought the building in 2000 for $7.2 million and received a zoning variance allowing conversion into 144 condominiums whose price might total $100 million. Standing on the windswept sixth floor overlooking the harbor, with the building shrouded in netting, the developer, Bruce Batkin, said, “We're not here to rape and pillage. We're going to do something beautiful. How can we do something worse?” But the project, supported by McGettrick, has been mired by stop-work orders resulting from a two-year-old lawsuit brought by eighty-five local businesses. They argue that fancy apartments could spell the death knell for manufacturing. In 2006, they succeeded in getting a state supreme court justice to overturn the controversial zoning variance, halting the project possibly for good. “Imlay Street could be the tipping point that affects all the zoning in Red Hook,” O'Connell said. “You pay one million dollars for an apartment, you don't want to hear trucks loading or unloading early in the morning.”
Actually, the outlook for industry in Red Hook is no longer bleak. According to Phaedra Thomas, executive director of the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation, the number of industrial businesses has grown 60 percent since 1991, to 455, and jobs have increased 19 percent, to 5,000. Waterfront activity has also rebounded. The Erie Basin Bargeport was vacant fifteen years ago, but it now provides staging for hundreds of barges used for repairing bridges or shooting off Macy's Fourth of July fireworks, and it employs more than 600 workers. Another pier operator, John Quadrozzi, Jr., president of the Gowanus Industrial Park, has taken a forty-six-acre complex of grain silos and docks and uses it, in part, to unload hundreds of thousands of tons of Chilean salt for deicing the city's streets.
On a brisk winter morning, I went out to his huge dock and spoke to him in his office trailer. Quadrozzi told me that while he opposes Ikea, he is finding it hard to resist offers from megastores that want to move in nearby. “If I'm a salmon, I can only swim upstream so long,” he said. “I get tired.”
Factory owners also fret when they see fashionable shops new to Red Hook sprouting on the commercial spine of Van Brunt Street: Baked, a SoHo-like bakery with delicious brownies; 360, a well-regarded French restaurant; and LeNell's, a specialty liquor store that sells 100 brands of bourbon.
Until now, the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg has encouraged apartment and office development along the waterfront. The city and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey gave American Stevedoring Inc. only a short-term extension of its lease on three piers where it operates gantry cranes for moving large containers. There has been talk of new parks and office complexes.
But in January 2005, the administration seemed to respond to an outcry that persistent rezoning had destroyed manufacturing in Dumbo and Long Island City. Bloomberg announced a new policy that, when finalized, would designate fifteen “industrial business zones” as neighborhoods protected from r
ezoning, and would give companies relocating there tax credits of $1,000 for each employee. The new zones would include portions of Long Island City in Queens, Hunts Point in the Bronx, and Red Hook and Gowanus in south Brooklyn. Such a move would protect Linda Tool and companies like it from speculative landlords who might force them to relocate by raising their rents or offering them only short leases.
Many old-timers would like to see the neighborhood livened up with apartment dwellers. Sue and Annette Amendola, two of the ten children of an immigrant longshoreman who hauled bags of coffee on his back, live in the same apartment in which they were born in the 1940s and do not want the neighborhood moribund.
Sunny Balzano, seventy-one, a painter whose family has owned a bar on Conover Street since 1890, wants more housing too but worries that the big-box stores would destroy the neighborhood's singular character. He remembers when the noon whistle blew for lunch and children had to flee the sidewalks because of the stampede of beefy dockworkers trying to grab lunch or a shot of whiskey at one of the forty bars in the neighborhood.
RED HOOK
WHERE TO GO
Brooklyn Cruise Terminal (DOCKING FOR LARGE PASSENGER SHIPS) PIER 12 (TAKE VAN BRUNT STREET TO BOWNE STREET ENTRANCE); www.nycruiseterminal.com
Fair way Market (SOME OF CITY'S BEST FRUITS, VEGETABLES, CHEESES, SMOKED MEATS, ON THE WATERFRONT) 480 VAN BRUNT STREET; (718) 694-6868; www.fairwaymarket.com
WHERE TO EAT
Baked (SUPERB BROWNIES, COOKIES, AND LATTES) 359 VAN BRUNT STREET; (718) 222-0345; www.bakednyc.com
Hope & Anchor (FUNKY DINER, WITH KARAOKE ON SATURDAY) 347 VAN BRUNT STREET; (718) 237-0276
The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York Page 28