Manhattan at Mid-Century

by Myrna Katz Frommer

  In the late 1950s, Saks buyers began going to the shows in Europe, buying couture, and copying them. They were line-for-line copies, often in the original fabrics. By the early sixties, Saks was including designer labels in their clothes. Adam had discovered Anne Klein. He was so impressed with her, he put in a boutique of her sportswear, the first sportswear boutique in the store.

  Our buyers had the best eyes in New York. Nevertheless, every so often there’d be a big mistake. The midi skirt of 1969 was a bomb. Stores had racks of them. Employees were told, “We will let you buy them at cost if you wear them,” but it didn’t work.

  After Adam and Sophie retired in 1969 (Adam died that same year), it was up to me to keep the Saks Fifth Avenue image in front of the public. I did it by always remembering what Adam wanted. Fifth Avenue is so important a part of the name. Any time a magazine wrote an article and referred to us as Saks, I wrote them: “The name is registered as Saks Fifth Avenue.”

  There were so many beautiful department stores when I first came to New York. I loved the feeling of B. Altman’s, the high, high ceilings, the old-fashioned wide aisles. But that’s gone along with Peck and Peck, Best & Company, Bonwit Teller. But Saks Fifth Avenue has carried on even to this day.

  I was blessed to have known and worked with Sophie and Adam Gimbel. I spent my summer weekends with them, I traveled with them. It was a whole life. They helped form my taste. You’d go to a dinner in their beautiful town house on East 64th Street, the men in black tie, the women in evening dresses. And after dinner, all the ladies would get in the elevator and go up to Sophie’s bedroom for their coffee while the men would have their coffee in the dining room and smoke their cigars.

  I was a girl who hated fashion. I grew to love clothes because of Sophie. I’d sit and watch her fit, see a dress begin in muslin. The first Sophie suit I had was the most beautiful purpley blue and white tweed, hourglass waistline, full tweed skirt. For the most part, I never changed my style. I found an old photo from Charleston. I’m in a pink buttoned-down shirt, a navy blazer, charcoal gray shorts. All that’s changed is now I wear slacks.

  HOWARD KISSEL: I first came to Fairchild Publications in 1967, working for the Daily News Record, which covered menswear and textiles. It was there that I became aware of this thing they put out called Women’s Wear Daily. It had begun, I believe, in the teens when the ready-to-wear industry sprouted. As the women’s-wear garment industry grew, Women’s Wear Daily grew.

  By attrition, I became editor of the arts page at Women’s Wear Daily, and I soon realized it put me in the best place to observe New York. They were launching this magazine, W, and John Fairchild, I assume, came up with the brilliant idea of making W a kind of offshoot of Women’s Wear Daily. Since there would be nothing in W that didn’t come from Women’s Wear Daily, they didn’t have to pay us for something they used two times.

  Women’s Wear Daily reported on the movers and shakers related to the fashion industry. Pat Buckley was key; she was like the leader of the pack. There was also Mica Ertegun, the wife of Ahmet Ertegun—the head of Atlantic Records—and a very good friend of Jerry Robbins in the New York City Ballet. They were part of the upper crust. By focusing on and cultivating women like these, Women’s Wear Daily made itself into an important thing to read.

  These people we were writing about were dubbed the Cat Pack. They had the Cat Pack kiss, which is essentially the air kiss. There was the Cat Pack game, a board game where you advanced or retreated in society. WWD had this thing called “They Are Wearing,” where a photographer would go out on the street to see what people were wearing. Once they had a photo showing Jacqueline Onassis in a short skirt with her knees crossed out—in other words, telling her she shouldn’t be wearing something this short. It was all totally silly. We had fun because we didn’t take ourselves seriously, but the rest of the press did.

  A man named Peter Davidson Dibble set the tone for the publication; it was a very queenly style. We had a double-spread thing with editorial comments and certain things would be in all cap letters, bold. It was very, very funny. There was a family named Crespi who did public relations in Rome. In the late sixties, the Crespis did something to irritate Women’s Wear Daily, so the magazine devoted two pages to maligning the Crespis, saying they were having a terrible time marrying off their younger daughter. It got to the point where the Crespis sued for damages. The daughter, Pilar Crespi, was gorgeous; a few years later she was a fixture in society. They were not having trouble marrying her off. But that was Women’s Wear Daily; they were constantly having feuds with people.

  Then in the early seventies John Fairchild moved to New York and began seeing all these people we were making fun of. Since he wanted to get invited places, we had to suck up to them. Where Women’s Wear Daily was outrageous in the sixties, by the seventies it had become much more establishment. We were invited to many places because people saw us as very chic. That was when the fashion designers were becoming celebrities in their own right.

  I think John Fairchild is the godfather of contemporary journalism because a lot of the horseshit that you now see in the Times, especially in its “Styles” section, comes directly from what Women’s Wear Daily did in the sixties and seventies. In an essay that appeared in something called The Grand Street Reader some years ago, a disgruntled Times reporter named John Hess said he knew the Times’s days were numbered when he saw a copy of Women’s Wear Daily on Abe Rosenthal’s desk every morning.

  JANE BEVANS: My mother, Tami Apt, was a businesswoman, a designer, and probably the first traveling saleswoman who went around the country. Even though she always said, “I hate the rag business,” I knew she loved it.

  I went down to her place on 35th Street between Fifth and Sixth a lot. There was the showroom where the models came out in their beautiful gowns and outfits and walked and twirled around to show the buyers the garments. And there were the people in the back who were sewing and cutting on the machines. I worked in the garment center as a showroom model and a salesperson right out of high school. It seemed natural that I would go into the industry. College was not a subject in my household. But walking around in my underwear and in bathrobes in front of people all the time was very uncomfortable. It was only when I took charge of my life and said, “Wait, who wants to be part of this screwball world?” that I got out of it.

  PAULINE TRIGÈRE: When I first moved to 550 Seventh Avenue, the tailors and sewers were mostly Polish, Hungarian, and Russian Jews; a few were Italian. I would walk out onto Seventh Avenue at noon, and nobody was speaking English. I learned Yiddish from hearing it spoken by the garment workers. Then over the years, slowly but surely, these people disappeared. They didn’t want their children to be tailors or dressmakers; they wanted them to become lawyers and accountants.

  SAM BERNSTEIN: When I came back from the war, a man in my brother-in-law’s family recommended me to Schwartz, Rosenzweig and Schifmann, a shop on 29th Street that made fur trimmings for cloth coats. I was hired as a nailer. My job was to get ahold of the fur collar, stretch it, nail it on a board and wait till it dried out. It was a dirty job, and in the summer, it was unbearable. The showroom was air conditioned but not the factory. You sweated a lot over the skins.

  We were working on beaver. Different places worked on different kinds of furs. Mink was the best, Alaskan seal was also high end. Most of the little shops like the one I worked in were in the twenties and thirties between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. They were owned by Jews, although more and more Greeks were coming into the industry. The bigger, more expensive places were on Seventh Avenue.

  I took the Sea Beach Express in Brooklyn at seven o’clock every morning to 34th Street. Then I got off and took the local back one stop to 29th Street. I worked from 8:00 in the morning until 5:30 at night. At twelve o’clock, the shop chairman would ring a bell, and we stopped for lunch, which we always ate in the factory. Sometimes we took an hour; if it was busy, we took only a half hour and then started working again.


  We punched in and out on a time clock. At the end of the week, they figured out how many hours you worked and paid you cash in a little brown envelope. But they always tried to cheat you, like if you worked thirty-seven hours, they’d pay you for thirty-five. And who dared to argue? It wasn’t a union shop. They could fire a union man and hire a non-union man. I thought, What am I going to do if I lose my job? I was always afraid I wouldn’t be able to make a living.

  POLLY BERNSTEIN: The man that recommended Sam for the job used to collect the leftover pieces of fur from different shops and get Chinese people to piece them together into cheaper garments and quilt covers. There were a lot of Chinese immigrants in the fur district who did that kind of piecework. Everybody tried to grab work from everybody else. “How much do you pay? I’ll work cheaper for you.” They’d bring the pieces home in a bundle, make the wife and kids work at home.

  I worked at home for a while, sewing collars for a small shop. Then I began doing piecework on 37th Street. I got paid per collar. One day, this man said to me, “What are you doing here, you dumbbell, working for nothing? Come with me, I’ll give you a job that pays for your work.” He didn’t like the owner of the shop because he took advantage of poor people.

  Through him I got a job in one of the big department stores as a saleswoman in the brassiere section. A department store was clean, the work was not manual. But it was the same idea. If the boss liked you, he let you be. But if he didn’t, you were out of work. There were a lot of buyers who took advantage of the young salesgirls. One had about five girls. I remember a young woman who told him, “I love my husband, why do I need you?” But she ended up going with him. Everybody knew from ten to eleven she wasn’t around.

  Garment District, 1955.

  SAM BERNSTEIN: I spent my entire working life in the fur district. Every spring there was the slack season, and there was no work. Those were very bad times. We tried to pick up piecework here and there. Later on there was unemployment compensation, which helped a little bit. By the time I retired in the mid-1970s, the industry was mostly Greek. The union was giving a small pension, but most of the shops were still not air conditioned.

  I did think of going to evening college after the war on the GI Bill of Rights, but somehow it didn’t work out. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to hold on to the job if I went to school. But I knew I didn’t want my children to work in a factory. I wanted them to be professionals. When my son was accepted at City College, we were so proud and happy. I knew he wouldn’t end up in a shop like me.

  5

  Sanctuaries in the City

  LACONIA SMEDLEY: Black people are very quick to pick up on a person’s spirit. You can be beat down, left out, lynched. But when you come together, you’re saying I am a child of God and I have worth. You can always resort to that space, that one feeling, that one idea that you can overcome. That’s what you hear in our music all the time.

  Although I was not a churchgoer, I visited the churches of Harlem because of the music. There were great voices in the choirs when I came to New York in the 1950s. Many of the singers were classically trained. They performed Handel’s Messiah, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and Bach chorales like they did downtown.

  The choirs also sang spirituals, the older songs from the time of slavery. Professor Edward Boatner, who led the thousand-voice National Baptist Convention Choir, was known for arranging the spirituals he had learned as a child. The slaves couldn’t write but they composed collectively. It was the way they were able to express their feelings and communicate without the overseers knowing they were sending messages. Once I came into a church before services had begun, and I saw an elderly woman sitting by herself and humming a pentatonic phrase in a minor key. People started to come in, and at first they were very quiet. Then they started humming along, and before you knew it, there was four-part harmony. It was very improvisational, the same kind of collective composing that had created spirituals.

  FATHER PETER COLAPIETRO: Most Catholic boys growing up in the fifties and early sixties felt they would want to be a priest. It was “I wanna be a fireman,” “I wanna be an astronaut,” “I wanna be a priest.” I went to the seminary from 1965 to 1970, but I didn’t have a calling at that time.

  I did get involved in programs under church auspices, however: Summer in the City, Full Circle. We were lower-middle-class kids from the Bronx who would go down to the projects and the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side and work with the kids there. This was something you were supposed to do.

  Almost all the people were Hispanic. They had nothing; the job situation was bad. There was so much misery in their lives, but when they got together they could really enjoy themselves. They would pool their money and roast a pig in the street. Drugs, of course, were a problem, although not as bad as it got to be by the mid-seventies.

  The summer of 1971, one of my buddies told me, “We’re doing volunteer work for this priest, Bruce Ritter. He has these apartments and takes in kids, and we rehabilitate the apartments with Sheetrock and fix doors and stuff. Do you want to come down?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  There were about thirty kids in apartments in an abandoned tenement on 7th Street between Avenues C and D in Alphabet City. They had another building across the street where they had their cooking facilities, and we would eat cafeteria style down there together. This was the forerunner of Covenant House.

  Bruce Ritter was very affable, friendly. But he was a Franciscan. A Franciscan is supposed to live in a community, and he was living by himself in his own apartment. I didn’t know if I liked this.

  Covenant House did some great, great things. But once Bruce Ritter got into trouble because of accusations from a couple of kids, he left. All you got to do is make the accusations. A nun came in and she’s built the place up. I learned a lesson from that: Never become too proprietary about a program because as your fortunes rise and fall, the fortunes of the program will rise and fall.

  I had seen pictures of Cardinal Spellman, I saw him on television. But when I finally met him, I was so surprised at how short the guy was. I mean he was about five feet two. It was unbelievable how so much power could be concentrated in so little a man. The president would come to him for things. He was a very brilliant guy, although all his speeches were written by a nun. He was also very much pro-Vietnam, a hawk. Even so, probably the largest sector of the antiwar movement came from Catholics. I remember the rallies at Fordham, the candlelight marches, the prayer services.

  When I met Cardinal Spellman, it scared the hell out of me. We were in the sanctuary of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the pews face each other. I saw the cardinal sitting across the way, and he was glaring at me. What had I done? I wondered. But when I got up, I realized he wasn’t glaring at me; he was glaring at Bishop Sheen, who was sitting at an angle to me. He didn’t like Bishop Sheen.

  I was serving mass that day, holding a candle. Paul Erpacher, a classmate of mine, was in front of me; he was the cross bearer. In those days, the cardinal had some difficulty walking. He sort of shuffled over. “Oh-oh,” I said to myself, “he’s coming toward me. Oh-oh, he’s coming closer. What does he want? I hope he doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  He comes right up to me and in that Boston accent, he says, “Hey, sonny, be careful with that candle. Seminarians are in short supply.”

  St. Patrick’s was always a sideshow kind of place. Because it was in Manhattan, it had all this pedestrian traffic. I remember all the movement, people walking around, walking around, walking around, and the strong smell of incense and beeswax from the burning candles.

  In the back of the cathedral was a wax statue of Pope Pius XII in his white cassock. Apparently these clothes were a gift to Cardinal Spellman from the pope, who was a friend of his, and when the pope died in 1958, the cardinal had this wax statue of him cast. They protected it by putting it in a glass case because people would invariably try to destroy the thing, some looney bird would come along and try to kn
ock the pope’s head off.

  Even as a kid, I knew Holy Cross Church was sort of an oasis on 42nd Street. It’s the oldest church on 42nd Street from river to river, built in 1852; it caught fire and got rebuilt in 1867, then was redesigned in the 1880s by Louis Comfort Tiffany. What interested me the most was this big fluorescent cross that stands perpendicular to the front of the church. At first I didn’t think it was a Catholic church. We don’t do that—it’s like Elmer Gantry. Still, you don’t expect to see a church on 42nd Street with the buses, and the smells, and the noise. People pass by and say, “There’s a church over there?” They come in and they’re surprised to hear Gregorian chants.

  We have a prayer called the Novena—novena means “nine”—where you say a particular prayer nine times, nine weeks in a row, nine days in a row. At the parish here, we had the Miraculous Medal Novena for peace, which is dedicated to Mary. During and after the war, through the seventies, the place would be packed. There’d be people out on the sidewalk. It would be broadcast over the radio.

  Before I returned to the seminary in 1973, I worked as a bartender and ditch digger. There’s nothing worse than digging a hole in the middle of a Manhattan street on an August afternoon when the temperature is ninety-five degrees and you’re down ten feet in the ground, kissing a steam pipe. We worked very, very hard for $5.95 an hour. That was a lot of money back then.

  All the men I worked with came from Calabria, Italy, and spoke very little English. They’d bring their lunch along. We had a coffee break at ten and a beer break at two, when you’d really be dragging. These guys would sit there, drink their Rheingold or Ballantine beer out of a quart brown glass, and it revivified them. Then they’d go back to work for another two hours.