New York’s Garment District is known for iconic images like rolling racks of dresses careening down Seventh Avenue, quintessential entrepreneurs like Abe Schrader and Bud Konheim, leggy models walking alongside yakking garmentos, and flamboyant designers rubbing elbows with first ladies and Ladies Who Lunch — all to the point of creating an identity that is a rarity in the history of American industry and popular culture.
The Garment Center’s culture also has a seedier side, one of mobsters and union bosses exerting their influence and trading cash in back rooms and loading docks, while politicians from Mayors Robert F. Wagner to Rudolph W. Giuliani flaunted their clout to gain favor and financial support from industry bigwigs.
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The post-World War II period through the Seventies could be called the heyday of the Garment District. The industry helped drive the era’s rapid growth in population and wealth, the burgeoning rise of the suburbs and an explosion of retail malls, discounters and national chains. This brought out the best in entrepreneurial spirit and ingenuity — and a new generation of crafty, gifted and sometimes unscrupulous businessmen. Many of these executives did business with the gangsters and powerful union leaders — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not — to make a buck and keep their businesses afloat, although most were tireless titans, as proud of their rags-to-riches journey as their ultimate success.
Among these colorful characters:
■ Abe Schrader, an Eastern European immigrant who became a self-made millionaire. Schrader, who lived to be 100, said he made his first million in 1943. A few years later, he made the symbolically long trip from Eighth Avenue, where he had his contracting shop, to the showrooms of Seventh Avenue. He founded and became chairman of Abe Schrader Corp., which became a $70 million dress and separates company. In 1984, Schrader sold his company, which had gone public in 1969, to Interco Inc. for $38.2 million.
■ Ben Shaw, known as Mr. Seventh Avenue. Shaw gained his reputation pulling purse strings for designers such as Donald Brooks, Norman Norell, Stephen Burrows, Dominic Rompollo, Jane Derby, Oscar de la Renta, Giorgio Sant’Angelo and Halston. Along the way, he brought Pierre Balmain to the U.S. and Gloria Vanderbilt to Seventh Avenue.
■ Fred and John Pomerantz. In seven decades on Seventh Avenue, Fred Pomerantz went from cutting fabric to heading a diversified apparel firm that, at his retirement in 1982, had $250 million in sales. A burly man with a rough-hewn manner and gravelly voice, Pomerantz’s career began in the Twenties, and he presided over coat, dress and uniform firms using the Pomette and Silver Pom labels.
In 1947, he began Leslie Fay as a dress firm, opening production facilities in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He was known for having a tough hand with retailers, admitting after his retirement that he was “the most stubborn bastard in the dress business.” By the time he died in 1986, his son, John, had established himself as the company’s chief executive officer.
By 1991, Leslie Fay’s volume had peaked at close to $900 million. Then, in late 1992, the company was rocked by an accounting scandal in which two of its executives fraudulently reported quarterly figures. In April 1993, Leslie Fay was forced to declare bankruptcy, where it remained for five tumultuous years and eventually folded.
■ David Schwartz and Maurice Saltzman, who were known to be in a contest to run the first company to reach $100 million in sales. Schwartz got into the up-and-coming business of women’s dresses in 1919 and stayed in it until 1977, when he reluctantly retired as chairman of Jonathan Logan. Known as a man who was consumed by the business, Schwartz acquired the Jonathan Logan Dress Co. in 1937. In 1960, he was the first to take a women’s apparel company public. In 1963, Schwartz’s transformation of the company into a conglomerate led to Logan emerging as the victor in its race with Bobbie Brooks to reach $100 million in sales.
Saltzman, the founder of Ritmor Mfg., a maker of misses’ dresses under the Barbara Brooks brand, changed the name and direction of the company in 1940, when it became Bobbie Brooks. Bobbie Brooks followed Jonathan Logan to the $100 million sales plateau in the Sixties and, through acquisition and internal expansion, exceeded $200 million in sales by 1980. But the investments soured, leading to a Chapter 11 filing in 1982. It would emerge from bankruptcy a year later. Saltzman stayed on until 1987. He died in 1990 at the age of 71.
■ Carl Rosen, who shunned the emerging sportswear business in the Sixties to remain focused on the moderate dress trade. Rosen’s company, Puritan Fashions, finding itself needing to catch up with competitors such as Jonathan Logan, was astute enough in the early Sixties to get the license for Beatles T-shirts and sweatshirts and sold a bunch of them to J.C. Penney Co. It was a 1977 deal that brought Puritan the license for Calvin Klein jeans and sportswear, propelling the firm to sales of $250 million in 1981. Rosen’s son, Andrew, has carried on his legacy, becoming a highly successful industry executive himself with a number of firms, including Theory.
In the back rooms and side streets over the years were “the silent partners,” as they were often called — union chiefs and organized crime ruffians. The relationship with the leaders of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and its latter-day, less powerful successor unions ran from cooperative to controversial. Contract negotiations were almost always combative and sometimes led to strikes and rallies on the streets of the Garment District.
The ILGWU steadily built its membership and gained substantial power under David Dubinsky, who became president in 1932. Dubinsky’s 34-year reign was marked by aggressive organizing, and ILGWU ranks swelled from 45,000 to 450,000 and came to dominate New York manufacturing. It was easy to “look for the union label,” as the slogan went, because it was prevalent in the district.
One of the largest demonstrations occurred when more than 100,000 ILGWU members rallied nationwide, including in Manhattan, in support of Dressmakers Local 145’s strike against Besserman’s Dress Factory in March 1958. More recently, in June 1994, striking Leslie Fay workers from five states were joined at a demonstration in front of the brand’s headquarters at 1400 Broadway by other ILGWU members and trade unionists affiliated with the AFL-CIO. The size of the crowd was estimated at 7,000 to 8,000 people.
A year later, organized labor and the Labor Department, driven by then-AFL-CIO president John Sweeney, led about 1,000 delegates and union members down Seventh Avenue chanting, “No more sweatshops,” as the industry reeled from a series of fresh revelations of modern-day sweatshops that most people thought were in the past.
Jay Mazur, president of UNITE (a successor to the ILGWU), told the crowd: “We’re here today to deliver a message to our sisters and brothers who work in these buildings day and night, often in deplorable conditions, and to workers enslaved in El Monte, Calif., and in factories in Chicago and Dallas and Atlanta, that we will make those who exploit labor accountable for their actions. It’s time for a change.”
Although sometimes connected, the union leaders didn’t leave the kind of mark on the industry that organized crime did.
The garment trade over the years was a favored way to launder mob money, and in the days before public financing and off-shore manufacturing, the labor-intensive, cash-strapped companies were often easy targets for the Gambino, Gotti and Lucchese thugs.
As a result, loan-sharking became the most pervasive aspect of organized crime involvement in the industry over the years, run by the likes of Thomas Lucchese’s cohort Anthony Salerno. In a 1977 federal investigation, Lucchese was tied to such industry entrepreneurs as Alfred Rosengarten, who controlled an array of dress firms, and Abraham Chait, a racketeer, trucking company owner and apparel manufacturer who once took the Fifth Amendment when asked where he was born.
Trucking was also tantamount to mob influence during the heyday of local manufacturing, and garment firms would be said to be “married” to their truckers. Brothers Thomas and Joseph Gambino were put on trial in 1992 by then-Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau for illegally controlling garment industry trucking. His young prosecutor at the trial, Eliot Spitzer, said the Gambinos’ business was built on their underworld reputation, the economic threat of barring manufacturers from shops if they didn’t “play by the rules,” fraudulent billing and an occasional show of force “where the velvet glove comes off.”
In the end, the Gambinos pleaded guilty to restraint of trade and competition and agreed to exit the trucking business in New York and pay a $12 million fine.
The Garment Center had changed over the 80 years or so since moving to Midtown and embracing mass manufacturing, modern marketing and public financing, but from the stories passed down from one generation to the next to personal reflections of those who have endured, or the evolving dynamic that is the Garment Center, one consistent theme has prevailed: the unparalleled entrepreneurial spirit of this special class of immigrants and their progeny, one that has been undeterred by Depression and recession, war and crime, politics or global competition.
Konheim, ceo of Nicole Miller Ltd., said growing up in the business, what struck him over the years was the familiarity — from the people to the restaurants.
“When I was a young guy in the industry — and I started working here in the industry in 1955 — I was fourth generation and so was everybody else, or at least they had a father or a grandfather in the picture somewhere,” he recalled. “It was like summer camp. When you would talk to someone one-on-one in the showroom or their offices, they always had the hottest thing going. But when you would get together in a group on the street or over lunch, business was always lousy. There were more local restaurants, places like Gross’ dairy restaurant, that had personality.”
Like the design studios and showrooms it houses, the Garment District has followed the trends.
The first garment center emerged out of the native tailoring, sewing and mercantile skills of the European immigrants newly arrived on American shores. Its first home was theirs: The Lower East Side, where the mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants set up shops in their tenement homes, in store fronts and on streets like Canal and Orchard, giving rise to what would long be one of the city’s most important and identifiable industries. It would also give birth to a future generation of fashion executives who would have the culture and nuances of the garment trade ingrained in their heritage.
As the city became more sophisticated and the population moved uptown, so did the garment center. By 1910, the district was centered at Madison Square — where Madison Avenue, Broadway and East 23rd Street converge. But the tony ladies and gents that frequented the fashionable shopping strip — anchored by the Ladies’ Mile — didn’t mix well with the factory workers and sewing shops. So over the next decade, merchants led by the Fifth Avenue Association and the Save New York Committee lobbied Tammany Hall to force the manufacturers out. Incidents like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and numerous strikes and labor unrest in the neighborhood aided their cause.
It was time to move again to what would become a more permanent home. In September 1919, two sites along Seventh Avenue between 36th and 38th Streets were developed by the Garment Center Capitol Co., an association of 38 women’s garment manufacturers, revitalizing a vice-ridden area known as the Tenderloin. Leadership was provided by men like coat manufacturer Saul Singer, who was president of Garment Center Capitol; Reuben Sadowsky, who erected the Sadowsky Building at 1372 Broadway — the first manufacturing site in “Garment Town” — and Max Meyer, who rose from errand boy at coat firm A. Beller & Co. to become an owner and later one of the founders and president of the Fashion Institute of Technology, an educator and incubator for the industry to this day.
The corporation erected 498 and 500 Seventh Avenue at a cost of about $15 million for the buildings and $5 million for the land. In the period from 1921 to 1926, more than $125 million was invested in construction alone. By 1931, the garment district had the largest concentration of apparel manufacturers in the world, covering an area from Sixth to Ninth Avenues and from West 30th to West 42nd Streets. Through the Thirties, ILGWU membership had grown to 300,000.
As the industry grew, truck traffic became more intense, generating traffic of another kind — the characteristic rolling racks and hand trucks steered by “push boys,” who conveyed fabrics and finished garments between buildings.
In the Fifties and Sixties, the buildings in the Garment Center became specialized, with companies from specific segments of the women’s market congregating together at one address. For example, 1385 Broadway was known as the bridal building, 1400 Broadway was where popular-price dresses could be found, 498 and 530 Seventh Avenue housed dress manufacturers, while 500 and 512 Seventh Avenue were the coat buildings.
“Until all the manufacturing moved offshore, the place was absolutely abuzz, a beehive of activity,” said Konheim. “You couldn’t get down the street at noontime. The atmosphere was amazing. It was a fashion show on the street with all the models going in and out of the showrooms, you had the Italian patternmakers talking shop and the garment executives shooting the breeze.”
Meanwhile, the district’s once-vital manufacturing base was fading away. By the Eighties, a large chunk of production shifted back to lower Manhattan, particularly Chinatown, where a new immigrant class became the sewers for the industry. But this period also marked the rise of imports, and domestic manufacturing jobs saw a rapid decline. At its peak in the mid-Seventies, there had been 450,000 apparel production jobs in New York, but by 2009, the city’s fashion industry employment — including all textile and apparel manufacturing and wholesaling — stood at 87,500.
In May 1985, the New York Fashion Council, comprising top executives in the apparel industry, sent a letter to then-Mayor Ed Koch appealing for an easement of real estate pressures felt along Seventh Avenue. The NYFC also sought a general cleanup of the area, which during the Seventies and Eighties were burdened by rising crime rates, dirty streets and an unsavory image that discouraged many buyers from making trips to Manhattan.
These conditions prevailed into the early Nineties, when retail consolidation and recession were the culprits behind curtailed retail buying trips to New York. In 1993, as a reaction to that, the Midtown Realtors Association, comprising landlords and property owners in the area, created the Fashion Center Business Improvement District.
The FCBID operates on a budget derived from a surcharge on collected property taxes. Its continuing mission: providing private sanitation and a security force, resulting in cleaner streets and a safer atmosphere. Crime and grime dropped dramatically. So did the number of complaints about the district’s image.
In 1996, the FCBID opened the industry’s first information kiosk, on the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 39th Street, a place where buyers and tourists can get information like listings of companies in different segments of the industry and details on services, as well as entertainment.
During this same period, the Council of Fashion Designers of America gave New York’s growing designer sportswear and ready-to-wear crowd a new home for its runway shows with the creation of 7th on Sixth, erecting tents in Bryant Park, on Sixth Avenue between West 40th and West 42nd Streets, behind the main branch of the New York Public Library. By centralizing the shows in a safe and comfortable environment, the CFDA helped alleviate the chaotic, overcrowded conditions that buyers and press had to endure at the twice-a-year fashion shows in individual showrooms. The tents have since moved uptown to Lincoln Center, however, contributing somewhat to the district’s loss of identity.
The identity crisis can also be blamed on the consolidation of the Garment District — now also known as the “Fashion Center” after the establishment of the FCBID — into the hands of fewer vendors, paralleling the shrinking of department store nameplates.
In April 2000, industry employment in the district fell to less than 50 percent for the first time, giving way to areas like advertising, computer technology, health, law and education. Apparel manufacturing jobs in the state stood at 16,000 at the end of May, up 0.1 percent for the month, but down 1.2 percent year-over-year, according to the state labor department. Longer-term trends show New York City lost 64 percent of its apparel manufacturing jobs from 2000 to 2010, employing 9,850, while textile production fell 75 percent to 2,920, according to Labor Department data.
Konheim said the change in the district from a time when everyone had their factories and warehouses down the street to today, when it’s primarily showrooms and other industries, has taken away much of the dynamic.
“You had the truckers coming in every morning from the factories to unload or pick up their goods, and therefore the racks and pushcarts were all over the streets,” he added. “You also had, until the 1980s, all the buying offices, so salesmen would be running around delivering samples and orders. Now they’re mostly gone and you have people doing business at trade shows in other parts of town. It’s still got personality, but its not what it once was — and it never will be the same.”