NEW YORK — In the midst of marathon union negotiations and facing heated criticism from the Jewish community over school decentralization and a host of other issues, former Mayor John V. Lindsay once remarked to a reporter from this publication that no one from Seventh Avenue ever called him to complain about the apparel industry’s problems.
The following day, WWD quoted Lindsay, saying, “You sit there telling me Seventh Avenue is being ignored. Tell them to call me up,” under the headlines, “Just Give Me a Call,” and “Dial ‘M’ for Mayor.” Based on the response, Lindsay may have regretted his words that day in December 1970, but they made him a legend on Seventh Avenue.
His passing on Tuesday evening at the age of 79 was mourned along the corridors of New York’s garment industry, through which Lindsay frequently passed during his administration. It was then that Seventh Avenue became known as Fashion Avenue, and that the slogan “New York is the fashion capital of the world,” was born.
As Bill Blass said on Wednesday, “I think the mayor most associated with the fashion business has been John Lindsay.”
Lindsay heard all sorts of complaints from the New York apparel industry — traffic in midtown, sanitation, crime and charges of rent gouging. Some manufacturers were afraid to walk certain streets in the 30s at night and others carried guns to protect themselves and their showrooms. It was a tumultuous time for the city as a whole, when break-ins and drugs were rampant and racial tensions high. A transit strike and endless labor difficulties occupied the early part of Lindsay’s tenure as mayor, and up until then, the apparel industry — then the city’s largest business sector — felt it was being ignored by the mayor.
In response, Lindsay proposed a liaison between City Hall and the fashion industry and, in 1971, he appointed one of its most vocal and experienced players, the legendary dress manufacturer Abe Schrader, to represent the apparel business community.
“He liked our industry very much and tried to help us as a whole,” recalled Schrader, who turned 100 in October.
“When he named me as chairman, this is how I met him for the first time,” Schrader said. “I campaigned for him also. Dubinsky and I, from the union, helped him,” he said, referring to David Dubinsky, who was president of the ILGWU at the time. Lindsay had represented New York’s 17th Congressional District for seven years when he ran for mayor in 1965 and served for two four-year terms through 1973.
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“He helped us in any way possible, whenever we asked,” Schrader said. “He came to make speeches on Seventh Avenue, and once a week, we had lunch with him at Gracie Mansion.”
Schrader, who was also a confidant of President Lyndon B. Johnson, worked through several administrations and characterized Lindsay’s administration as being the most receptive to the industry’s needs. Robberies were a particular problem within the garment center, which contributed to many out-of-town buyers fleeing to other markets at the time.
“People were running over to France to buy a lot of their orders,” Schrader said. “But John Lindsay wanted everything to be manufactured over here. He said there are designers in New York who are just as good as the French.”
His support of the industry led to a number of changes in the district. There were more police on the streets and more public awareness of the role the apparel industry played in the city’s economy. It was also under the Lindsay administration that New York first identified itself as “the fashion capital of the world,” the first time a city other than Paris dared call itself that.
At Schrader’s request, Lindsay approved the name change of Seventh Avenue from 34th Street to 42nd Street — the heart of the New York industry — to Fashion Avenue. “He said, ‘Right away, no problem.’ He was a very fine and original human being,” Schrader said.
Stan Herman, president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, also became a big Lindsay supporter, although he was among the administration’s critics early on. When Herman was the designer behind the Mr. Mort label, he complained that “the mayor has to take a swift look at the master plan of the city and see if it wants a dress business here in 1980.” The late Jerry Silverman, who served with Schrader on the fashion industry liaison committee, also criticized the lack of policing and common incidents of assaults and robberies in the late Sixties, saying: “Most of us have to lock the doors during lunch or late in the day before a holiday when employees tend to have more money.”
Herman recalled on Wednesday that Lindsay became “a friend to the fashion industry, but the industry then wasn’t what it is today.
“Lindsay was a glamorous figurehead for a while,” Herman said. “I was quite young at the time and my dealings with him were very few, but he came to the industry frequently to speak and to encourage it.”
Lindsay eventually appointed Herman as a member of Community Board 5 in a position he held until 1988, where he was involved with the landmarking and remapping of Bryant Park as well as monitoring all new construction in midtown.
Blass recalled that Lindsay and his wife, Mary — a dashing couple — routinely came to industry functions, earning designers’ support for the remainder of his political career. Blass said the industry once feted Lindsay with a lavish party at the Four Seasons and frequently turned out for the mayor’s biannual luncheons to hear his viewpoints on a number of issues.
In November 1971, Lindsay hosted a breakfast meeting at the Statler Hilton Hotel, marking the formal kickoff of the garment district’s beefed-up police security program, one of the results of the newly created Mayor’s Office of Apparel Industry Planning & Development.
“The city is always the place that presents the greatest difficulties,” Lindsay said at the meeting. “But you can’t run away from the problems. You can only resolve problems by facing them squarely as you people have been doing in the garment area.”
“He was a mayor very strongly associated with fashion,” Blass said, “because he saw the benefits for the city of having a successful industry. [Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani has seen that, but I am hard put to find someone between them who did.”
“Lindsay had a real hands-on quality with people,” Blass said. “He certainly was charming looking, and besides that, had a wonderful quality with people that was candid and easygoing.”
Much was made at the time of Lindsay’s movie-star looks, as well. Lindsay was tall, a size 42, with a strapping gait and was a known gesticulator. He tended to wear double-breasted suits in a variety of striped patterns to City Hall and a turtleneck and peacoat as he walked the streets of the city. He bought his suits at Brooks Bros. or had them custom-made by Saluzzi. But for weekends, he wore Bill Blass fancy-printed pants and a knit placket-front shirt, described by fashion editors as having a style of “that freshly pressed just-rumpled look of the clean collegiate.”
“He and Mary both were into fashion — not that she was a fashion plate to any extreme — but they understood the importance of the industry to the city,” Blass said. “It was the number one industry then.”
In recent years, Lindsay suffered from Parkinson’s disease, had two heart attacks and two strokes. The cause of death was attributed to pneumonia. Lindsay had moved to a retirement community in Hilton Head, S.C. last year.
His political career ended after a brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 and an unsuccessful attempt for Senate office in 1980. As President Clinton said in a statement on Wednesday, Lindsay had a “remarkable rapport with the people of New York City — people of every race, in every neighborhood, in every walk of life.” But he also faced criticism after leaving office, when the city was thrust into an economic crisis that Lindsay’s successors Abraham Beame and Ed Koch attributed to his administration, when spending habits were characterized as excessive.
After leaving office, the Lindsays took an eight-month vacation, during which time they visited London, Paris, Athens, Copenhagen, Dublin, Vienna and Zurich. Upon their return, Mary Lindsay sat down with WWD to discuss their administration and the pressures that she faced as the wife of a politician blessed with extraordinary good looks. There were always a number of women to compete with.
“They were always clawing at him,” she said. “I told him, ‘As long as there’s a crowd of women around you, I don’t mind. But if it’s only one, watch out. You don’t want to see a woman without eyebrows or eyelashes, do you?’ John said, ‘Now Mary, that’s not very feminine of you,’ and I said, ‘I’ll be feminine after I take care of the competition.”‘