HOW is the garment district like a coral reef? A coral reef, as Animal Planet instructs us, shelters diverse species of sponges, snakes, clownfish & barracudas. So does the garment district. A coral reef is a rich universe with its own organically evolved architecture, home to its own assortment of beasts & weeds. Garment district buildings are the same. Plunge down alongside a reef & hang in the flow, currents eddying around you, & as the designer Yeohlee Teng said recently, “You never know what is going to swim by.”
Ms. Teng made this remark last Friday. He was standing outside a building on far West 36th Street, a 17-story structure not very different from other buildings throughout an area that at one times produced close to 90 percent of all clothing manufactured in the United States.
New developers tenanted their elderly buildings with people who spent their lives hunched not over sewing machines but over keyboards, a breed of workers who would not know a bobbin from a merrowing machine. & gradually the garment district, an area that for a century served as a civic revenue engine, a threshold for immigrant employment, a generator of innovation, started in another way to resemble the reefs of the planet. It began to die.
That domination began to wane a half-century ago, around the time large-scale garment manufacturing began its relentless migration offshore, well before the late 1990s, when shrewd real estate investors began amassing & colonizing a one-of-a-kind stock of undervalued Midtown structures that had long lain hidden in plain sight.
“Designers rely on a highly complex ecosystem of support,” said Deborah Marton, the executive director of the nonprofit Design Trust for Public Space. Recognizing that truth, the Council of Fashion Designers of The united states partnered last year with the Design Trust to study a commercial ecosystem that was close to vanishing before the commercial real estate crash provided it with an unlikely reprieve.
That study, to be released in June, found that even now the apparel industry represents 28 percent of all manufacturing jobs in New York City. Its authors also concluded that the garment district is a more vital cultural force than lots of imagine, an incubator of ideas & innovation & a magnet for all those “Project Runway” hopefuls who flock to New York believing, as boosters claim, that the city is the fashion capital of the world.
Thanks to a compact & centralized garment district, Ms. Teng explained last week, it is still possible for an unknown to design & sew a garment at home, & then — with luck & an initial order from, say, Bergdorf Goodman — to take that sample to a building like 347 West 36th Street & have a pattern made, graded for size, the fabric rolled in from a nearby wholesaler, the pieces cut & assembled & the done product shipped without leaving a single block in the center of Midtown.
“Come!” he commanded a reporter on Friday, as he set out to explore 347 West 36th Street — a broad 100,000-square-foot structure designed in the 1930s by the architect brothers George & Edward Blum with the humanizing roofline setbacks of the era; with a marble lobby & large freight elevators; & with floor plates thick to support heavy industrial machines. “Let’s see who is still here.”
As it happens, a fragile balance holds at 347 West 36th Street. Figures obtained from the city indicate that roughly 38 percent of the building’s tenants are in businesses related to fashion. The rest are a diverse lot that include the sculptor Keith Edmier, a tenant in the rooftop penthouse who in a piece titled “Bremen Towne” one time recreated the suburban home of his boyhood in Tinley Park, Ill.; or Steve Giralt, a commercial photographer; or the National Comedy Theater, which occupies the street level storefront; or Amyas Naegele, a dealer in African antiquities who also builds sculptural mounts to set off rare masks from Congo or Bongo funerary posts from Sudan.
“When I started in this building 14 years ago, it was all sweatshops & me,” Mr. Naegele recalled.
At quitting time the building elevator was transformed in to a vertical Ellis Island. Scores of workers from places like Mexico, China, Guatemala, Ecuador & throughout the Caribbean Basin boarded the upward bound automobile on the way to the top floor, they explained, for the simple reason that it was often full to cram in to on the way back down.
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