Living In | The Garment District: An Identity Dyed in the Wool
January 14, 2011
But the most pleasing part to Ms. Penberthy, especially at night, is the most offbeat: the neon sign of the New Yorker Hotel just a few rooftops away, the ruby letters sizzling.
Evoking Edward Hopper paintings or pulp detective novels, electric signs like these cast an evocative glow across many of the district’s 28 blocks.
Some alert drivers to parking garages, where fans wearing foam fingers whoop after Knicks games at Madison Square Garden. Another tells where to gamble on horses on Seventh Avenue, though that sign, on a closed Off-Track Betting parlor, has been reduced to “Off Tra.”
Pink hearts announce adult-themed entertainment; in this way the area’s seedier past lives on, if drastically downsized in recent years. But the vintage vibe is what appeals to Ms. Penberthy, an executive with a sportswear company who began her career in the fashion industry nearby.
“The area is really just a throwback to an earlier time,” she said.
Prices, too, can seem to have arrived via time machine. In 2010, her 3,000-square-foot unit, which has two bedrooms and two baths, cost $2.315 million, or about $770 a square foot, which is at least 20 percent lower than the price for a comparably airy space in, say, SoHo, according to brokers.
With 6,000 people living in an area of about half a square mile, according to the American Community Survey figures released by the Census Bureau in December, it remains largely industrial. But the fact that people live throughout marks a shift from the mid-20th century, when residents, many in the fashion business, lived closer to the edges of the district than its heart.
One of these is Myra Mann, a retired fashion buyer. In 1960 she moved to a building on 34th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues, surrounded by high-rises; she says that cluster of buildings was then home to many in her field.
The rent on her first apartment there was $52 a month. She now owns a two-bedroom, from two combined units, at the same address. The apartment cost her a total of $248,000 — she bought the first unit in 1984 and the second in 2004 — though it might fetch $800,000 today, she guesses. Living and working in the same part of town for five decades has left Ms. Mann acutely aware of how much it has changed. Transvestite prostitutes “wearing eight-foot platform shoes” by the Lincoln Tunnel exit ramps are long gone, she says. She also recently noticed that a factory once run by a client that churned out blouses has now become a residence.
But on balance, she said, what is remarkable about the garment district is how little, fundamentally, it has succumbed to the tsunami of gentrification that has swept other parts of the city.
“They are always talking about huge changes to the area, but I just don’t see it,” said Ms. Mann, explaining that grocery stores are still lacking. But proximity to a manufacturing zone does have benefits: namely, the hush that falls after everybody punches out.
At nights and on weekends, “you could throw a cannonball down 34th Street,” Ms. Mann joked, “and you wouldn’t hit anything.”
WHAT YOU’LL FIND
It is clear that fewer clothes are being made in Manhattan these days. Even by the turn of this century, manufacturing and showroom jobs in the 10018 ZIP code had fallen to 77,191, from a high of 206,225 in 1960, according to Labor Department statistics.
But the spirit of the garment industry still pervades the place (strongly enough that an aficionado of local history, Mike Kaback, offers a specialized tour). Signs for beads, lace and thread echo vivid window displays, like the wall of ribbons at M J Trimming on Avenue of the Americas and 38th Street.
Sidewalk medallions honor designers like Halston and Perry Ellis. And on a recent afternoon, at 39th Street and Seventh Avenue, it seemed almost like a fashion statement to find an orphan glove left on the statue of the garment worker at his sewing machine.
Exact boundaries are open to interpretation. A generous definition could have them stretch south to the Fashion Institute of Technology on West 27th Street, or over to Fifth Avenue, which is where the business improvement district puts it.
Its proper name, too, is debatable. The business improvement district prefers Fashion Center, while others use Clinton, Hell’s Kitchen — and even, like the Wyndham Garden Hotel on West 36th Street, “Times Square South.”
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