Garment Center Capitol Buildings

When they were built in 1921, the Garment Center Capitol Buildings, a pair of buildings at 498 and 500 7th Ave., heralded the move of New York’s flourishing garment industry uptown to the district where it has remained ever since. New York City’s continued hold on the fashion industry has preserved a symbiotic relationship between fashion design and manufacturing, which take place on the same city blocks in the heart of Midtown. At this point in time, though, the Garment District faces new development pressures. Although designers like Patricia Underwood still retain their facilities in the buildings, newcomers like the Bates USA advertising agency have moved in as well.

The Garment Center Capitol Buildings included enough modern amenities to lure almost the entire garment industry uptown–notably electricity, light, and ample space that most garment factories had lacked before. When the ready-made clothing business first began to grow in the 19th century (by producing clothing for the slave trade as well as for soldiers and sailors), it was located on the Lower East Side, where part of its workforce took piecework into their tenements. Most of the area’s workspaces were small. Larger factories were located slightly to the west, in what is now SoHo.

As the ready-made clothing business expanded from uniforms to men’s shirts and then found its real cash cow, women’s clothing, the manufacturing district was poised to overflow its boundaries. During the same years, workers in the industry had organized, often becoming significant members of nationwide labor movements (The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union was founded in 1900 and in 1909 they led an influential walkout called the “Uprising of the 20,000”). After the infamous fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where 146 garment workers were trapped and died, New York created new labor regulations that required factory owners to provide safer and more spacious working conditions. Department stores, where the masses might buy the manufactured clothing, were moving uptown, and Midtown emerged as a transportation hub–nearby Penn Station was completed in 1911. The garment industry began to move from the Lower East Side to lofts above 14th Street. It concentrated around Fifth Avenue, and then began to spread north from 34th Street, where luxury department stores catered to the rich, but it was quickly cut off.

The tony residents of Fifth Avenue were not pleased with the move. They started a “Save New York Committee” in 1918 to nip the garment industry’s encroachment on their neighborhood in the bud. It was the nature of the industry to take over the sidewalks with workers shuttling rolls of fabric, boxes of trimmings, or racks of garments from cutting room to showroom. Ideally for the industry, each specialized segment–the cutter, the finisher, the buyer–would be physically connected to all the other parts in the dense fabric of its neighborhood. The Fifth Avenue citizens would not tolerate the bustle of the constant pedestrian transport of goods, not to mention the immigrant workers who poured out of the buildings at lunch hour.

So, the garment industry moved west and slightly further uptown. The Garment Center Capitol Buildings were the first and the most important buildings to symbolize this move in 1921, facilitating the movement of an entire industry to its enduring home. A Russian Jewish immigrant named Mack Kanner had the idea to build them, and pushed the project through. The book “New York, the Wonder City” called Kanner “a poor little Jewish boy who lived in Russia and came to America practically penniless. By sheer grit and the grasping of opportunity, he promoted and carried through to success this gigantic institution.”

Pennsylvania Station and Macy’s (the building at 34th and Broadway was built in 1902) had already moved in on the notorious Tenderloin slum on Manhattan’s Middle West Side. The two Garment Center Capitol Buildings were another grand addition to the neighborhood. They had full electricity and plenty of natural light. Showrooms and cutting and sewing rooms coexisted in the same building, bringing together sales and manufacturing. The immense structures actually straddled two zoning codes, so the showrooms all faced Seventh Avenue which was not zoned for manufacturing, and the factory spaces looked over the back side where manufacturing was permitted. In 1932, the building’s tenants consisted of 58 small firms, and 22,000 people worked there, creating $200 million worth of clothing, according to “New York, the Wonder City.”

The buildings seemed a success, and they inspired others. The neighborhood grew quickly into a garment center. By 1924, people were building showrooms and factories further west on Eighth, Ninth, and even west of Ninth Avenues. The streets grew congested in the daytime with the large number of workers and the ferrying of goods between firms. Penn Station was also essential to the congeniality of the neighborhood to the industry–buyers could come from out of town to visit the district directly, and stay in a hotel, if need be, within the same blocks.

The Garment Center Capitol Buildings and the other buildings that sprang up around them to house the garment industry were multi-purpose structures. They combined manufacturing space with showrooms as well as offices. The gamut of the industry was represented: a garment might come from the sketchpad of the designer to the shears of the fabric cutter to the needles of the trimmer and finisher all in the same block. There too were the contractors and clothing buyers. Sewing machine dealers and repair shops were located at the source. Businesses that transported clothing across the country in trucks had headquarters there; built-in chutes in the buildings routed finished products to the shipping area.

Since the industry’s early days, women’s clothing had ballooned to become the most important segment of the garment industry in New York City, and the city has dominated women’s fashion for the last century. Quickly changing fashions necessitate the proximity of designers to manufacturers as well as the production of relatively small quantities of a given garment. Therefore, production of less-changing garments like underwear has moved to cheaper locations, but the more fickle segment of the fashion world seems intent on remaining in New York. The garment district established by the Garment Center Capitol Buildings has endured remarkably. While some production has left the city, and certain sweatshops operate in Chinatown, the Garment District remains one of the only urban manufacturing centers in New York.