Tailoring a solution
Close your eyes in Manhattan’s Garment Center, just south of Times Square, and you can almost hear clothes racks still clanging across sidewalks from a past era when hundreds of thousands of workers in New York City’s biggest industry cut, stitched, sewed and shipped to the nation the creations of top fashion talent.
Now, open your eyes, and see reality behind bustling showrooms and an industry employing many tens of thousands in New York City: the actual making of garments in the Garment Center hanging on by a thread, amid an economy and a city transformed.
Mayor de Blasio deems it time to nudge fashion manufacturing, down to just a few thousand jobs in the Garment Center, into a comeback — by stripping three-decade-old zoning protections that did nothing to stop their free fall, enabling the city to invest $51 million to help workshops rebound in new Brooklyn digs with sharply discounted rents. In broad strokes, there’s merit to the thinking. First, because the protections — which lock in 8.5 million square feet in the center of Manhattan for a specific industrial purpose, the only such narrow set-aside anywhere in the five boroughs — are a mismatch for the age in which we live.
After what’s been a precipitous decline in fashion manufacturing, driven partly by cheaper overseas labor and partly by technology innovations over many years, less than 10% of those square feet are actually in use for the on-the-books purpose.
That’s unsustainable, and it paralyzes dozens of drab buildings that could use upgrades but won’t get them until something changes.
Honest zoning would, first and foremost, correct the mismatch, freeing up a piece of Midtown to serve whatever economic needs the market deems fit.
But it isn’t that simple. The fashion industry, though diminished from its heyday, remains a glittering star in the city’s cultural and economic firmament, one we simply cannot afford to let go gentle into that good night.
Manufacturers are endangered. But plenty of designers, suppliers, marketers, prototypers, even budding tech startups in the fashion space are thriving.
They flourish in Midtown in no small part because of proximity — to embroidery and patternmaking specialists who commute from New Jersey or Long Island, to the Theater District and the Fashion Institute of Technology, to the upscale showrooms where buyers descend from all over the globe and then walk to nearby hotels.
The legitimate fear of many in the industry is that nixing the special zoning will be the end of a game of Jenga: Encourage movement of one piece of the industry to Brooklyn, and the whole tower falls.
Enter Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who has convened a panel of industry and civic players to work out a pact in time for an Aug. 21 City Planning Commission meeting on the zoning plan.
That intervention — of which the city is supportive — will be worthwhile, provided the players can set aside nostalgia for what was and what never will be and welcome the city’s unique willingness to aid their industry above others.
Our recommendations: Rethink the zoning, and with it the excess space that will never see sewing machines again under any scenario. Band together to lock in core Midtown real estate for showrooms and specialists.
And accept that discount rents and funds to invest in machinery and training to build resurgent fashion factories in Brooklyn could be a blessing in doom’s disguise.