Will the City Make Room for Made in New York?
Posted on 17. Sep, 2010 by Lisa Riordan Seville in Uncategorized
Dresses returned to their racks and weary fashionistas went home at the close of New York’s Fashion Week on Thursday, but as the tents came down, those at the center of the city’s multi-billion dollar fashion industry picked up efforts to sketch out the future look of garment district.
According to a source familiar with the discussions, talks about the future of this 13-block stretch of midtown Manhattan will take place this week and may reach beyond the rezoning effort squelched this summer. A new plan would have to grapple with the competing political and fiscal interests at play in the neighborhood. Though on the surface a question of how to preserve the last of the district’s historic manufacturing sector, the battle in the garment center is as much a tug of war between the fashion world, a $10 billion industry in New York, and real estate, one of the city’s driving forces.
This week’s meeting comes two months after the city quietly shelved a plan to refashion the garment district. The proposal would have eliminated the protections on the 9.5 million-square-foot district currently zoned for manufacturing, which has been steadily slipping away over the past several decades. The city offered instead a 300,000-square-foot building reserved exclusively for the shrinking industry.
The design met with vehement opposition from powerful members of the fashion industry when announced in early 2009.
Designers like Nanette Lepore, Diane Von Furstenberg and Yeohlee Teng joined with local manufactures to speak launch a vocal campaign to “Save the Garment Center.” They believe the rezoning would have driven the remaining manufacturing jobs from the area, decimating an infrastructure crucial to local designers and threatening New York’s place as a global innovator in the fashion.
“The garment district sustains the newness in our industry which helps support the notion that we are the fashion capital of the world,” said Teng, who manufactures her minimal, angular pieces in midtown factories. Without the proximity between the designers, fabric stores and pattern cutters, the city looses its edge, she said.
The Department of City Planning appears to have heard the outcry. The decision to halt the rezoning came on the heels of “Made in Midtown,” a report released in June by the Design Trust for Public Space (supported by Council of Fashion Designers of America and several members of the industry) that painted the 13-block as a growing hub of fashion innovation.
“It’s clear that our niche as a city is not the 100,000 t-shirts that will retail for $10 a piece,” said Deborah Marton, executive director of the Design Trust. “That’s never going to be true again.”
But Marton said district has in recent years become factory for the “production of ideas and innovation,” an identity she believes the city could through incentives and greater awareness of those working in the area.
Some of that has begun. This year the New York Economic Development Corporation and the Council of Fashion Designers of America partnered to create a small “Fashion Incubator,” which offered space in the area to ten promising designers at below market rates.
Those incentives do not, however, address concerns about the dwindling number of middle-class manufacturing jobs in the area. Numbers from the state’s Department of Labor show apparel manufacturing jobs in the area fell to less than 7,000 at the end of 2009, down 18 percent from a year before.
“New people aren’t coming in—there’s no need for it,” said Rodger Cohen of Regal Originals, Inc. in 39th street. His factory has been in business in the district for over 40 years, and manufactures everything from nursing scrubs to high-end couture. “It’s not a bad industry, but nobody wants to go into something dying.”
Small programs to foster young designers also do not resolve the problem of what to do with the thousands of square feet designated for manufacturing that go unused.
“Fifty percent of side streets are zoned for manufacturing,” said Barbara Randall, executive director of the Fashion Center’s Business Improvement District. “There’s never going to be enough production to fill the spaces.”
The special district status, set in place in 1987 to attempt to keep production local, has left landlords struggling to fill buildings and pay bills. The overall vacancy rate more than doubled in a year, hitting nearly 14 percent in 2009, according to data collected by the Fashion Center BID. Loft space went for $19 to $39 a square foot, about half the rate of office space in the area. That’s potentially millions of dollars in lost revenue for the city.
“The trick is to find the right balance, and we’re working with the garment businesses, building owners, labor organizations and fashion groups to get there,” said a spokesperson for the Department of City Planning.
When stakeholders sit down this week, the city will see if it can strike the balance among the myriad interests. But one important player apparently not privy to the plans is the Fashion Center BID.
Executive Director Barbara Randall said that if the groups were talking, she didn’t know about it. Either way, she remained skeptical of efforts to find a middle ground.
“We all want to save the garment district,” Randall said. “But what specifically are the tools, the mechanisms to do that?”
To that question, Randall said, “Nobody has the answer.”
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