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Chapter 1: From Downtown Tenements to Midtown Lofts: The Shifting Geography of an Urban Industry
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1 From Downtown Tenements to Midtown Lofts The Shifting Geography of an Urban Industry Nancy L. Green T he garment industry is one of the best reminders that not every New York building is a brownstone or a high-rise. One of the last manufacturing sectors to remain in the urban center, it provides a link between past and present. This multimillion-dollar industry provides riches to top designers and below-standard wages and conditions for immigrant workers. The industry today is a hybrid, both a reminder of New York’s past and heralded as a model for the future. Is the flexibility which characterizes the fashion industry a prototype for the twenty-first century or a throwback to the nineteenth? From Chinatown to Seventh Avenue, garments and their makers, buyers , and sellers are a ubiquitous feature of the New York landscape. The flexibility of fashion and the labor subcontracting that is its corollary are also linked to a flexible use of space. Garments are displayed and made everywhere, from boutiques to showrooms and from homes to workshops. Debate has raged over the persistence of sweatshops.1 We can learn something about today’s garment geography by looking at how shop and home Nancy Green’s chapter in this volume is a revised version of Nancy L. Green, ‘‘Sweatshop Migrations: The Garment Industry between Home and Shop,’’ in The Landscape of Modernity , edited by David Ward and Olivier Zunz. Copyright 1992, Russell Sage Foundation , 112 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10021. 28 A Coat of Many Colors have migrated around Manhattan since the turn of the century. I will first examine the industry’s space needs and then look at the urban neighborhoods of its immigrant work force. Both have interacted to affect the industry’s place within the city and to construct the Lower East Side, Seventh Avenue, and Chinatown as garment districts. The Geography of Garment Making: Concentration and Dispersion Two forces characterize the urban implantation of New York’s twentiethcentury apparel industry. On the one hand, women’s garment making has, for the last century, migrated toward the urban core—be it New York or Paris—where fashions are created. On the other hand, garment manufacturers have sought to escape to the ‘‘provinces’’ or beyond, in search of lower labor and rent costs and of more space. Concentration. By the late nineteenth century, New York City had become the fashion capital of America. The growth of the ready-made trade—first in men’s wear, then in more fashionable women’s wear—was accompanied by a relative concentration of production. Sewing migrated from local tailors’ shops and rural outworkers to urban factories and shops. As homemade clothes gave way to store-bought ones, sewing became the occupation of industrial homeworkers instead of individual homemakers. By 1890, 44 percent of all ready-made clothes in the United States were produced in New York City. This was even truer with respect to women’s wear: 53.3 percent of all women’s garment industry workers in the United States worked in New York City in 1899, increasing to 65 percent in 1904 before dropping back to a still healthy 57.3 percent in 1925.2 New York’s market share was even greater than its concentration of workers. Sixty-five percent of the total value of American-made women’s wear came from the city in 1899, and 78 percent in 1925. (By contrast, in 1925, Chicago employed only 5.2 percent of the nation’s women’s wear workers and accounted for only 4 percent of the sector’s value.3 ) The concentration of women’s fashion in New York City (as in Paris4 ) occurred largely because it—like Paris—was a capital of other things: finance , manufacturing, transportation. And, as we know, it was the first port of arrival both for the immigrants who made up the majority of the [3.227.252.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:27 GMT) From Downtown Tenements to Midtown Lofts 29 work force and for imported Parisian patterns. Insofar as style is a game of both imitation and differentiation, it is best to be at the hub of both design and labor. The proximity of satellite services (button or zipper specialists , sewing machine repairmen) only reinforces the advantages and the economics of the urban industrial neighborhood.5 Dispersion. Nevertheless, as ready-to-wear spread, so did the decentralization of production. The current debate and despair over New York...