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Fellow Blogger on the Garment Center
By admins | April 17, 2009
Okay, so we thought we were the only ones to care about our little neighborhood, so we were pleasantly surprised to see it featured this week at Jezebel.com. This is a great piece with some gorgeous classic pics of the neighborhood. Here’s a tidbit;
I unearthed a 1960 Life the other day, from the week that Eisenhower and Khrushchev addressed the UN. But editors made space for two non-political stories: one about space rockets, and one about Seventh Avenue. There was also a picture of candidate Jack Kennedy riding a mule in Sioux City, Iowa.
Of course, neither of these stories was truly innocent of political import: the space rockets (from Project Mercury, the United States’ first manned spaceflight program) were there to show off the country’s technological superiority. (The article is full of quotes from John Glenn, and blistering copy like “All Mercury-Redstone components are stamped with the symbol of the Roman god Mercury striding over the earth with a rocket clutched under one arm. When a workman handles one of these parts, he knows an astronaut’s life depends on it.”) And the garment district? Back then, the schmata trade was a bustling American industry — New York’s biggest, with an annual worth of $4.4 billion ($31.6 billion, in today’s dollars). Life reports three out of every four dresses sold in the country at the time were made on Seventh Avenue.
“Seventh Avenue is a self-contained world in the center of New York City, known for the tangle of its traffic, the glitter of its girls, and the unending smog from its operators’ long, foul-smelling cigars.” What isn’t mentioned is that back then, the garment district was also known for its mob connections. Jewish gangsters like Lepke Buchalter and Dutch Schultz had organized the garment workers unions in the early part of the 20th Century before moving into the trucking racket, and by the time this article was published, Carlo Gambino was in charge. The Gambino family ran trucking on Seventh Avenue as a private monopoly, and no designer or factory owner could ship or receive so much as a bolt of cloth without going through the permitted channels.
To continue reading as see all the fabulous photos click here.
Here is more related scoop;
Topics: Blogs, garment center | 1 Comment » 
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April 20th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Thanks for this, Jezebel is a fantastic site too!