Changes In Who Works Where
I read in the paper about the immigration raids in the Los Angeles Garment District. It brought back memories of the much larger garment center in New York when I was younger.
In the 1960s, the heart of the New York’s Garment Center stretched from 5th Avenue to 9th Avenue between 34th Street and 42nd Street. It bustled with thousands of factories. Boys and men, known as push boys, wheeled pushcarts and racks on sidewalks and streets. It was so crowded you could hardly walk.
One of my best friends from high school worked in his father’s fabric converter business every summer. In his seventies now he is still in the business, selling fabrics to a dwindling market. A market that has been going downhill since he was a teenager.
The first commercial building I managed was at 336 West 37th Street. In the mid-1970s its tenancy was sewing contractors, cutters, and specialty factories such as a buttonhole maker. It was a 15-story wedding cake building (the floors became increasingly smaller as the structure climbed.)
The floors were 10,000 sq feet each up to the 6th floor, the sewing contractors usually were located on those floors. There could be a couple of hundred sewing machines whizzing away. When the operators were working, there was fine cotton dust floating in the air. Smoking was not allowed and was enforced because of the flammability of the materials.
Most of the machine operators for sportwear were women with the vast majority having come from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and a few from Jamaica or other Caribbean islands. I once asked one of the factory owners how long it took to train a “girl” with no experience to become an operator. He told me about two weeks tops.
The building had a few higher end factories. Here, beaded gowns or suits would be made. The workers were craftsmen from the cutters to the tailors to the pressers. These too were immigrants…but from an earlier wave. Eastern European Jews and Italians in their 60s, 70s, and even 80’s were doing what they had been doing their entire lives in drab and mostly sunless environments.
I spent July 4th, 1976, on the roof of that building with my family and the super’s family barbequing and looking at the tall ships that had assembled to sail up the Hudson to celebrate the nation’s 200th birthday. The rest of the building was silent and closed, but we had an unobstructed view that is now long obscured by the tall buildings that have arisen along 9th Avenue to the river.
A motorcycle gang had a garage building across 9th Avenue where they held their barbeque on the empty sidewalk that day. There also were still a few tenements across 37th Street from the building that housed a few old Italian people and mostly Hispanics on their roofs enjoying the same thing as we.
As time went on, the garment industry shrank. Some people still believe that the industry can be brought back to life. That is the worst kind of fiction. At the beginning of the 20th century the industry operated with the labor of immigrants. They may have been primarily Jews and Italians that by my time had been substituted by Hispanics and Caribbean Blacks, but the industry always needed low-cost labor to produce garments for the American market.
Today instead of importing labor and material, we import finished goods. That industry, like so many others, hasn’t relied on the native born to do those unpleasant jobs in over a hundred years. Americans are too busy using computers and living on Facebook to add to our GNP by toiling away in sweat shops. Which tells me that we are much better off as individuals and a nation than if we were hunched over sewing machines.
