Fashion Center dresses for office use

Real Estate Weekly, March 24, 1999 by Lois Weiss

"They were afraid it would throw their workers out of work, and would gentrify the area," Shulsky said of a fear that is ironically now fueling the movement of office workers into the heart of the Garment Center.

The changes in the way people conduct business, and the economic changes to both the city and the country, have also hastened the decline in the number of Garment Center manufacturing firms.

Many jobs were lost by highly paid city workers when companies moved their manufacturing groups to overseas and out-of-state sites with dramatically lower pay scales for work forces.

"There used to be many showrooms that don't exist any more," Shulsky sighed. "There was a time during Market Week you couldn't get a ticket to a Broadway show."

Today, instead, a salesperson or buyer might get on a plane and travel to the chain store's headquarters in the Midwest, or visit a factory in Taiwan, or conduct business over the Internet.

While goods are financed, packaged, distributed and advertised in New York, little if anything is actually manufactured here, he noted.

"To think that is going to change by the enactment of a zoning resolution is worse than silly," he said.

Among the stated goals of the Special Garment Center District, established in 1987, are to retain adequate wage and job producing industries; preserve apparel production and showroom space; limit conversion of manufacturing space to office use; and conserve the value of land and buildings, and thereby protect the City's tax revenues.

"If there are places with cheaper rents, even with the zoning, in the end it's who can manufacture the dress cheaper," said Randall of the BID. "There are still many areas of the city where rents are even cheaper." Garment makers have already moved to both Sunset Park and Long Island City, she added.

Meanwhile, the reality of designated spaces and low rents is impacting the Fashion Center's capital improvement plans.

"We've been asking our owners to please upgrade their buildings, and we'd like them to do their facade and create better lighting and fix the sidewalks, but many of them are loathe to improve the building if it's a factory when they can't get higher rents," she said.

The Special District has been around for awhile, but the city's economy continues to evolve, observed Paul D. Selver, a zoning and land use partner with Battle Fowler.

"Under the circumstances, it might be appropriate to revisit the provisions and assess to see if [the rules] provide a valuable protection for manufacturing," he said. "If they don't any more, then the zoning regulations ought to look to the future and promote the uses, like office, that are moving in."

A few years ago, there was a problem with a Donna Karan space on West 40th. "They were challenged because a lot of [the space] is showroom, and a lot of their designing is done on computers," recalled Randall. "The city walked in and they didn't see tons of sewing machines, but did see tons of computers." The BID worked with the city to define what is "manufacturing."