The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  The fire brought the idea “that government has a responsibility, that there are things the boss and the union can’t do,” said Leon Stein, the author of “The Triangle Fire,” a definitive account.

  Triangle, owned by Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, was the nation’s largest manufacturer of the shirtwaist-style blouse, a popular, closely fitted garment with long sleeves and buttons to the neck.

  They were acquitted of manslaughter, and the company, which ultimately faded out of existence, received $64,925 more in insurance benefits than claims for which they could prove loss; Mr. Stein said it was a profit of $445 for each of the 146 victims. A few, small settlements were made with workers’ families.

  New York, Cradle of Labor History

  By STEVEN GREENHOUSE | August 30, 1996

  Jefferson Market Courthouse was made a National Historic Landmark in 1977 and now is used as a branch of the New York Public Library.

  NEW YORK MAY BE NOTORIOUS FOR BULLdozing over its history, but somehow the wrecking ball has spared many sites that served as crucibles for labor. Not far from Manhattan in-spots like the Union Square Cafe and CBGB’s, not far from the Bowery and Orchard Street, many of the nation’s epic labor battles took place.

  Probably the best place to start a tour is the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, east of Washington Square at the northwest corner of Washington Place and Greene Street. New York University now uses the stately building for biology and chemistry studies. The only hint of the place’s history comes from two plaques, one from the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union reading: “Out of their martyrdom came new concepts of social responsibility and labor legislation.”

  Head next to the JEFFERSON MARKET COURTHOUSE, now a public library, at the Avenue of the Americas and West 10th Street. Here the police dragged hundreds of female strikers arrested during the Uprising of the 20,000. The workers went on strike to protest low wages, the requirement that they pay for their needles and thread, and favoritism toward compliant workers. Mrs. August Belmont once sat up all night in this courthouse and put up her palatial Madison Avenue mansion as collateral to get several strikers out of jail pending trial.

  Nearby are two picturesque cul-de-sacs, PATCHIN PLACE (off West 10th Street, between Greenwich Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas) and MILLIGAN PLACE (on the Avenue of the Americas between West 10th and 11th Streets). Here, rooming houses were built around 1850 for the Basque waiters at the Brevoort Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Patchin Place’s tenants included E. E. Cummings, Theodore Dreiser and John Reed, the Harvard dropout turned radical who chronicled the Russian Revolution in the book “Ten Days That Shook the World.”

  Next is UNION SQUARE, which contrary to popular belief is not named after labor unions. Even so, New York’s first Labor Day Parade was held here in 1882, when 25,000 people under a Knights of Labor banner marched for an eight-hour day and a ban on child labor. In 1930, 35,000 demonstrators protested the Depression and clashed with the police here, leaving 100 people injured.

  Union Square has been the home of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and the Amalgamated Bank, the nation’s first labor-owned bank, the Communist Party and its newspaper, The Daily Worker.

  Next, walk to 208-210 East 13th Street, an orange-brick tenement where Emma Goldman, the anarchist and advocate of free love, lived from 1903 to 1913. Her lover Alexander Berkman tried to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, the steel magnate, during the 1892 Homestead steel strike near Pittsburgh.

  Head to WEBSTER HALL, at 119 East 11th Street, where Woody Guthrie sang on behalf of unions in the 1930’s and where earlier the Socialist magazine The Masses held fund-raising balls. Walk next to TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK, at 10th Street and Avenue A. In the recession of 1874, 6,000 protesters from the Workingmen’s Party gathered to hear New York’s mayor, William F. Havemeyer, speak about helping the unemployed. When he failed to appear and the police declared the rally illegal, the protesters clashed with the police, injuring hundreds of officers. Samuel Gompers cowered in a doorway nearby, and it is said that the riot turned him away from radical unionism.

  Then walk along St. Marks Place to COOPER UNION, founded in 1859 by Peter Cooper, the philanthropist who made the first rolled steel railroad tracks and helped Samuel Morse lay the first Atlantic telegraph cable. Cooper created this school to provide free art and technology education to working people. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln gave a major address in the school’s Great Hall. In 1909, Gompers led an emotional meeting of shirtwaist workers that authorized the Uprising of the 20,000. “There comes a time,” he said, “when not to strike is but to rivet the chains of slavery upon our wrists.”

  David Dubinsky, 90, Dies; Led Garment Union

  September 18, 1982

  DAVID DUBINSKY, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE International Ladies Garment Workers Union and an influential labor leader for more than three decades, died yesterday at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan after a long illness. He was 90 years old and lived in Manhattan.

  With extraordinary flair and boundless energy, Mr. Dubinsky was the major force in converting a union that was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1932 into a dynamic organization that had $500 million in assets in 1966, when he became its honorary president.

  The influence of Mr. Dubinsky, a short man with gray crew-cut hair, extended well beyond his union. He played a major role in the formation of the Committee for Industrial Organization, forerunner of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, in the mid-1930’s; he was the first head of an American Federation of Labor union to demand action against organized racketeering in unions; he pushed labor toward greater social responsibility, and he was for many years one of the forces behind the Liberal Party in New York.

  Mr. Dubinsky, whose personality was once described as ranging from “that of global statesman to that of a dead-end kid,” was sometimes captious, sometimes overbearing, but always able to bring high drama into every report and talk.

  He never lost his Yiddish accent, his tendency to wave his arms at the slightest provocation or his loud voice, which started as a shout and went up from there.

  Under his leadership, the I.L.G.W.U. accumulated a long list of firsts. Among them were the publication of financial statements long before it was legally required, the establishment of research and engineering departments to improve the efficiency of the garment trade and the creation of educational and cultural programs for thousands of members.

  Perhaps Mr. Dubinsky’s most notable achievement was in bringing a standard 35-hour week to a sweatshop industry that was in a constant state of chaos. The union was less successful, however, in establishing high wage levels in New York and other garment centers in the Northeast.

  Prof. Joel Seidman of the University of Chicago said that under Mr. Dubinsky “the union itself changed from a radical organization with a Socialist goal into one of more moderate tendencies, advocating reform within the context of private enterprise.”

  FASHION, PUBLISHING AND ADVERTISING

  100,000 Men and Women Fill The Apparel Needs of the World

  By DANIEL LANG | November 5, 1939

  Seamstresses and tailors fashion coats to fill numerous orders at Originala Inc, a former maker of women’s clothing in Manhattan.

  BUSINESS RECOVERY WHICH HAS COME WITH the autumn will find few more enthusiastic celebrants than those employers and workers concerned with New York’s half-billion dollar dress business, the largest industry in the city.

  New York’s—and the nation’s—apparel capital occupies an area of six or seven blocks. If the visitor enters one of the garment center’s factories, he will come upon the buzz of high-speed sewing machines, designers creating new fashions, finishers sewing on buttons and belts and pressers ironing out the still-wrinkled dresses.

  Somewhat over 100,000 metropolitan inhabitants make their living answering the apparel needs of this worldwide market. At least another 20,000 are engaged in such neighboring trades as the manufacture of buttons, belts, artificial
flowers and buckles.

  Yet wholesale dressmaking is by no means a very old industry. Immigrants who found refuge here went into the needle trades. Like the pioneers of an earlier day, they were confronted with great obstacles. Theirs was the wilderness of sweatshop and firetrap.

  On a fateful day 28 years ago the conditions under which they worked were dramatized in a frightful fire. Sheer chance picked out a place called the Triangle Shirt and Waist Company. The Triangle fire did not take long—just 15 tragic minutes. But that was long enough. One hundred forty-six young bodies lay charred in Washington Place.

  Today conditions are very different. Impressive fireproof, day-light factories stand in Triangle’s stead. The union runs a health center. The day’s working hours have dwindled to seven, the week’s days to five. In non-slack seasons, every worker makes at least $31.50 each week.

  Before dress manufacturing could emerge from its wallowing sweatshop stage, it had to solve the vexing problem of seemingly endless strikes and lockouts. So successful has the garment industry’s method of settling capital-labor difficulties proved, that it has been imitated far beyond the borders of Manhattan. Within those borders fully a quarter-million manufacturers and employees in some half-dozen industries have achieved peaceful relations along lines modeled after the arbitration set-up of the dress business.

  Buttonholes to Go

  By N.R. KLEINFIELD | January 17, 1993

  WHEN YOU’RE IN MELVIN REICH’S BEAT-UP shop and just sort of gazing at the people lined up, you see a lot of clothing that seems to have nothing in common but actually does. The other afternoon there was an indigo dress, an ocher pair of pants, a woman’s bright-orange coat that you had to wonder who would wear, a lime shirt and a tiny lavender sweater that was probably for someone no more than about 3. Try to get into any of these items and it would be awkward. They were without buttonholes. That alone was why they were here.

  “Buttonholes are what we do,” Mr. Reich said crisply. “I am specialized, like the doctors. The one who takes care of the throat does not take care of the eyes. I take care of the buttonholes.”

  He is a spry 68, and by now he knows that his is ultimately dark and desperate work only for the ardent-hearted, for there is not much hope for arcane specialists anymore when clothing can be made cheaper on foreign soil or by nonunion low-wage labor. Emissaries from Bill Blass, Geoffrey Beene, Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta and Albert Nippon still regularly troop to Mr. Reich’s unprepossessing quarters for some of their buttonholes. There used to be 2,000 or more buttonholes a day, while now a very active day means 1,000.

  Fashion is about a lot of things, and it is always easier to focus on the big and ignore the little, but what is a garment without the small touches? For instance, no fine blouse is fine, no suit absolutely perfect, without a good buttonhole.

  Mrs. Reich elaborates: “You think it’s nothing. Just a buttonhole. But it’s something. It’s not nothing.”

  Beene Gives His Regards To Seventh Avenue

  By BERNADINE MORRIS | January 8, 1991

  GEOFFREY BEENE SAID FAREWELL TO Seventh Avenue last week after laboring in the turbulent center of the garment district for more than 30 years. About 8 a.m. the day after New Year’s, after a vacation in Hawaii, he stopped in to say goodbye to the people who will continue working in his old showroom at 550 Seventh Avenue. Then he headed uptown to his new salon at 37 West 57th Street.

  Sleekly sophisticated with lacquered black furniture, silver walls and black and white marble floors, it will be the kickoff site for his new approach to global fashion. This is where he will create his new collections, deal with his growing group of private customers, make plans for projected boutiques in Paris and Vienna and handle the overflow from his tiny shop, his first experience in retailing, which opened a year ago at 783 Fifth Avenue, in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel.

  “Seventh Avenue was good to me,” said the designer, who opened his own company there in 1963.

  In recent years he has been widely acclaimed as this country’s most adventurous designer, second to none in inventing new ways to cut cloth. Among his ground rules: clothes must be comfortable; fabrics must be lightweight; there are no retro designs and no place for astonishment for its own sake.

  “Seventh Avenue was good to me,” said the designer.

  “What I am always trying to do is to idealize a woman’s form, never to vulgarize it or to expose it,” he said. “Designing is an architectural problem. You are faced with a piece of crepe or wool, the flattest thing in the world, and you have to mold it into the shape you want. Clothing is nothing until it hits the body. The body gives it shape.”

  The serenity of his new salon with its Art Deco overtones will be conducive to his work, he believes. “If I get stuck, I have the continuing theater that is New York for inspiration right outside my window,” he said.

  Syndicate Plans New Diamond Center

  July 10, 1958

  PLANS FOR A DIAMOND CENTER AT 49 TO 55 West 47th Street, between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue), were announced yesterday by Philip Gelfand, an attorney. He represents a syndicate that has taken a 99-year lease on the property.

  Mr. Gelfand said the four brownstone houses occupying a plot 80 by 100 feet would be demolished soon. Preliminary plans being considered by the syndicate include one for a two-story building.

  Forty-seventh Street is expanding rapidly as a jewelry and diamond district, according to the attorney. He cited as an example of rising land values there the recent sale of a plot 20 by 100 feet for more than $200,000.

  Diamonds Are Forever (Until Nightfall)

  By STEVEN KURUTZ | January 29, 2006

  IF YOU WORK IN THE DIAMOND DISTRICT, where spectacular robberies seem to occur every couple of months, it is necessary to take certain security measures. According to Jack Grant, who is better known as Jack of Diamonds and has been selling jewels on West 47th Street since the 1970’s, you need a good safe, security cameras, a gun and, if one judges by Mr. Grant’s eternally arched eyebrow, a general mistrust of everyone.

  It also helps to have well-developed spatial skills and a tolerance of routine, because to foil thieves, storeowners pack up their wares every night, leaving their display windows looking empty and forlorn. If you wander through the diamond district between 6 p.m. and 9 a.m., you might think that the entire operation had up and folded. That is, until the morning, when dealers unpack the jewels and lay them out again.

  “First thing you do is look to see if everything is still there,” said Mr. Grant, standing behind a glass counter on a recent morning and inspecting the contents of a brass-colored floor safe. Everything was: rings in trays stacked atop one another like egg cartons; loose stones wrapped in paraffin paper and tucked inside white envelopes; gold necklaces stretched across display boards, a small fortune of jewelry given the flea-market treatment. Thousands of these items are laid out each morning in the space of 20 minutes.

  “In a store in Westchester, they might display their items nicely,” Mr. Grant said. “Here, you just schlep it out” to the display windows. Mr. Grant, 61, has schlepped out his merchandise about 7,000 times in his lifetime. At one point, in the early 80’s, he sold gold finery to R & B stars (“I had the Commodores”) and the occasional Times Square pimp.

  At 4:30, Mr. Grant and his three part-time employees began packing up. In his younger days, he might have stayed open a little longer to catch a late customer. Now he likes to leave by 5. He and his assistants made quick work of the jewelry, stacking the trays inside the safe as if they were packing a miniature U-Haul for an important move.

  By 5, the store was dark and the front window empty, except for an oversized playing card—a Jack of Diamonds—and a sign that read, “We buy diamond and gold jewelry.”

  William Goldberg, 77, Dies; A Trader in Rare Diamonds

  By DOUGLAS MARTIN | October 26, 2003

  Diamond dealer William Goldberg in his shop at 20 West 47th Sreet in 1978. />
  WILLIAM GOLDBERG, A LEADER OF MANHATTAN’S diamond district known both for dealing in some of the biggest diamonds sold in modern times and for trying to lift his industry’s historic veil of secrecy, died Monday at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 77.

  The cause was pancreatic cancer, Barry Berg, his son-in-law, said.

  Modern Jeweler magazine in 1990 said Mr. Goldberg was the first gem dealer to find fame while remaining part of 47th Street, as the diamond-littered block-long stretch on the West Side is internationally known. A buzzing, cluttered bazaar of wholesalers, retailers and everybody in between, it lies between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

  The magazine said that industry giants like Harry Winston and Lazare Kaplan either bypassed the street or rose above it. Mr. Goldberg not only stayed but also served three terms as president of the Diamond Dealers Club, where billions of dollars worth of diamonds are exchanged every year on the strength of a handshake and the Yiddish expression “mazel und brucha,” meaning luck and a blessing.

  “He wields the greatest influence ever of any United States diamond dealer,” the magazine said.

  Mr. Goldberg’s voice was heard on matters from security on 47th Street to “conflict diamonds” in Africa, but his greatest fame came from quietly buying and selling some of the world’s biggest and best gems—and then, of course, talking vociferously about the deals to anybody who would listen.

  In the 1970’s, there was the Queen of Holland diamond, part of a necklace once owned by an Indian maharajah. Mr. Goldberg found it in a Swiss bank vault and bought it, in an episode he described as “right out of the movies” in an interview with Newsday in 1991.