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 Garment District seams poised for historic designationBy Chris Lombardi In the eight years since her company moved into production space at 242 W. 38th St., apparel industry entrepreneur Samanta Cortes has never thought of the building as anything more than a set of offices. “I knew it was old,” Cortes told Chelsea Now this week. She’d noticed, however, “that there were some really beautiful details.” But no one had ever told her that the 1924 building was designed by acclaimed Neoclassical architects Simon I. Schwartz and Arthur Gross, or that the lintel at its base is called an “entablature.” Or that it was on a list submitted to the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation as part of a proposed Garment Center Historic District. “It never occurred to me that it might be a landmark,” Cortes said. She wasn’t the only one who was surprised. Community Board 4’s Landmarks Task Force met for the first time on Thursday to consider the proposal, in time for a public meeting on the subject this coming week and a formal hearing in Albany next month. According to task force chairperson Edward Kirkland and the Historic Districts Council, the proposal was first broached by the Trust for Architectural Easements, a local nonprofit that has persuaded many New York building owners that such a district would benefit their bottom line. Its modus operandi is the “historic preservation easement,” in which building owners commit to allowing the trust to maintain the building’s historic facade in exchange for a substantial tax reduction. This week, while the CB 4 task force and area building owners look more closely at the proposal, local stakeholders interviewed by Chelsea Now were both hopeful and a little skeptical about whether the Trust’s optimistic strategy would address the dilemmas they face every day. ‘It must be stopped’ The proposed Garment Center Historic District would run from Sixth to Ninth Aves. and from 35th to 41st Sts. Those boundaries are actually several blocks west of the 19th century garment district, which swelled into and disrupted old Broadway theaters at Herald Square. As a result, the burgeoning apparel industry was forced to move west of Broadway after World War I by the powerful Fifth Avenue Association and its Save New York Association. A full-page ad in the New York Times charged that the immigrant horde “now threatens the fine residential and shopping district of Fifth Avenue, Broadway, upper Sixth and Madison Avenues and the cross streets... The evil is constantly increasing. It must be stopped.” Finally, 126 apparel companies agreed to move west of Sixth Avenue, and in 1919 the first of the Garment Center’s signature buildings began to rise. At its height, in 1939, the industry employed over a half-million workers in factories, suppliers and craft shops. Now, while fashion is still among New York’s top industries—bringing in $47 billion in 2006—mass production has moved offshore, especially to India and China. The District’s workers are mostly artisans specializing in “a higher level of service to the designer,” according to the city-funded Garment Industry Development Corporation (GIDC). In recent years, as previously covered in Chelsea Now, the Department of City Planning has begun to change the District’s real estate picture to conform with industry changes. First, the 2005 Hudson Yards rezoning incorporated the Garment District blocks west of Eighth Ave. This sliced off the western flank of the Special Garment District, created in 1987 to preserve New York’s manufacturing base amid surging rents, which sharply limited rentals by non-apparel tenants. After 2005, as numerous former garment buildings have made way for residential and hotel construction, City Planning began working to introduce a tentative rezoning plan for the District to community boards. The Trust began to float its proposed historic district to the Fashion Center Business Improvement District (BID) in February 2007—and soon realized its timing could not have been worse. Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden had just promised that upcoming zoning changes would help them “upgrade” the District into something far smoother, more tourist-friendly and more profitable than the gritty remainders of its industrial past. ‘Knee-jerk fear of over-regulation’ “We walked into a political situation we didn’t anticipate,” said Sean Zalka, New York area manager for the Trust (formerly known as the National Architectural Trust). The last thing that a building owner hoping to be liberated from zoning restrictions wanted to hear, he said, was the word “preservation”—which, thanks to the city’s famously stringent Landmarks Preservation Commission, often signals even further restrictions. “There’s a knee-jerk fear of over-regulation and cost burdens,” Zalka told Chelsea Now in a phone conversation this week. “The first thing we tell them is: The designation we’re seeking is purely honorific. The second thing: We can make it so that it actually reduces your building costs.” Unlike the more stringent city Landmarks designation, under which owners of designated buildings must submit all alteration plans to the LPC, inclusion in the state and federal Historic Places registry doesn’t itself impose limits on what building owners can do with their buildings. Federal designation does give owners tax incentives for maintaining their buildings—both a 20 percent federal credit and a five-year tax abatement against any increases in value that result from rehabilitating the building—and offers help with restoration funds. The Trust says it has found a way to sweeten the pot further, and that it can broker deals with building owners that offer more substantial protection to historic resources. A “historic preservation easement,” first defined by the 1974 National Historic Preservation Act, is a legal agreement made between a property owner and a qualified charitable or governmental organization. Under the agreement, which alters the deed on the property and extends to future owners, owners promise to protect in perpetuity a building’s historic exterior, and not change the outside appearance of the property unless the organization signs off on it. The easement is counted as a donation to the organization and is completely tax-deductible. On average, Zalka said, the value of the donation is about 10 percent of the overall value of the building—a substantial boost to the owners’ bottom line. “If your building is valued at $10 million, and you get a million off your taxes, that’s what I’d call an incentive,” noted Simeon Bankoff, executive director of the Historic Districts Council. According to Zalka’s organization, more than 4,000 easement agreements have been signed around the country since 1974, and the practice is widespread in older cities like Boston, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. In New York, the Trust now maintains agreements with 500 building owners in scores of historic districts, including Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene and the newly established Wall Street District. The Garment District effort was inspired by his organization’s donors, Zalka said on Wednesday. “We have owners that wanted to bring some recognition to the area,” he added, including Walter Samuel, who owned a 1927 building at 315 W. 36th St. built by apparel tycoons Max Rosenfeld, Paul Herring and Isadore Geller. “He approached us about designation,” Zalka said. The Trust arranged for Samuel’s building to be placed singly on the register. “But then, going forward,” Zalka added, “we knew it would be best to treat it as a district.” Will it work? The next step was to hire Anthony Robins, who in the 1990s directed research, surveys and special projects for the LPC, and whose 2005 report “The Case for Preservation Easements” noted that his former agency had failed to actively protect another venerable neighborhood. “Although a large National Register historic district covers much of the heart of the Lower East Side—a national symbol of immigration history,” he writes, “the commission has never considered regulating the district there.” Robins studied the Garment District block by block and building by building, and as he studied, he and Zalka talked to building owners. When asked how many said they’d be interested, Zalka estimated, “several dozen.” Meanwhile, City Planning began to float new zoning plan, drawn from a 2006 report by the BID, that would have allowed more square footage to be used for Class B office space, hotels and destination retail. That proposal stalled last summer in the face of opposition from the District’s current business owners, though the department’s hopes are still high. “We continue to work closely on combined efforts to support and enhance businesses in the Garment District,” said City Planning spokesperson Jennifer Torres, while materials from DCP, the BID and EDC all speak of “enhancements” to the district. Finally, the Trust met with the executive committee of the Fashion Center BID. “The BID’s policy is to stay neutral,” Zalka said, “but they weren’t unfavorable.” The Trust’s proposal, including Robins’ 220-page description of the District, now sits at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. On Feb. 28, a one-hour community meeting at the Parsons School of Design will offer one last chance for community feedback. Going in, stakeholders who talked to Chelsea Now were mostly curious. For Board 4’s Kirkland, the devil is in the details. “They’ve talked a lot of property owners into it,” he said. “But will this really prevent anything that they might want to do?” Magda Aboufadl, director of enforcement for GIDC, agreed with Bankoff, saying that the Trust proposal would have “very little impact” on the current challenges in the district. “The federal registry has zero impact on a building’s interior,” Aboufadl said. She added as a caveat that she knew nothing yet about the role of easements, or the fact that building owners were actually under at least some obligation on a permanent basis. And HDC’s Bankoff, while enthusiastic about easements as an alternative to the LPC, cautioned that a federal designation would likely have no impact on any zoning proposals for the district. “They’ll do an environmental impact statement for it, and it’ll say that the impact on historic buildings will be minimal,” Bankoff said, sighing. “That always works, doesn’t it?”
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