Immigrants who built New Yorks roads, canals, and bridges also, manned its factories, transforming the city into the nation's manufacturing capital in the nineteenth century. That distinction heavily influenced its initial predisposition against the Civil War, and then its robust economy, once war began.
Buoyed by Isaac M. Singer's marketing of the first commercially successful sewing machine in the 1850s and the shift in demand from tailor-made to readymade clothing- first for slaves and then for Union soldiers - the garment industry boomed. In a marked metamorphosis, by the end of the war, more Americans were buying their clothing than making it themselves.
Making clothing was labor-intensive. It accounted for nearly one in three manufacturing jobs as early as 1860. The garment industry became the city's biggest employer, fueled by the influx of cheap Eastern European immigrant labor. By 1900, production by the second biggest industry, sugar refining, was valued at only one third that of the garment industry. A decade later, it was producing 40 percent of men's and 70 percent of women's clothing purchased across the country.
The garment industry also introduced women to the workplace and transformed Midtown West into the world's densest and most vibrant district for fashion design and manufacturing. Each block boasted its own specialty, from furriers to button-makers, trimmings, notions, and bridal gowns.
In recent decades, high Manhattan rents and cheaper nonunion labor in the South and in Asia have siphoned off most of the manufacturing. Many showrooms remain, and buyers still throng to Fashion Week in New York every February and September. But the Fashion Center Business Improvement District considered changing its name to reflect the growing diversity of tenants in the district bounded roughly by Thirty-Fourth to Forty-Second Streets and Fifth to Ninth Avenues.
Abraham Cahan, the socialist founder of the Jewish Daily Forward, wrote: "Foreigners ourselves, and mostly unable to speak English, we had Americanized the system of providing clothes for the American woman of moderate or humble means. The average American woman is the best-dressed woman in the world, and the Russian Jew has had a good deal to do with making her one.
Significantly, the clothing industry also emerged as an incubator for union organizers. The International Ladies' Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers were at the forefront of labor reforms, many of which were first adopted by New York early in the twentieth century and later became a template for New Deal labor and social welfare legislation nationally.
TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
