A TALK BY NY HISTORIAN WARREN SHAW
From The Triangle To The Tiger: New York’s Garment Center In American Popular Culture, 1920-1970
Thursday, May 24, 2012 at 7:30 p.m.
East 54th Street Recreation Center
348 East 54th Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenue
A multimedia examination of a completely overlooked aspect of Popular Culture — the popular take on New York’s Garment Center during its peak years.
From the 1920s through the 1970s Seventh Avenue was the undisputed center of American garment-making. During these years the industry shook off its sweatshop roots, and owners worked tirelessly to promote an aura of glamour and confidence. From the industry’s remorseless waves of success and failure, garment workers created some of the great rhythms of the City, while the lunchtime oceans of streetside workers, models, designed and owners made up one of New York’s daily spectacles.
But in the 1960s the ground began to shift. Rising costs and other factors drove a growing share of manufacturing abroad — first to New Jersey and Pennsylvania, then to the South and West, to the Caribbean and around the world. A fatal combination of increasingly national-scale retail, heavily-promoted competition from Western companies like Levi’s, the fashion-spurning “Youthquake” or counterculture, and the aging-out of many of the old firm owners, all rang down the curtain on the Garment Center’s mid-century dominance. By the 1980s Seventh Avenue’s proud place as the foremost emblem of the City’s economy had been taken over by real estate developers — and by Wall Street.
Learn about the Golden Age of the Garment Center, and its Pop Culture artifacts — the novels, plays, songs, films, advertising and other popular imagery that tells the changing fortunes of the Garment District. By turns informative, campy, bigoted, and just plain naive, this imagery is deeply evocative of a once-vital City sector, now more a tourists’ lure than a force in New York’s life.
Admission is free, but reservations are required. Please call (212) 408-0293, or email artsculturefun@parks.nyc.gov
For further information:
http://warrenshawhistorian.com/Upcoming_Lectures.html
