WAS The New York Times trying to deceive its read ers, or did the Gray Lady herself get taken in? I’m talking about the lead article in the Times’ City section last Sunday.
In the lengthy, empathy-oozing and lavishly illustrated piece – “Pins and Needles” – reporter Jennifer Bleyer recounted the plight of several apparel-industry firms struggling to stay in the so-called Garment District. (Given how few manufacturing companies remain, the name is about as accurate as “MeatPacking District” is for Downtown’s restaurant-and-retail mecca.)
However, Bleyer utterly misrepresented the sides, and the stakes, in the key battle over the area – namely, the Bloomberg administration’s (stalled) drive to rewrite zoning rules to allow former factory buildings to be used for offices and other non-manufacturing purposes.
That initiative has been the story in the district ever since city Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden first announced it last winter. But the Times article seemed only dimly aware of its existence and deaf to its intent.
Having reported on that fight more than once – most recently under the headline “Zoned for Blight” on June 26 – I’ll take the liberty of pointing out the Times’ blunders:
* The Times suggested the city’s priority is to protect small apparel businesses and their employees from being forced out of the area by rising rents. It attributed to an Economic Development Corp. official the view that the “migration of showrooms is a primary impetus for the Bloomberg administration’s discussions about rezoning.”
That will persuade only readers unfamiliar with what’s been going on in the area for the past 10 months. The notion that the city is mainly out to protect small apparel-industry companies from supposedly greedy landlords turns the truth on its head – even if one EDC official believes it (although the words in quotation marks above were Bleyer’s, not the official’s).
It’s true, EDC doesn’t want every last showroom or button-maker driven out; neither, for that matter, do most landlords, who appreciate their importance to the area now dominated not by manufacturing, but fashion design and marketing.
But the city wants to dramatically reduce – not increase – the amount of space that the zoning code requires landlords to provide. That this is the top goal is not exactly a secret: The City Planning Department has been working on a publicly announced, widely reported major rezoning proposal since last winter.
Yet Bleyer’s piece didn’t even mention the Planning Department. Nor did it say the rezoning bid would reduce by as much as 80 percent the amount of floor space earmarked for such uses as apparel showrooms, printing and accessory-making on certain blocks in the West 30s and 40s.
Last February, Burden accurately termed the existing garment-area zoning “the most anachronistic in the city.” The rules have left millions of square feet of precious space empty or underused – and often crumbling. Owners can’t find enough tenants who can pay market rates and to whom they can legally rent floors; as a result, they can’t afford to modernize or even clean them – which is why window fans still adorn some blocks in the district.
City planners are out to redress this wasteful, economically counterproductive status quo. But unlike other rezonings that have sailed through, the garment-center initiative is bogged down in political wheeling and dealing.
* The Times didn’t mention the chief roadblock to rezoning: labor union Unite Here, a successor to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. It’s throwing the kitchen sink at the plan and manipulating the media every way it can.
Unite Here’s paw-prints are all over the Times article, even though neither its name (nor even the word “union”) appears anywhere in it.
However, Bleyer does cite the views of the Garment Industry Development Corp. (GIDC), which she calls an “industry advocate group.” She quotes a GIDC official who lamented seeing “whole floors go from factory to travel agency.”
The same GIDC official provided the article’s “nut” paragraph, equating loss of garment factories in the past to “death by a thousand cuts” – a grim scenario recently escalated to “entire limbs being cut off.”
An innocent reader might well infer from all this that GIDC represents the apparel industry – period. But why, you may ask, would the “industry” complain about the recent loss of a relatively small number of businesses, when that very same industry had bailed out en masse from the neighborhood long before the soaring rents of the past few years? (Sewing jobs there fell from around 200,000 in the 1950s to about 5,000 in the year 2000.)
The answer: GIDC, although purporting to represent the “industry,” looks, sounds and smells more like a front group for Unite Here. To grasp that requires no Watergate-style sleuthing, but merely a glance at GIDC’s own Web site.
Unite Here bosses hold two of the three spots on GIDC’s executive committee. GIDC’s chairman is none other than Bruce Raynor, the president of Unite Here, who boasts of organizing southern JP Stevens textile workers back in the “Norma Rae” era. GIDC’s secretary-treasurer is Unite Here’s executive vice-president, Edgar Romney.
GIDC claims to represent the interests of the apparel industry, the union and the city. Its board (not including the executive committee) does include seven industry members. But where each of them represents a different company or trade association, the board’s five labor members are all from the same union – Unite Here.
And the city’s alleged participation is negligible. Its only representative on GIDC’s board is an assistant commissioner of a neighborhood division of the Department of Small Business Services.
In a burlesque of balancing the story, the Times also quoted the director of the Fashion Center Business Improvement District, the business-advocacy group that strongly favors rezoning.
But while the Times was mute as to the makeup of GIDC’s board, it left no doubt as to who supposedly calls the shots at the BID: Its board, we were informed, “includes more than a dozen real-estate executives.”
“Pins and Needles?” A better title might have been “Baloney and Propaganda.”
scuozzo@nypost.com
