Preservation of American Hellenic History
Preservation of American Hellenic History
by Jason C. Mavrovitis
Furriers in New York City had their businesses centered on Seventh Avenue; framed east to west by Sixth and Eighth Avenues, and north to south by Thirty-second and Twenty-sixth Street Streets. This was the fur market, known to its workers as "the Market." Dingy, high-rise buildings housed its factories. By the late 1920's the manufacturers' showrooms were decorated in an art-deco style. They lost any semblance of elegance as they aged, worn and ill kept. Rarely did the proprietors even clean their showroom mirrors, whose patinas of dust softened the reflections of generations of women who adored themselves in mink, fox, ermine and sable.
The factories, behind showrooms and bookkeepers' office space, consisted of large open bays with unfinished wood floors and nine-foot windows. Along the windows were waist high benches. Matchers and cutters worked there in the natural light that enabled them to judge fur color and hair height. Close by were rows of machines where operators under the watchful eye and supervision of a matcher and cutter sewed together long pieces of fur skins that had been carefully sliced by the cutter. When joined these strips reformed the appearance of the fur and, when attached to adjoining skins, attained the shape and style of a designer's conception.
There were tables where junior workers opened the bellies of tanned fur skins, removing heads, paws and tails for use in manufacture of "plates," or large rectangles of fur material that were cut into shapes to sew into "piece garments." At other tables, men called "nailers," stretched and nailed semi-finished products to pattern boards to establish the final form of a garment. In larger factories groups of women chattering in Greek or Yiddish sewed silk linings and monograms into stoles, jackets, capes and coats. Cleaning equipment, patterns hanging from wall pegs, and bundles of furs filled the rest of the space.
There was heat in the winter, but not a lot of it. In New York summers the shops were hot, humid spaces relieved only a bit when on a day that the wind blew fresh from the north and west it found its way through open windows to restore the workers. Ubiquitous loose hair clung to perspiring skin. One toilette served up to one hundred male and female workers in a loft. Winter or summer Jimmy wore a white shirt and tie, and a white, cotton smock that reached his knees.
[Skip the navigation links: Jump to the Citation Guidelines.]
[Skip the citation guidelines: Jump to the Bottom of the Page.]
(This is the bottom of the page.)