#seventh ave.

[newyorkthegoldenage]

View of 7th Avenue, looking north from the 46-story Nelson Tower at 450 Seventh Avenue and 35th Street, southwest corner, 1935. The Metropolitan Opera is at the top center, and the Mills Hotel is at the lower right.

Photo: Berenice Abbott via MCNY

[newyorkthegoldenage]

A typical day in the Garment District, this one on October 8, 1952, a bustling hub of fashion and manufacturing. The workers who cut, sewed, and pushed endless racks and hand-trucks around the midtown neighborhood were “the living embodiment of New York’s working-class economy, whose sweat and long hours draped the shoulders of the rest of the country,” The New York Times reported in 2012. A stretch of 7th Avenue, between 26th and 42nd Streets, was officially designated “Fashion Avenue” in 1972.

Photo: Sam Falk for the NY Times via Times Instagram

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The Garment Center at noon, 7th Avenue & 28th St., June 1936.

Photo: Dorothea Lange via the NYC Municipal Archives

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Seventh Avenue, looking north from 35th Street, 1935.

Photo: Berenice Abbott via the Smithsonian American Art Museum

[newyorkthegoldenage]

7th Avenue, looking south from 35th St., ca. 1936.

Photo: Berenice Abbott via Sotheby's

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Herbert Sondheim, Dressmaker Extraordinaire

Today, the name “Sondheim” means musical theater, but during New York’s Golden Age it meant something quite different: superbly made, high fashion dresses and suits that were actually affordable.

Herbert Sondheim was born into the garment trade and opened his own business in 1923. His first designer, Janet Fox, also became his first wife and Stephen Sondheim’s mother. After their divorce, he hired Francis Troy Stix and, in the early sixties, Sarah Ripault to replace her. Sondheim Dresses were one of six labels known as “New York couture,” bringing the style and sophistication of the East to ordinary American shoppers.

Sondheim Dresses were known for the high quality of their workmanship—they were not chugged out on assembly lines—and for always being au courant with the latest Paris styles.  They were also (relatively) affordable, and sold only at a few select stores (in New York, it was Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor, and Best & Co.--all, appropriately enough, gone now). Even Jackie Kennedy wore his dresses!

Above left: Loretta Young in Bedtime Story (1941, suit by Irene). Above right: the Sondheim version.

Herbert was also a good citizen of Seventh Avenue, helping to found the Fashion Institute of Technology and serving on numerous committees involved in common garmento matters. The sixties were too much for him, though: the disappearance of “ladylike style” that had marked his early years doomed his company, and it closed in 1964.