If Santa slipped a sable under your tree this year, he probably picked it up in Manhattan’s fur district, a neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side filled with old-school fur retailers, manufacturers and wholesalers. But come next year, St. Nick may have to start shopping elsewhere, as the once-seedy factory zone — now a delightful hodgepodge — is slowly taken over by a bevy of chain hotels and trendy new restaurants.
“The greed of the landlords is just beyond the scope,” says Stephen Cowit, a third-generation furrier who operates Henry Cowit Inc., the wholesale division of Madison Avenue Furs; his brother Larry oversees retail. Prices at his shop, located at 118 W. 27th St., range from $500 to $3,000 for pre-owned coats and $3,000 and up for new furs.
“We got booted out of our place at 151 W. 29th St. after 42 years,” Stephen Cowit adds. “We never missed a rent check.”
Cowit says that when he started in the fur business back in 1977, practically every storefront in each building on 28th, 29th and 30th streets between Sixth and Eighth avenues was filled with fur floggers. There were some 450 fur factories serving the New York area at that time. Today, just 14 remain, according to Cowit, who acts as treasurer of the trade organization Greater Fur New York.
There’s no exact tally of how many fur purveyors still operate in the district. But a quick walkabout shows about a dozen retail storefronts left — and all the hotels creeping in.
“The flower district is next door to us, and you can see what happened there: six hotels on 28th between Sixth and Seventh on just one side of the street. Those were all flower and fur shops,” Cowit says. “I have got to figure, in five to 10 years, there’s going to be no more mom-and-pop stores around.”
And 28th Street is just the tip of the mink stole. In the eastern swath of the fur district, around Sixth Avenue, massive upscale hotels have opened, including the Kimpton Hotel Eventi and Hyatt House New York. With those debuts (and the area’s multimillion-dollar condo developments) come dining outlets and nightspots like L’Amico, Haymaker Bar and Kitchen and American Whisky, which are eating up storefronts where family-run fur shops once flourished. And toward the Hudson River, Related Companies’ $25 billion mixed-use development Hudson Yards is bringing never-before-seen luxury offices, retail and condos to the formerly industrial corridor.
Directly across the street from Peter Duffy Furs, a 62-year-old shop at 231 W. 29th St., a Holiday Inn Express has popped up in a former parking lot used by area fur dealers.
“The biggest change around here is all the hotels,” the shop’s owner, Marge Duffy, says. “The problem is there is no place to park. You’ve got to walk with coats for blocks and blocks now.”
And real estate experts say to expect more of the same going forward. “Those wholesalers just can’t stay in business anymore,” says Joanne Podell, executive vice chairman of commercial real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield, highlighting the surrounding area’s gentrification and high-gloss newcomers. “You’ve got NoMad next door. You’ve got exciting things happening along Broadway above 23rd Street. And it’s all connected to 34th Street shopping to the north. You’ve got . . . buildings being converted to residential. It’s just like the flower district.”
Podell highlights the rising prices that result from that new development. “Why are [the furriers] gone?” she says. “Because they can’t afford to be there.”
“We had a showroom for $3,000 a month … now [it’s] $15,000.”
- Furrier Marc Kaufman
Their exit is not without protest. “We are artisanal manufacturers and that requires workspace,” says Keith Kaplan, a spokesperson for the Fur Information Council of America, a national fur trade nonprofit. “It gets cost-prohibitive when we are fighting tech firms and the like. So we innovate.”
Kaplan says preserving New York’s fur district is not within the scope of his organization, and that he has seen many area institutions move to fairer (read: cheaper) fields in Queens.
Still, it may be too early for PETA partisans to begin celebrating the district’s death. While business certainly isn’t what it was, local furriers — who’ve also been slammed by e-commerce, allowing shoppers to buy online — say that their neighborhood’s renaissance has actually had a buoying effect. They’re seeing increased traffic and customers with deeper pockets.
“The hotels bring new clients to our business,” says the eponymous owner of Marc Kaufman Furs at 212 W. 30th St. Although, he adds, “everything has changed” for his business. “We had a 5,000-square-foot showroom for $3,000 a month. Now, that space is $15,000 a month.”
Even Cowit admits to benefiting from the area’s rising tide, citing increased walk-ins at his own shop. “We get a lot of traffic from the hotel down the block,” he says of the new four-star Innside New York NoMad hotel at 132 W. 27th St. “I’m optimistic there will always be a fur industry.”