The city has decided not to rezone the Garment Center, according to an article by Adrianne Pasquarelli in the June 13, 2010 edition of Crain's.

"According to sources familiar with the planning process," the article said, "the city is going back to the drawing board and is conducting a new study of the neighborhood, which it hopes to release this summer. City officials declined to comment."

Last April, it continued, the city announced a plan that would have taken the 9.5-million-square-foot manufacturing district in the 13-block garment center "and sewn it into a single 300,000-square-foot building on West 38th Street."

In the article, Nanette Lepore, a fashion designer involved with the battle to oppose the rezoning, said that "We always knew that was kind of a ridiculous proposal."

The city's "apparent change of heart comes amid a chorus of complaints from high-profile designers - including Yeohlee Tang and Diane von Furstenberg - and retail executives, as well as an army of sewers, fabric cutters, pattern makers and button sellers who work in the area.," according to the article.

"Word of the city's move follows a study released this month by the Design Trust for Public Spaces. Instead of describing the garment center as a relic of a bygone industrial age, the new report bills it as a thriving and hugely productive research-and-development hub for high-end fashion," the article continued.

Susan Scafidi, fashion law professor at the Fordham University School of Law told Crain's that "The garment center has a bit of a reprieve," adding that "Gentrification isn't pressing against its borders to the same extent that it was in 2007."

The Garment Center is bounded approximately by Sixth and Ninth Avenues and 35th and 40th Streets and is, the article noted, "currently home to 21,500 fashion-related jobs," a figure that has "dropped 42 percent over the past 15 years...and it represents only a fraction of the 200,000-plus people who once worked in fashion in the city during the 1960s."

In 1987, "the city noted the shrinkage and zoned almost 10 million square feet of space to protect what was left of the industry," the article said, but as "nonfashion users gobbled up space on the fringes of the district and more and more designers shifted production overseas, the city's Economic Development Corp. began weighing rezoning measures."

The Design Trust's new "Made in Midtown" study said that almost 850 fashion companies are headquartered in the center and that the industry contributes $10 billion a year to the city's economy and that the district has more fashion companies than Paris, London and Milan combined.

Vin Cipolla, president of the Municipal Art Society, which has been working with the Design Trust, told Crain's that "The protection of the historic character of the neighborhood, its role as an incubator and the source of the global fashion industry needs to be reinforced."