By CHARLES V. BAGLI


New York’s garment center, once the heart of an industry that employed hundreds of thousands of workers and produced most of the clothing in the United States, is in danger of extinction.

For decades, cheaper foreign competitors and rising rents forced many of the sewing and cutting rooms and the button and zipper shops that once thrived on the side streets of Midtown Manhattan to shrink or move as mass production shifted to China, India and Latin America.

Now, even the remaining factories and shops that make the couture coats, dresses and other apparel for glamorous fashion designers like Nicole Miller, Yeohlee Teng, Anna Sui and Nanette Lepore are in jeopardy. Owners say they are caught in a vise between declining retail sales and landlords eager to find better-paying tenants.

Some city officials and industry leaders worry that if manufacturing is wiped out, many of the designers who bring so much luster to New York will leave, along with the city’s claim to be a fashion capital rivaling Paris and Milan. The damage would be undeniable, given that the industry’s two big annual events - Fashion Week in September and February - attract enormous numbers of visitors and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity.

“If you don’t have production in the garment center, there would be no reason for designers and suppliers to cluster in the district,” said Barbara Blair Randall, executive director of the Fashion Center Business Improvement District. “We’re down to 9,000 jobs.”

The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is considering designating one or more buildings in the garment center solely for manufacturing and related businesses. For 22 years, the city has protected the district through zoning that restricts building owners - from 34th to 40th Street, between Broadway and Ninth Avenue - from converting factory space to offices, which command higher rents. Landlords have railed against the restrictions, and their complaints have gained traction.

City officials, union leaders, designers, property owners and manufacturers are devising other ways to save the garment center. City officials say the industry has shrunk to a point where it could be reasonably consolidated in a few buildings, rather than several blocks.

“It’s not mass production,” Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey said of the garment center. “Clearly, what’s occurring is much smaller and more high-end compared with the actual production that used to exist. The idea is, we want to keep garment manufacturing in the garment district.”

The effort to shore up the garment center comes as Manhattan’s other blue-collar districts - printing, fur, meatpacking and fish - have disappeared, overrun by offices, residential development and expensive retailers.

A group of industry shop owners formed an organization called Save the Garment Center and argued that moving sewing shops to Queens or Brooklyn would mean the end of the industry. The shop owners soon enlisted some high-end fashion designers who manufacture most of their clothing at the center’s factories. The designers’ orders are more likely to be 3,000 or 4,000 pieces, not the production runs of 100,000 pairs of jeans that are now typically sent to China.

“Sustaining some form of the industry contributes to our status as a fashion capital of the world,” said Ms. Teng, the designer. “Access to manufacturers is profound. After all, fashion is about timing.”

Chen Zheng owns New World Fashion, a sewing room on 37th Street, near Seventh Avenue, where 28 employees, most Chinese, stitch together coats, dresses and tops for the designer Nanette Lepore. In order to help pay his rising rent, Mr. Zheng said, he recently sublet 15 percent of his space to a yoga studio.

“We need the mayor’s support to enforce the existing zoning laws as they were intended,” said Ms. Lepore, who makes 80 percent of her clothing line in the garment center. “Without the garment center, young designers cannot survive. If we fail to protect this district today, New York will not be the fashion capital of the world tomorrow.”


DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES / Steam-pleated fabrics at Regal Originals in Manhattan.