The apparel and millinery industry moved northward as the city expanded in the 19th century. Abraham E. Lefcourt was a clothing manufacturer in the first years of the 20th century, but he changed course around 1910. He turned to real estate development. Lefcourt would be influential in establishing the Garment District along Seventh Avenue after World War I. Among the buildings he would erect was the Lefcourt Clothing Center on the east side of Seventh Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets.
Designed by Ely Jacques Kahn of Buchman & Kahn in 1927 and completed the following year, the Art Deco-style structure rose 27 floors, filling the blockfront. Kahn used terra cotta and creative brickwork to adorn the facade with Art Deco details. At the 18th floor, he began a series of massive setbacks, required by 1916 zoning regulations.
The Lefcourt Clothing Center filled with, mostly, men's and boys' apparel firms. Among the first was Munves, Marmur and Selonick, a boy's clothing maker operated by Solomon Munves, Jacob Marmur and Stanley E. Selonick. Personality Clothes moved into the building in 1929. The firm manufactured the Boom-Boom brand of men's apparel.
Men's Wear, February 6, 1929
Bashowitz Brothers & Co., men's clothing manufacturers, occupied the 15th floor and part of the 16th floor that year, employing 275 workers. At the time, factory workers were paid in cash and received their pay envelopes each Friday or Saturday. The firm's offices were on the upper level. On Friday afternoon, December 19, 1929, the firm's cashier, Herman Helfer, and two assistants, Antoinette Calabrese and Yetta Wexler, 19 and 18 years old respectively, were distributing the week's $5,600 payroll into envelopes. When the task was completed, they sorted the envelopes and arranged them in a wooden tray on top of a filing cabinet.
Suddenly, three armed young men barged into the office and demanded the cash. Helfer pointed to the file cabinet. The New York Times reported, "One of the robbers seized the tray and all three fled a few paces to a corridor leading to the elevators and two stairways." The article noted, "Sixty sewing machine workers outside the office did not know of the robbery." The trio fled down a staircase and disappeared. They were never caught.
The building was designed with retail shops along Seventh Avenue. Among the commercial tenants in 1932 were Isadore Roth's barber shop, and Lina Millet's printing and stationery store.
The year 1932 saw the first of what would become a major change in the tenant list within the upper floors. In December, the newly formed Air Express Corporation moved its offices in. The service operated a fleet of windowless airplanes that daily transported goods from New York to Los Angeles.
In 1919 a group of garment unions organized the Union Health Center, becoming the first to be established by labor unions. The group opened a clinic at 131 East 17th Street in 1920. By 1924, nine unions ran the center with a membership of 45,000. A decade later, in May 1934, total control was transferred to the International Garment Workers' Union. With its membership having increased to 51,997, the center moved its headquarters into a full floor of 275 Seventh Avenue in 1935.
The New York Times remarked on January 5, 1936, "The site is within easy walking distance of the factories where 110,000 union members work" and noted that its 40,000 square foot space "contains clinical and diagnostic departments modernly equipped to take care of the ills that arise among members of the I. L. G. W. U. and thirty-seven affiliated unions in the printing, building and other trades." In the previous year, 55,000 patients were treated here.
The staff included 40 physicians, including 12 of whom visited the homes of workers too ill to travel. Union members paid 35 cents per month for the services (in addition to their regular dues). For the fee, workers were entitled to "ten week's medical treatment, including medicines and visits by the doctor if he is seriously ill." The I.L.G.W.U. space also had a meeting room that doubled as a lecture room. In January 1936, the union announced "a program of lectures on anatomy, physiology, pathology and hygiene."
Garment firms continued to occupy space in the building. In 1940 and 1941, for instance, tenants included the Hylo Textile Shrinking Company, the Monarch Textile Shrinking Company, the Uniform Coat Makers, Inc., and the Dixie Dress Shops. Nevertheless, non-apparel firms were changing the personality of the tenant list. In 1939, publisher Poale Zion Zeire Zion of America was here. That year they released the Labor Zionist Handbook.
As early as 1942, the Pioneer Women's Organization had its headquarters in the building. On January 18 that year, The New York Times reported that the group "had cabled $15,000 to Palestine for the defense program of the Working Women's Council." Six months later, on July 12, the newspaper reported that the Pioneer Women's Organization had wired another $10,000 to the Working Women's Council in Palestine "for immediate defense measures necessitated by the emergency on the Middle Eastern Front." The article said, "The money will be used for protection of children and their removal to safety zones, the support of agricultural training farms for women and assistance to families of men in the armed forces." (The two donations would equal $481,000 in 2025.)
In October 1945, the I.L.G.W.U. bought 275 Seventh Avenue for $2.5 million (about $43.6 million today). The union explained that the purchase would make possible "the expansion of its union health center," noting that it "is the largest labor medical-care institution in the country." The New York Times remarked, "The twenty-one clinics comprising the union health center...now occupy the two upper floors in the building." Now, said I.L.G.W.U. president David Dubinsky, "We intend to convert a large part of the floor space in this structure to meet the vastly increased health-care needs of our membership in Greater New York."
Exactly two years later, on October 14, 1947, The New York Times reported that the "International Ladies Garment workers Union has begun a $1,000,000 expansion project for its Union Health Center at 275 Seventh Avenue." The facility, described as "the largest ambulatory clinic in the city with the exception of Presbyterian Hospital," would now engulf five-and-a-half floors. On staff, said the article, were "ten full-time physicians, 110 visiting doctors, thirty-five nurses, thirty technicians, five pharmacists and 200 lay employees."
image via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.
Neither Arthur Waldorf nor Bernard Stulberg worked in 275 Seventh Avenue. Waldorf, who was 40 years old, worked as a bookmaker and was on parole after serving part of a seven-and-a-half to fifteen-year sentence for attempted extortion. The New York Times said, "he had been arrested five times since 1922, but only had two convictions."
Bernard Stulberg had been arrested four times and convicted once for robbery. Prior to the 1947 World Series, Stulberg called Waldorf and bet $1,900 to $1,000 that the Yankees would win. The Yankees won, but Waldorf did not pay up.
On October 8, 1947, the men met on the sidewalk outside the Lefcourt Clothing Center building.
"Where's my thousand dollars?" demanded Stulberg.
"I'm not paying. We had nothing in writing and you didn't put up any cash."
The New York Times reported, "Stulberg grabbed the bookie and began to shake him violently, Mr. [Assistant District Attorney Harold] Birns said." Waldorf broke free and ran through the Midtown Barber Shop, into the lobby and out of the 26th Street entrance. In the meantime, Stulberg had headed him off on the side street.
"I'll fix you," Stulberg blurted.
He then plunged a knife into Waldorf's forehead and right side. The bookmaker fell to the ground and Stulberg stabbed him again, this time in the breast. Waldorf ran back into the barbershop and pleaded, "I'm hurt. Please call a doctor." He was dead before help could arrive. The dozens of witnesses, many of them "girls leaving the building for luncheon," alerted a passing plainclothes officer Sebastian Quod. He arrested Stulberg a half block away after a short struggle. "Stulberg bit the patrolman's left hand before he was subdued," said the article.
In the meantime, fashion firms continued to share the building with the clinic. Among them in 1953 was Eastwood & Holt, fur brokers, who occupied the 14th floor. Over a weekend in April that year, the firm was the victim of an Mission Impossible-type heist. Thieves broke into the 16-story building at 159 West 25th Street and took the elevator to the roof. There they leaned a ladder against the Seventh Avenue building and climbed to and smashed the 16-floor windows of the L. E. Uniform Company. Once inside, they used "a brace and a bit, a crowbar, and other tools, to tunnel through the interior wall to the next-door office of the Fine Fashions Company, and then repeated the same performance to reach the Phyllis Dress Company, whose office faces the street," explained The New York Times.
Amazingly, the robbers lowered one man two stories on a rope. "He cut the glass of the Eastwood & Holt front windows with a diamond, so as to make no sound audible on the street below." He selected mink skins, wrapped them into 83 bundles, and sent them back up on ropes before being hauled up himself. The gang escaped through the same route.
The I.L.G.W.U. Health Center received a distinguished guest on June 6, 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson unveiled a plaque here "that duplicates the commemorative medal authorized by Congress in the last bill signed by President Kennedy, on Nov. 25, 1963," said The Times. The medal's inscription called the clinic the "first ever operated by a trade union in the United States."
By the fourth quarter of the 20th century, 275 Seventh Avenue was perhaps home to more offices than factories. In 1987 Child Care, Inc. had space here, and in the 1990s, the Garment Industrial Development Corp., the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the Consortium for Worker Education were tenants. Politician Tom Duane's headquarters were listed here in 1993. Later, Peter Lang Publishing occupied space on the 28th floor, and the Center on Social Welfare Policy Administration Law, and Cancer Care were in the building. As early as 2012 the Disability Services and Allied Workers Joint Board (DSAW) operated here.
In considering the Lefcourt Clothing Center an individual New York City landmark on May 20, 2025, the Landmarks Preservation Commission noted that the changes to the storefronts, "do not detract from the striking brickwork and massing of this important skyscraper designed by one of New York's foremost Art Deco architects."
photographs by the author
The lobby was astounding but for the most part has been obliterated.
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