Twilight of the Sewing Machine Repairman

By Jessica Firger

As fashion’s biggest names convene outside Lincoln Center for the next week, Leon Shpelfogel will be hunched over a Singer, a pair of pliers in hand, inside his shop in Brooklyn’s Midwood section — just 12 miles away but a world apart.

Shpelfogel spent more than four decades working inside the city’s once-thriving Garment District, where he fixed the machines owned by designers whose names are now found on high-end labels. The roster of clients at his sewing-machine repair shop, he says, included Emanuel Ungaro, Ralph Lauren, Michaele Vollbracht, Perry Ellis, Marc Jacobs, Liz Claiborne — all of whom have shown collections under the big, white tents.

“What stands behind the $15,000 Gucci dress? It’s nothing if the sewing machine breaks,” he said. “It eats me up.”

Shpelfogel, 65, was there with his pliers for the start of many designers’ careers. But the same economic forces that sent most of the Garment Districts’ jobs overseas also forced him out of the area.

Two years ago, he says, his landlord moved to double the rent on his 37th Street shop. So Shpelfogel relocated to a storefront a few blocks away from his Brooklyn home and informally changed the name: Garment Center Sewing Supplies became Needles, Pins & Sew On, a retail refugee in the Garment District diaspora.

Back in the district’s better days, Shpelfogel was the go-to guy for desperate designers and often paid favors to those who were struggling. When Cynthia Rowley was first starting out, she brought a broken sewing machine to Shpelfogel but couldn’t afford the $5 repair charge. In return for his kindness, the young designer offered Shpelfogel’s wife whatever items she wanted from her collection.

On a recent sunny afternoon, Shpelfogel stood at the counter of his quiet shop and rang up a customer’s purchase. “It’s cold outside,” he said to the woman, in Spanish. Shpelfogel knows enough Spanish to talk to his latest wave of clients in his new location. Along with English, he speaks nearly all the languages of last century’s immigrant garmentos: Polish, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish.

Behind him, a wall of tiny drawers bore handwritten labels noting their contents: velvet foot, left raising feet, swing gauges, tension springs, thimbles. A novelty sign balanced on one of the drawer handles reads: “Enjoy Life—this is not a dress rehearsal.”

Originally from Wroclaw, a city in southwestern Poland, Shpelfogel joined the garment industry shortly after he arrived in New York City from Israel, when he was in his early 20s. He met his wife on the Brighton Beach boardwalk during his first week in Brooklyn, married her two weeks later and set about learning his trade from his father-in-law.

Shpelfogel was mesmerized by how little equipment one needed to perform the job well. “I said to myself, ‘Look, what a beautiful profession! I can make money with just a screwdriver.’”

During their heyday in the 1960s, Shpelfogel and his father-in-law might repair more than 50 sewing machines in a day, he said, traveling from one factory to another with their tools. Sometimes there were too many machines to fix.

But things changed. Business moved elsewhere and factories closed.

In the 1960s, there were more than 300,000 factory jobs in the Garment District, which produced almost 90% of clothing sold in the U.S. Today the district employs some 12,000 seamstresses and tradespeople, who see just 20% of the money Americans spend on apparel, according to Andrew Ward, acting executive director of the Garment Industry Development Corporation.

Most of the work in the Garment District is now limited to high-end couture. And there just aren’t enough sewing machines to fix any more.

Shpelfogel, for his part, blames organized labor and not outsourced jobs or cheap imports for dooming the district. He still recounts incidents from the 1970s in which, he says, workers assaulted factory owners over higher wages.

“The unions destroyed everything,” Shpelfogel says. “If someone were to come here and tell me what to charge, I’d be in a lot of trouble.”

Shpelfogel now says he is content to tinker away in his Garment District exile — what he calls his “retirement.” The demand for his services today mostly comes from Brooklyn locals who want their Singers repaired more out of a hobbyist’s sentimentality than a worker’s utility.

But Shpelfogel remains on call. He picks up the phone on its first ring and with the voice of a harried businessman answers: “Garment Center!” That way his customers know they’ve got the right number.