Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul announced that the Garment District will receive $4.5 million in funding as one of the New York City region winners of the first round of NY Forward. The $100 million NY Forward program supports a more equitable recovery for New York’s communities, and as part of Round One, two to three awards will be made to communities in each of the state’s ten economic development regions to support development and implementation of revitalization plans for their downtowns.

VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.

AUDIO of the event is available here.

PHOTOS of the event are available on the Governor’s Flickr page.

A rush transcript of the Governor’s remarks is available below:

Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Great to see you, Mr. Secretary. Well done. Well done. I caught the pun at the beginning that it’s fitting to be here. Am I the only one who caught that? I thought that was pretty good. I thought that was pretty good. We’re also joined by a tremendous list of leaders of this community.

I want to thank Congressman Jerry Nadler for all he does fighting for us in Washington. He just hosted a delegation meeting where we had a chance to sit down in Washington and talk about how he is working so hard to bring money back to our state. And I want to give a round applause to Congressman Jerry Nadler.

Again, our Secretary of State. Thank you for all you do. Our Borough President, Mark Levine was here. He had a run out to probably some other announcement, but I see him almost every other day of the week it seems, but he’s doing a great job as well.

Our council members. I was once a council member, so never underestimate the power of the council members. We have Erik Bottcher here, as well as Keith Powers. Let’s give them a round of applause.

Hope Knight is here, the President and CEO of ESD. Where are you Hope? Right over here. Hope. Thank you. Thank you. Someone who knows every borough like the back of her hand, now knows all 62 counties. So, thank you for all you do for us as well.

Barbara Blair, the President of the Garment District Alliance, is here. Barbara, thank you for hosting us. Thank you, Barbara. And Dr. Joyce Brown, the president of the Fashion Institute of Technology. I want to thank you for hosting us this afternoon. What a great leader she is. She’s hosted us many times and I always appreciate what you do. This place is just an amazing place.

And I also want to mention about businesses and successful business, we have Kathy Wylde from the Partnership for New York City here as well. So Kathy, thank you and Mark Jaffe if he’s here as well. So thank you for joining us.

Yes. It’s Fashion Week. Guess where I just was – a fashion show. I flew down from Albany, had a chance to drop by and in my world, I’m always excited because they’re kind of quick. You just get to stop in and see something quite extraordinary. But the Michael Kors show was just on.

But when you go into a room like that and you see especially the young talent that is drawn to this community and institutions like FIT because they’re living their dream and there’s no better place to live their dream if you want to be a creator, an innovator, an entrepreneur than to come right here in the city.

So, to see how crowded the streets were, the throngs of people outside, it just really felt invigorating, it felt like New York was back and I love that sense. And for 79 years, this institution, has really been an international leader and absolutely makes us so proud to be the home of this institution where again, I mentioned, I don’t know if these are finished works of art – I’m going to guess they’re not quite done – but I think just to see what goes into elements of design and the kind of people that come here, the creativity, the passion. So you just walk down the streets of the city, you see these individuals, and there’s just no stopping them and others who’ve come to this institution like Michael Kors and Nina Garcia and Calvin Klein.

And I had a chance to also become very good friends with one of your trustees for 12 years, Deirdre Quinn, the founder of Lafayette 148, and I know her very well and I think she tells a funny story of how she’s Irish. Her father told her like, “Irish women don’t become designers. In this culture, how could someone like you make it?” And she did. So, people like that make us proud as New Yorkers to know that their connection to this institution is strong.

But the garment district. We all know what it is, but the rest of the world also knows as well. And you can say Paris and Milan and London. Okay, seriously, they don’t compare to what we have right here. This is the place, again, the most creative people in the world come here, and New York City is truly the fashion capital of the world. Think about it – 900 fashion companies right here. 900. 180,000 people working in this industry. That’s what gets my attention. That’s what I love about this. Those individuals who’ve made this their home and they’re not zooming into life, they’re here.

And the creative energy that happens when people come and they want to share their ideas and they come up with a vision together and truly, it’s almost 6 percent of our entire New York City workforce, which is huge, about $10.9 billion in wages, some of which ends up in our state budget. So thank you very much for that as well, for contributing to the services we can provide for all New Yorkers. And also, what I saw was quite extraordinary during the pandemic, an industry that basically just stopped. Stopped. I mean the supply chains – people getting materials and fabrics and leathers from other parts of the world – it all stopped. People were not allowed to come into work. And so, I came here during the toughest times and had a chance to go into some of the places that had so quickly converted – it was like the military, it’s like wartime operation – where they were making masks and gowns and shipping them to people who so desperately needed them.

So, it was beautiful to see what happened during that time and coming together that still stays with me when I realize that there’s a lot of loss of income, a loss of opportunity, a lot of loss of hope for people. But they came together for the common purpose of lifting up New Yorkers through their talents. And so, I want to thank them for what they’ve done for us as well.

And you think about this area, this Neighborhood back in the 1800s, this garment industry grew faster than any other industry in the country. It was just the early 1800s – this is where people wanted to be. You watch shows like the Gilded Age – those clothes were made right here, and we set the trend. We were the trendsetters and we had immigrants come here. In the early days, it was the Polish and Russian immigrants who came here and found work. When language was a barrier, they could still find that universal language of making things and creating things. And so, they would do piece work in the small factories. Eventually, almost 10 percent of the whole economy was the garment makers. And so, it’s declined somewhat, a little bit and that’s alright. That’s alright because when you go down, you know where you’re going to go next, you’re going up.

And I believe that this neighborhood has tremendous potential to tell a story of immigrants coming here, of creative people coming here, of creating trends and setting trends that the rest of the world will emulate. So, let’s not lose that sense of identity, that sense of place, that is so powerful here. And I think that we can reimagine what we do here. It’s a center for commerce, a destination for tourism. People come here, they want to see the places where the fashion is innovated, and this is really an economic engine for downtown and in Midtown. Also, there’s a lot of square feet here. So, let’s think about the next wave, the next wave, re-imagining, reinventing ourselves over and over again. There’s a lot of hotels here. People want to be down here – over 53 hotels and 31 hotels just opened the last decade.

So, this district, we have our challenges, every neighborhood has its challenges, but I really do believe we’re starting to see a turnaround and statistically on the crime rate, I talk to the mayor all the time about what we’re going to be doing. So, we have to feel safe, but also to be safe. And statistics will say that violent crimes and shootings are down very dramatically from what they had done during the peak of the pandemic. We’re back to pre-pandemic levels. That is good news because the alternative, it could have been – it could have kept going up. And there are cities in our country right now that are still facing these challenges and they don’t feel like there’s a turnaround anytime soon. Our turnaround has already happened. And we need to lean into that as community and business leaders, we’re the ones that people are going to look to for that sense of confidence. Do we feel good about this community? Do we feel we’re on the right track? Because when we feel that sense of possibility and share it with others, that’s how it spreads and that’s how it takes hold that we are on a different path and a different trajectory.

So, I know this neighborhood needs a little bit of extra help. I thank everyone who is involved in applying for a program we call New York Forward. I like that direction. New York Forward. And so, we have an opportunity to allocate money based on an application – it’s competitive. We don’t just hand this out to everybody, you have to compete against other communities. But I’m really proud to announce that this garment district will receive $4.5 million through this program to work on – it’s a chance to revitalize the neighborhood, but also leaning into the historic nature of it and not losing that sense of place and history. So, it’s about improving neighborhoods, keeping everything in place. Streetscapes – what changes the neighborhood. When I was a councilmember, we could just come through and you fix curbs and you fix the street, you put a couple of benches in and streetlights. You can create a whole different sense of place just with a few of those physical changes. Gathering places, parks.

So, what we can do here with this grant, and right now this is the money that you’ve asked for, you won, congratulations, and now the next step is for you and the community members to come up with the vision to execute it. And then we’ll come back another time – I’m always looking for a reason to come back to this neighborhood – and to announce what those projects are. So, dream big. Dream big. Think about the creative opportunity you have just to have unrestricted money, not totally unrestricted. You can’t go shopping and buy new clothes with it, for example, as much as you may want to in this neighborhood. But to think about what this community can be, what do we want to look back at this time, a few years from now, and look back and say, “2023 was a turning point when people thought that this might have been an area starting in decline.” And we said, “No, we’re stopping that from happening. We’re stopping it.”

And you’ll then part of that story by being here today and also being the leaders who are going to help make that come to fruition. So, think about bringing new people, new businesses, new industries, tourists. And also, never forget what one urban planner, William White, once said, “What attracts people most is other people.” So, we get that critical mass here and again, the energy that is so identified with New Yorkers pre-pandemic and now post-pandemic.

So, I want to make sure that we invest in our neighborhood, our communities. And I thank all of you for being also the stewards of a great, powerful story right here, a story of a community that didn’t have an identity. It decided this was going to be the place for fashion that will set the trends for the rest of the world and was created, it happened right here, no place else in our country, in the world. So, that is something we should all be proud of.

So, thank you very much. I look forward to coming back as I mentioned, more announcements. So, let’s hear from our great Congressman Jerry Nadler, who’s always looking to bring money. I’m sure he could help us bring even more to this neighborhood. We can kind of keep building on that success. But what a great leader we have here in Jerry Nadler. Let’s hear a few words from him as well.