This relief is pressed from the building itself: its brick exterior, a fragment of the powerhouse smokestack, and glass bottles uncovered within the walls when the New York City Economic Development Corporation took over the site. Those impressions are overlaid with a screen transfer of a 1918 photograph from the National Archives showing F.B. Clothing Co. workers inside this campus, when its manufacturers were producing goods during the First World War.

Bush Terminal rose on the Sunset Park waterfront as a vast port-and-manufacturing complex, its piers and lofts served by their own railroad. During the First World War the U.S. War Department took over the campus, and its tenant firms turned to making military clothing. These thirteen-button wool trousers carry a screen transfer of a 1918 National Archives photograph of uniform manufacturing at C. Kenyon Co. here in the terminal. It is a wartime image laid over a later sailor’s pair, inscribed at the waistband with a single name: Johnson.

“Li’l Abner” was the common name for a tan suede, lace-to-toe ankle boot worn widely around New York from the 1950s into the 1970s, sold inexpensively at army-navy and work-wear shops; the name echoed Al Capp’s comic strip. This pair came from Frankel’s, founded on Third Avenue in 1890 and the oldest business in Sunset Park, a work-wear store that has outfitted the neighborhood’s longshoremen, ironworkers, and union laborers for well over a century. Marty Frankel, grandson of the founder, lent these boots.

The label sewn into this dress, ILGWU, union made, no. 908054, is the heart of the piece. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, founded in New York in 1900 and built largely by immigrant women, was for most of the twentieth century one of the country’s largest unions; its “Look for the Union Label” campaign asked shoppers to recognize the hands behind their clothing. A tag like this one marks a garment made by organized labor, the same trade that, by the 1960s, had made Sunset Park and Bush Terminal the largest center of clothing manufacture outside Manhattan’s Garment District. The dress is by Richard Assatly (1944–1993), a Brooklyn-born, Lebanese-American designer who trained at the Fashion Institute of Technology and learned the trade as an assistant to designer Pat Sandler; his father and uncle ran the loungewear firm Dorian-Macksoud. He died of AIDS-related illness in 1993, among a generation of designers lost to the epidemic and since largely overlooked in fashion history."

Further reading: Laura McLaws Helms, “Uncovering Richard Assatly”

This cheongsam was hand-sewn by Sau Kwan Yu, who emigrated from Hong Kong over forty years ago and raised her family in Sunset Park while working as a garment worker. As her daughter, the artist and filmmaker Betty Yu, has documented, she labored under sweatshop conditions; Yu’s film Resilience tells the story of her mother’s fight against them.

[ Reserved for Betty’s words, to be added.]