How a huge, abandoned New York City Post Office turned into Fashion Week headquarters
Then known as the New Post Office, the James A. Farley Post Office was built from 1910 to 1913 at a cost of $5.275 million.
The architecture firm McKim, Mead & White built it as a companion to the original New York Penn Station, which was originally built in 1910 and demolished in 1963.
The Post Office was open 365 days a year until 1990, when the mail business started to dwindle. Now, most of the actual letter-mailing action is confined to the building's front entryway.
But the building is absolutely massive. It takes up two city blocks and once housed offices, a fitness center, a cafeteria, a 41,000-square-foot mail sorting room, and even a police unit. But now that mail has largely been replaced by email, the vast majority of the Post Office sits vacant.
That's where Jennifer Blumin, founder and CEO of the Skylight Group, comes in.
Blumin's company finds defunct warehouses and other spaces in New York City and turns them into event spaces for the likes of Samsung and Target. And the Post Office's enormous mail-sorting room is one of those spaces.
Blumin got her start managing the penthouse of the eccentric Israeli billionaire Jonathan Leitersdorf when she was 23. You might know it as the setting for Richard's apartment in "Sex and the City" — rooftop pool and all.
She changed gears in 2004, and now focuses on rehabilitating Manhattan's most massive out-of-use spaces. Skylight now operates five venues in Manhattan, including the Post Office's mail-sorting room, but its roster sometimes shifts, since most of the spaces are between uses or owned by other entities.
The Post Office's mail-sorting room is now known as Skylight at Moynihan Station. The huge blank canvas with industrial touches is a favorite of the fashion set.
The 41,000-square-foot space still bears signs of its past as the biggest mail-sorting room in America, complete with a passageway running along the wall where the postal police would keep watch over sorters to make sure they weren't stealing.
Fashion designers have been showing their wares at Skylight locations like the Post Office since as early as 2006. But New York Fashion Week's official headquarters was a section of giant tents adjacent to Lincoln Center for the past few years. With its run-of-the-mill, overly branded appearance, Lincoln Center was spurned by many of the biggest names in fashion, who wanted somewhere a little cooler to show their wares.
And so, the most in-demand designers would hold their shows off-site at Skylight venues. Ralph Lauren's exclusive home was Blumin's first Skylight property, Skylight Soho, for a whopping 16 seasons, starting in 2006.
Having "Skylight" on your fashion show invitation became a status symbol for the coolest designers, while more staid brands showed at Lincoln Center.
Then, earlier this year, it was announced that Fashion Week headquarters would no longer be Lincoln Center due to its status as a public park. Instead, NYFW was moving to two Skylight venues — Moynihan Station (the former Post Office) and Clarkson Square (a former High Line terminal).
Both were already popular with the fashion set. Kanye West's first collection for Adidas was shown at the Clarkson Square venue — the 60,000-square-foot former terminal of the High Line — in early 2014.
After 11 years of off-the-beaten-path street cred, both the High Line terminal and the post office are now Fashion Week's official home base.
This season, Fashion Week is from Sept. 10 to Sept. 17. Public School, Prabal Gurung, and Jeremy Scott are just a few of the designers showing at the Post Office.
The previous two NYFW home bases, Lincoln Center and Bryant Park, made use of temporary structures like tents — a far cry from Blumin's comparably ancient Skylight venues. She thinks her venues' age is part of the reason why Fashion Week's sponsors picked Skylight.
Our venues create dialogues, they have a past," she told Fashionista. "It ties you to the common history we have as New Yorkers. It's a constantly evolving city, so that a post office can become a runway. A tent can be anywhere and fleeting, and that’s not the right message to send.
Skylight's badge of coolness extends beyond fashion — Jay Z picked the Post Office's Skylight at Moynihan Station room for his Tidal launch event.
Kanye West performed there as a surprise during a Samsung event in 2013.
But the post office's days as an event space might be numbered. A plan to turn it into a train hub as a companion to Penn Station is slowly coming to fruition.
Here's a mock-up of the terminal, which will occupy the 41,000-square-foot former mail sorting room where the highest-profile events are currently held.
Until the Empire State Development Corporation sorts that out, though, there's nothing to do but pray that you get invited to a breathtaking event at Skylight at Moynihan Station before it's too late.
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