That domination began to wane a half-century ago, around the time large-scale garment manufacturing began its inexorable migration offshore, well before the late 1990s, when shrewd real estate investors began amassing and colonizing a matchless stock of undervalued Midtown structures that had long lain hidden in plain sight.

New developers tenanted their old buildings with people who spent their lives hunched not over sewing machines but over keyboards, a breed of workers who would not know a bobbin from a merrowing machine. And gradually the garment district, an area that for a century served as a civic revenue engine, a threshold for immigrant employment, a generator of innovation, started in another way to resemble the reefs of the planet. It began to die.

“Designers rely on a highly complex ecosystem of support,” said Deborah Marton, the executive director of the nonprofit Design Trust for Public Space. Recognizing that truth, the Council of Fashion Designers of America partnered last year with the Design Trust to study a commercial ecosystem that was close to vanishing before the commercial real estate crash provided it with an unlikely reprieve.

That study, to be released in June, found that even now the apparel industry represents 28 percent of all manufacturing jobs in New York City. Its authors also concluded that the garment district is a more vital cultural force than many imagine, an incubator of ideas and innovation and a magnet for all those “Project Runway” hopefuls who flock to New York believing, as boosters claim, that the city is the fashion capital of the world.

Thanks to a compact and centralized garment district, Ms. Teng explained last week, it is still possible for an unknown to design and sew a garment at home, and then — with luck and an initial order from, say, Bergdorf Goodman — to take that sample to a building like 347 West 36th Street and have a pattern made, graded for size, the fabric rolled in from a nearby wholesaler, the pieces cut and assembled and the finished product shipped without leaving a single block in the center of Midtown.

“Come!” she commanded a reporter on Friday, as she set out to explore 347 West 36th Street — a broad 100,000-square-foot structure designed in the 1930s by the architect brothers George and Edward Blum with the humanizing roofline setbacks of the era; with a marble lobby and enormous freight elevators; and with floor plates thick enough to support heavy industrial machines. “Let’s see who is still here.”

As it happens, a fragile balance holds at 347 West 36th Street. Figures obtained from the city indicate that roughly 38 percent of the building’s tenants are in businesses related to fashion. The rest are a diverse lot that include the sculptor Keith Edmier, a tenant in the rooftop penthouse who in a piece titled “Bremen Towne” once recreated the suburban home of his boyhood in Tinley Park, Ill.; or Steve Giralt, a commercial photographer; or the National Comedy Theater, which occupies the street level storefront; or Amyas Naegele, a dealer in African antiquities who also builds sculptural mounts to set off rare masks from Congo or Bongo funerary posts from Sudan.

“When I started in this building 14 years ago, it was all sweatshops and me,” Mr. Naegele recalled.

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