Manocherian Brothers Float Resi at Garment District Building

When the City Council approved the rezoning of 42 blocks in Midtown South, it excluded 37 properties in the Garment District from changes that would pave the way for more housing.

Now the owner of one of those properties is considering zoning changes to allow residential space anyway.

Manocherian Brothers signaled in a brief summary filed with the Department of City Planning that it wants to rezone 257 West 39th Street, a 16-story commercial building that is home to various fabric shops.

The owner filed a preliminary description of the project in December, calling for a partial conversion of the building to residential use. The site, along with the other 36 buildings carved out, is zoned for commercial, light manufacturing and community facility uses.

No application materials have yet been filed, and a property manager at the firm declined to comment.

Under a previous proposal, the northwest quadrant of the Midtown South plan would have been rezoned as M1-9A/R-12, a designation that allows both commercial and high-density residential use. But before approving the rezoning, the City Council made a number of changes. One was to drop the residential — R-12 — change from the Garment District, instead switching the area’s zoning from M1-6 to M1-9A.

At the time, Council member Kevin Riley, then-chair of the subcommittee on zoning and franchises, said the carveout was in service of preserving a “unique cluster of businesses” in the Garment District. The New York Fashion Workforce Development Coalition agreed, praising the changes as “vital protections” for the district.

The building on 39th Street has fabric shops on the ground floor, including AK Fabrics, It’s a Material World, Beckenstein Fabrics and Fabric House. More shops have taken residence on the upper floors, though one tenant indicated that much of the building sits vacant.

The street is among the endangered “clusters” referenced by Riley. The building next door, at 251 West 39th, is also home to several fabric and wholesale embellishments and accessory stores. Across the street is the Drama Book Shop, a reminder of the area’s history of feeding the wardrobe needs of the nearby Theater District.

But you don’t have to venture far for traces of that history to dissipate: Chain and fast-casual restaurants dominate 40th Street and have taken over much of 38th as well.

An analysis by PropertyScout found that most (more than 84 percent) of the Midtown South rezoning district is dedicated to commercial use, followed by residential at about 13 percent and manufacturing at 1.2 percent. PropertyScout CEO Wilson Parry pointed out that the original certificate of occupancy for the 39th Street building shows the property once served as tenement housing, which likely makes the property a good candidate for conversion, at least from an access to light and air perspective.

It’s unclear if more property owners will seek site-specific zoning changes within the carveout area. However, if others follow Manocherian Brothers, the proposals could call into question the logic of the City Council’s rezoning modifications, especially as the administration tries to ramp up housing construction. The city projects that the rezoning will allow the construction of more than 9,500 housing units, a decrease of 200 units from the city’s estimate before the Council’s changes (though some have estimated the loss to be much greater).

Such individual zoning changes would be reviewed by the person who replaces local Council member Erik Bottcher, who won a special election this month to fill Brad Hoylman-Sigal’s seat in the state Senate. Whoever takes over for Bottcher may have less final-say power for such proposals thanks to ballot measures weakening the Council’s tradition of member deference.

The northwest quadrant carveout drew the ire of some owners hoping to convert their properties or sell at a higher premium. At least one property within that area was being marketed as completely vacant and ready for residential conversion right before the City Council amended the rezoning proposal.

The Garment District Alliance, a business improvement district whose board members include local property owners, opposed the Council’s amendments, arguing that the city was needlessly leaving housing opportunities on the table.

The group recently conducted a survey of the 37 properties in the carveout and found a nearly 30 percent vacancy (though this doesn’t account for any pending leases).

Barbara Blair, president of the Garment District Alliance, said the zoning carveout sidelines an area where the city should be encouraging growth, given its proximity to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and Penn Station.

“It’s critically important that this is a high functioning neighborhood because it’s a port of entry,” she said. “I think that the city should revisit it.”