Textile Dealers Turn Down Offers, Hold on to Their Building
Nearly every weekday morning for the last 35 years, Stevie, Alan and Ron Katz have arrived at their offices of Paramount/Boltex Textile Company at 34 Walker St. There, on the cluttered second floor of the weathered 146-year-old building, the brothers settle in, side by side at their desks, a mere arm’s length from each other. The trio seem oblivious to their surroundings, the papers spilling out of file cabinets and desk drawers, the broken obsolete equipment, the clutter of cloth, paper and boxes that cover nearly every available surface.
The Katz brothers are among the few remaining textile merchants in a neighborhood long rooted in that trade. From the mid-19th century until the 1970s, men like them occupied nearly every building in northeastern Tribeca. The Katzes are the last generation of a family business started on 64 White Street in the early ’30s by their grandfather, who was born on the Lower East Side.
The phone calls from co-op developers eager to convert this valuable piece of real estate, which wraps around and also fronts onto Church Street, are relentless. But for the brothers, the idea of moving their business and giving up their building is, as yet, unthinkable. “We don’t like change,” they often say.
Across a low divider lined with piles of invoices tied with rubber bands (“We file them,” says Alan, “when they get so high they might fall over”) is the former desk and chair of the brothers’ late father, Jack Katz, who died in 2000.
Dad’s name comes up in nearly every conversation around here. And if there is a right way to do things, it was Dad’s way.
“My father wouldn’t trust a computer even today if he was living,” Alan, 55, says. “If someone wanted a price he figured it out on scrap paper.” He picks up a composition notebook from his desk. “I keep all of my records in books,” he says, “like my father.”
There are a few computers in the office and Alan uses them for email. But Ron, 61, and Stevie, 56, still avoid them. “I wouldn’t even know how to turn one on,” Ron says, laughing. Stevie uses ledger books to do the bookkeeping.
The brothers work together in remarkable harmony. (“My father always said, ‘If you have sons, they’ll get along,’” Alan recalled.)
Alan runs the air conditioner full blast, so Ron wears a jacket. When Stevie talks, and he is a big talker, the other brothers listen indulgently. “He talks about our father a lot and he exaggerates,” Ron notes. Stevie, standing nearby, is unfazed by the observation.
Most important, they all agree that the business is staying just where it is—in this building that their father loved.
“When buyers call, they ask, ‘Well, what’s your number?’” Ron says. “Stevie amuses himself by asking and hearing the answers—it’s worth 4 million, 5 million, 6 million. But truthfully speaking, we don’t have a number because we’re not ready to go yet. Stevie and Alan aren’t married. I’m living with a woman. None of us have children. I guess the person to decide will be the last one standing.”
“The most important thing their father left them with was to be a family,” says Carol Levine, the secretary, who has worked for Paramount for 55 years, her chair just a few feet from Jack’s. “And even if they have different personalities, in business, that doesn’t break them up. Three goes into one, and it all comes out together. That’s his legacy.”
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All three brothers dropped out of college to join the business and Stevie and Alan still live together in the Brooklyn home where they were raised.
“We pretty much grew up knowing that eventually we were going to come into this business,” Ron says. And they all agree that there was nothing else they wanted to do. They joined the business two years apart, beginning with Ron in 1973. Like their father before them, they came into the family business in their twenties and never wanted to leave.
The sons don’t know much about their grandfather’s business on White Street (he died in 1959) but they know that their father, after returning from the war, bought the building on Walker Street for manufacturing.
“We were the biggest laundry bag maker in New York,” Stevie says with pride. By the time the brothers stepped through the door, in the 1970s, Paramount/Boltex was specializing in linens and textiles for restaurants and hospitals.
It was a thriving business. Every week, hundreds of rolls of fabric were delivered from mills in South Carolina. On one floor, a cutting machine went all day slicing the material into tablecloths and napkins. On another floor, more than a dozen women sat at machines, stitching hems.
“When I first started working here in 1994, it was so noisy that you wanted to put cotton in your ears,” recalls Harold Green, who is now in charge of shipping and receiving. The constant whirring of the sewing machines, he says, took him months to get used to.
Orders came in from customers all over New York City, Long Island and New Jersey. Ron, who was one of the salesmen, recalls that he would spend four days alone just servicing the linen supply customers in Brooklyn.
Their dad, the brothers are quick to say, was the brains behind the business’s success, but they’re even prouder of the respect—and loyalty—he earned from his workers.
Green, too, recalls him affectionately.
“Everybody loved him,” he says. “If a worker was short on money, he’d say, ‘Carol, write a check.’ If someone needed a favor, he did it. He never turned them down.”
Years ago, Levine was mugged on the subway going to work. After that, Jack drove her home every day along with Alan and Stevie. (Since Jack’s death, the brothers have hired a car service to bring her to and from work, four days a week. “She put in her time,” Alan says.)
Jack wanted to make life easy for his sons, and gave them little responsibility. “If I wanted to take off the day to go to the track, he said, ‘Sure,’” Alan recalls.
“My father liked to be in control,” Alan says. “He took the orders, worked the factory, instructed everybody.”
But in 1996, their father suffered a massive heart attack. Returning to work for only a few hours a day, he could no longer take charge. For the first time, he leaned on Alan for help.
“I learned more in those two years than in all the years I used to work with him,” Alan says.
After Jack died, the brothers worried that they did not have what it would take to run the business. And the business was changing.
“The independent guys basically bit the dust,” Ron says. “They were swallowed up by two or three big people.” More and more of his time was also being taken up by collecting from customers who weren’t paying on time.
In 2003, the brothers took one big step that their father would never have considered: They shut down the factory.
“Once NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] passed, people stopped manufacturing in America,” Alan says. “Everything we used to make upstairs is now made in Mexico.”
The brothers rarely venture above their second-floor office. The upper floors, now just a way station for boxes arriving from Mexico, is Harold Green’s domain. (The company also imports hospital goods from Pakistan.) Twice a month, a tractor trailer pulls up on Walker Street, fully loaded with boxes of ready-made tablecloths and napkins.
Green gets in at 4:15 a.m. and a few hours later he is overseeing the day laborers who unload the hundreds of boxes.
It takes all day to bring them upstairs in the building’s single tiny elevator.
Like his bosses, Green is nostalgic about the business. Walking about the quiet floors, where foremen once shouted above the din of machines, he pointed out the dusty vestiges of the past.
The 20-foot long cutting and folding tables are still there, a few sewing machines, a work table with drawers filled with parts. He cranks up a rusty lift that once carried rolls of cloth. “We keep it just for memories,” he explains.
In the late 70s, Jack and his sons went into a side business, racing their own trotters. Their New Jersey stable is called The Three Brothers.
“My dad always used to say, ‘I’m the best horse you’ve got,’” says Alan, “and he was right. So I think he would be surprised that we were able to continue running this business without him. And that we did so good.”