By day, the neighborhood—if you can call it a neighborhood—is a condensed jumble of signs, all clamoring for attention in two languages and about a thousand different shades of neon yellow. But the real Koreatown happens at night. On weekends, West 32nd Street turns into a 24-hour playground, a kind of noir wonderland where barbecues and spas and karaoke joints all stack up on top of each other and nothing ever closes.

You have to really peel back the street's glittering confetti to take in the buildings sitting mute behind it all, the anonymous brick and limestone pasted with the sediment of accumulated decades. If you can see past the blinking lights, past the signs, the six-story building at 32 West 32nd Street reveals its past in a faintly emblazoned facade: "Bergdorf Building."

The name "Bergdorf," of course, would go on to become half of that most lavish, ladies-who-lunch department store, where Mahattanites not only accrued the regalia of a moneyed lifestyle but luxuriated in the marble-encased trappings of money itself. But, in 1899, Bergdorf's was an unremarkable side-street tailor shop at a truly remarkable time in tailoring. With the rise of manufacturing, methods of production and lifestyles both were speeding up, racing toward a streamlined industrial horizon. Caught in the middle of it all was Herman Bergdorf, a tailor with more luck than talent, and a greater passion for wine than for his craft. It took Edwin Goodman, his ambitious young apprentice, to recognize the bend that manufacturing had thrown into history, a bend he leaned on heavily to refashion the women's ready-made garment industry.

The manufacturing industry, which transformed the garment district more than a century ago, has more recently transformed it again—this time by all but disappearing. It wasn't a sudden disappearance, and it was one that was slow to sink in, perhaps because the garment industry has always been something of an invisible one. It didn't require much room, its cutting rooms and zipper shops cropping up in brownstones, boutiques, sweatshops, excess office space, just about anywhere at all. It filled up the margins of midtown, propelled by the largely invisible workforce that always fills those margins—New York's steady stream of immigrant labor.

But, in recent decades, Manhattan rents and cheap overseas production have whittled away at the Garment District's edges. It shrunk northward, even as the city's zoning protections limited the conversion of factory space into more profitable offices. (The protections themselves may soon vanish, as protestations of landlords grow louder.)

At 32 West 32nd Street, the climb to the K-pop blaring karaoke bar—past the barbecue, the noodle shop, the eyelash salon—takes you up rasping wooden stairs, likely unchanged since their tailor-shop days. With a notable exception: The walls have been painted with cartoon Korean children, cavorting in the dim light like mutant hieroglyphs from one of Herman Bergdorf's drunken dreams. It's one of those strange New York corners where you can't quite tell if the hasty brushstrokes of the present are infringing on the past, or if it's the other way around.

FOR MUCH OF THE 19th century, ready-made clothing was principally the attire of slaves, miners and sailors. But nearing the century's end, the advent of the sewing machine and post-Civil War distribution networks set the burgeoning garment industry ablaze with energy. The 1890s saw the rise of women's suits and small concurrent shifts in women's social status, as middle-class women led increasingly public lives that left less time for elaborate dress fittings. Manhattan's garment industry seized on the distinguishing factors that long remained its mainstay: a position as a port city with strong ties to European fashion markets and a convenient supply of cheap labor. By 1899, New York produced 65 percent of the nation's ready-made women's wear.

At the time, Herman Bergdorf, an Alsatian immigrant, maintained a middling tailor shop along the Ladies Mile stretch of Fifth Avenue. His shop might have continued to languish in relative obscurity had his sister not been employed by a prominent society lady, the wife of William Goadby Loew, who once admired one of Bergdorf's suits and ordered one for herself. That was all it took to make "Berfdorf suits" a sudden rage, and Bergdorf found himself suddenly overwhelmed by orders. To compensate, he took on the promising 23-year-old Edwin Goodman, a move that also, according to Booton Herndon's Bergdorf's on the Plaza, freed him to spend more time in Brubacker's wine saloon.

By 1901, Goodman had raised enough funds to buy into the business, and he convinced Bergdorf they should join the migration of fashionable shops up Fifth Avenue. But while Goodman was away on his honeymoon, Bergdorf instead opted for a cheaper side-street location, the 32 West 32nd Street address he christened the Bergdorf Building. According to city records and the Office for Metropolitan History, Bergdorf paid $132,000 for the structure, built by Bruno W. Berger.

Returning from his honeymoon and expecting to find a fashionable Fifth Avenue storefront, Goodman was infuriated by Bergdorf's choice of real estate, and the two men parted ways soon after. Goodman bought out Bergdorf, who retired to Paris, and the operation remained in the cramped 32nd Street salon only until 1914. But in its decade or so there, Goodman became a fastidious scholar of a growing movement in women's wear: the trend toward less restrictive fashions. To the popular hobble skirt—a literally named garment to which The New York Times attributed several injuries and, in 1911, one death—Goodman added a box pleat that in the knee allowed for a slightly less inhibited step. The jabot, a choking, boned neckpiece, he did away with altogether.

At the time, most of the manufacturers that tailors relied on worked out of their homes, according to Daniel Soyer in A Coat of Many Colors, often employing entire families in packed, squalid conditions. The boom of the garment industry was dependent on the sudden influx of immigrant labor that began arriving in New York in the 1880s. Eastern European Jews, primarily unmarried young women, made up the majority of the laborers, followed by Italians, also often young women. The young, mostly female workforce was at the forefront of major labor battles that, in many ways, radically altered the industry. At the same time, garment manufacturing gained a reputation as a "mobile industry"—a reputation that, by and large, has stuck—in part to elude accountability for its labor practices.

While the workforce changed, fluctuating with shifts in immigration policy and demographics, the garment industry remained fairly stable until the 1970s, when fashion retailers that had relied on local manufacturers began widening their production networks into foreign countries. Garment manufacturing became a transnationally mobile industry, as advances in communications and transport facilitated highly specialized, coordinated units operating in multiple countries at once.

Around the same time, changes in immigration policy allowed Koreans to enter the U.S. in unprecedented numbers. Small Korean sweatshops began appearing on West 32nd Street, mostly subcontracting work from Seventh Avenue manufacturers and employing a largely Latino workforce. By 1989, there were 1,500 Korean-owned garment factories in New York, concentrated predominantly in the garment district and Flushing, according to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. But the midtown industry was still largely invisible to most New Yorkers and still dependent on questionable labor practices. In 1988, at a building just down the block from 32 West 32nd Street, the Associated Press reported the collapse of a fire escape as garment workers fled INS agents.

As manufacturing is displaced both within the New York area—many Korean sweatshops have moved to Queens and New Jersey—and globally, Korean groceries and restaurants crowd onto West 32nd Street at higher and higher densities, transforming the patch of molting textile industry into a kinetic spurt of motion. You could say it's the time-told New York immigration story: A largely invisible community is sucked up into the city's labor market, eventually appropriating and reappropriating its power structures and finally earning its mainstream cultural credibility—usually in the form of culinary appreciation and usually in a neighborhood where few members of the community actually live.

That's one way of looking at it. But it's also about a city of transplants, its odd collisions and obliterations, its reinventions. It's about the endless hemming and restitching such a city entails.

egeminder@observer.com

City records indicate that the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea signed the deed for the 6,370-square-foot lot on March 3. The government will use the site to build a brand new Korean Cultural Center, which is now housed at 460 Park Avenue, according to Heesung Cho, who works at the center.

The site has 43,152 buildable square feet, according to commercial real estate database CoStar, which means the Korean government paid a premium $366 a square foot.

"Generally, today, development sites have a value that’s predicated on building residential rental housing, and the price that most developers are willing to pay in Manhattan is about $150 to $200 a square foot," said Robert Knakal, chairman of Massey Knakal Realty, which specializes, among other things, in the sale of development sites. Mr. Knakal said the exception to that rule is when the buyer is a long-term user, like, in this case, the Korean Cultural Center, which has no apparent near-term plans of turning a profit on the purchase.

Eastern Consolidated's Eric Anton, Ronald Solarz, Daniel Glaser, Samuel Schneider and David Kalish represented the seller, 126 East 32nd Street LLC, in this transaction.

The government of Korea was represented by Colliers ABR's Craig Evans and Newstar Realty's Young Park. 

This is the second foreign government to buy Manhattan real estate market in recent weeks.

On March 6, the Republic of Chad paid $7.3 million for a lovely townhouse on East 36th Street, which the government will use for its Mission to the United Nations.

Koreatown’s answer to Bungalow 8 is hidden on the third floor of a shabby commercial building amid the BBQ and karaoke joints lining 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.

On a recent Saturday night (verging on Sunday morning), I passed through two layers of doormen and rode a rickety freight elevator up to a futuristic, bi-level, all-white lounge, with translucent glass floors, a two-story waterfall, and thumping techno.

The scene was straight out of a Brett Easton Ellis book by way of Seoul. Twenty-something Korean hipsters sipped martinis from white-leather banquettes in the tunnel-shaped bar, while people sang karaoke from private, plasma-TV equipped rooms upstairs.

Maru opened in 2005 to cater to the younger generation of Korean students and professionals living in condos around Herald Square and embodies the changing dynamics of the neighborhood.

While many other ethnic enclaves in Manhattan have caved amid encroaching development or survived by becoming tourist attractions, Koreatown has thrived over the past 15 years and has managed to maintain its cultural identity, thanks to a stream of young Korean immigrants to the city.

“It was a small town 15 years ago and then, all of the sudden, Koreans started coming to New York,” Maru’s manager, Sonny Lee, explained below the purple and black flashing lights in one of Maru’s karaoke rooms.

“A lot of rich people from Korea send their kids to New York and L.A. to learn English or go to school now, and they spend a lot of money here,” he said.

Sylvia Lee, a broker at CiCi Realty, on Koreatown’s main strip, said young Korean students “love to live in midtown."

“Manhattan for Koreans is what Hong Kong used to be, not British or Chinese, but independent,” explained Ms. Lee. “More money is coming from Korea now and parents are sending their kids to college here, plus Korean currency is doing really well, so there is a higher standard in the neighborhood."

The luxury rental buildings have drawn scores of Koreans to settle in the neighborhood, said Joseph Jerome, a principle at JEMB, the developer of Herald Towers.

“Because of the proximity to Koreatown, we have a huge population of Korean renters, a lot of students and people working at Ernst & Young,” he said.

JEMB Properties led the residential transformation of Herald Square when it opened Herald Towers, a 700-unit rental building, in 2000. The Gotham Group followed with the 48-story Atlas rental building on 38th Street in 2002. Pennsylvania-based developer Pitcairn Properties opened the 34-story Magellan in 2003, and the 41-story Tower 31 opened in 2006 on West 31st.

“Since we bought property the whole strip between 23rd Street and 34th Street on Sixth Avenue has turned into a rental residential market,” said Mr. Jerome. “The complexion of the neighborhood changed into a place that is acceptable to live, so rents have ticked up.”

In 2000, rents in Herald Towers were averaging the mid-$30’s a square foot, Mr. Jerome said, and now they are averaging the mid-$50’s.

The Atlas has also seen rents increase from an average of $50 per square foot in 2002 to about $65 a foot now, said Katherine Sabroff the vice president of marketing for the Atlas Group.

Absent from the media buzz surrounding Herald Square’s revitalization is the fate of the small businesses in Koreatown.

Ms. Lee said retail rents have doubled in Koreatown in the past two or three years. Nonetheless, she thinks, the neighborhood has benefited from residential development in Herald Square and the northward migration of the Chelsea gallery scene.

The Koreatown of today is certainly a far cry from the 32nd Street of 1982, when the first Korean restaurant opened to feed the city's 100,000-person immigrant community. The buildings on 32nd Street are stacked four floors high with hair salons, Korean art galleries, Internet cafes, bookstores, and shops selling all manner of Asian products--from Korean kitsch to books, movies, and CD's. Most seem geared to younger customers.

On a frigid January evening, the Korean restaurants along 32nd Street were all packed with Koreans in their mid-20’s, chatting easily in English mixed with Korean. Most of the older shop owners, however, spoke no English.

Restaurants and shops come and go regularly on 32nd Street, claimed long-time Koreatown employees, save for a few mainstays like the AM record and bookstore on the corner of Fifth. But, aside from a new Pinkberry, most are still Korean-run.

This could change soon, said Mr. Jerome, when long-term leases on 32nd Street expire. He would would not disclose retail rents in JEMB's Herald Center, but said 34th Street has seen a 30 to 40 percent increase since last year.

“Post 9/11 was a different market and if they took them 10 years ago, retail wasn’t that strong then,” he said. “I would think it’s going to be hard for them once leases expire because there’s just so much going on in that neighborhood.”