A furrier isn't a salesperson who happens to sell coats made of fur. It's a trade – closer to a tailor, a leatherworker, and a craftsman rolled into one. A furrier designs a garment, selects and matches the skins by hand, cuts and sews them into a pattern that has to account for the natural grain and nap of the fur, builds the lining and structure underneath, and – just as often – takes an old coat apart and rebuilds it into something new. It's a skill that takes years to learn properly, and for a long stretch of the 20th century, New York City was where more people learned it, and practiced it, than almost anywhere else on earth.
A trade older than the city's skyline
New York's relationship with fur goes back further than most people realize. Long before Manhattan had a garment industry, it had a fur trade – the city's official seal still carries two beavers on it, a nod to the pelts that were among the first goods ever traded out of the port of New York. New Amsterdam was, in its earliest years, a Dutch fur trading post. By the early 1800s, a German immigrant named John Jacob Astor had built the American Fur Company into the largest fur business in the country and, in the process, became the richest man in America. Fur wasn't a side trade in New York. In many ways, it was one of the trades the city was built on.
The wave that built the Fur District
The version of the trade most people would recognize – the one with a concentrated cluster of small workshops, family businesses, and skilled hands-on craftsmen – took shape later, in the decades after the Civil War, as New York's garment industry boomed and a huge wave of Jewish immigrants arrived from Eastern Europe, many from Russia and Poland. Fur work was a new industry in America, which meant fewer of the closed doors immigrants often ran into in older, more established trades. Many arrived already knowing the craft, having worked with pelts in the old country, and they built on that head start.
It worked. By 1910, roughly three out of every four furriers working in New York City were Jewish immigrants or their children. Unlike the grinding piecework of a sweatshop, furriery was – and still is – a genuine skilled trade, the kind you learned formally at a trade school or, more often, the old-fashioned way: standing next to someone who'd been doing it for decades, usually a father, an uncle, or a father-in-law. Shops were frequently family businesses, passed down and intermarried, with sons, daughters, and new in-laws absorbed into the trade the same way generations before them had been.
Twenty blocks, hundreds of shops
By the early 20th century, that concentration of small furriers had a name and a home: the Fur District, centered on 27th to 30th Streets between 6th and 8th Avenues – the same handful of blocks where ERNY Furs still works today. The New York Fur Exchange opened in 1920, giving buyers and sellers a central marketplace to trade raw and processed pelts, and at its peak, hundreds of furriers and fur-related businesses lined those streets – cutters, sewers, dyers, pattern makers, and finishers, often within a few doors of each other.
Fur wasn't only a trade during this era – it became a cultural marker across New York, for reasons that went well beyond fashion runways. For families who'd been shut out of homeownership and other forms of generational wealth by decades of housing discrimination, a fur coat was one of the few possessions that could be bought outright, worn proudly, and handed down. It meant something different to different New Yorkers, but across the city, it tended to mean the same basic thing: something you'd worked for, and something worth keeping.
A shrinking trade – and the shops that stayed
The Fur District has been shrinking for decades. In 1979, it was home to roughly 800 fur manufacturers; by 1989, that number had fallen to around 300, and it's kept falling since, as rising Manhattan rents pushed out workshop after workshop in favor of hotels, condos, and restaurants. Most of the district that once employed thousands of skilled hands is gone now.
What's left is a small handful of shops still doing the work the way it was always done – by hand, on the same streets, often run by the same families who started them. ERNY Furs is one of them. Master furrier Ervin Rosenfeld arrived in New York from Europe as a teenager, joined the fur trade in the early 1970s, and has spent more than five decades since doing exactly the kind of work this trade was built on: designing coats from scratch, taking apart and rebuilding old ones, and treating every customer who walks in – whatever brought them there – like the point of the whole thing. Read more about that story on Our Story.