Perla Valdes has worked out of her home on 44th Street since she first came to the United States 35 years ago. Although she is retired now, she still has a few private clients.
Valdes is a lace artist who specializes in antique wedding gowns, blouses or whatever else you need her to make.
Valdes is one of many North Hudson residents who are quoted in a new exhibit at Union City’s Park Theater on the history of the embroidery industry in this area. The industry has been prominent in Hudson County since the first Swiss and German immigrants arrived here in the 1870s.
“This is part of a real cultural history of New Jersey and Hudson County,” said Director of the Park Performing Arts Theater Father Kevin Ashe last week. “Every group that came through this area became involved in this business.”
The Park Theater, through its Folk Arts Program, is working to preserve the history of this industry with an exhibit that collects oral histories, pieces of lace and embroidered works from the earliest days of the industry to the present.
The Cultural Thread exhibit will open in Fall 2001 at the Park Performing Arts Center New Gallery. A preview of the exhibit is already on display.
“I was trying to find a project that would bring the community together,” said Meriam Lobel, the director of Folk Arts Program. “The embroidery industry is uniquely characteristic of this area. Many, many people in Hudson County and surrounding counties had a part of it.”
Valdes learned the art of lacework from her aunt in Cuba. Together, Valdes and her aunt designed and sewed dresses for the richest Havana socialites. After moving to the United State, Valdes soon found that type of following again.
“I like to work with lace because lace is beautiful,” said Valdes, who has picked up the pieces of antique lace that she uses in France, Italy and Spain.
Valdes has never made the same dress twice and often designs her own fashions.
“My mother usually knows when it comes to brides what they want,” said her daughter, Carmen Valdes. “She doesn’t know you, but she knows what you like to wear and what would look good on you.”
Down many generations
A local man who is quoted in the exhibit is Rich Muentener, 52, of Jersey City, who started working in his grandfather’s shop when he was 12 years old.
Muentener was quoted in the exhibit saying, “The biggest project I even done was the punching for the American Eagle that is embroidered on United States government flags. That design has 72,000 stitches and I placed each one with loving care.”
All of the government flags that are made today are made in the United States.
“There is a chance, and a very good chance that [the flag] was made here,” said Ashe about any American flag you see on television or close to home.
“There were 500,000 flags made this year,” said President of Schiffli Lace and Embroidery Manufacturer Association Frank Cimino. “And next year there will be 700,000 [flags] made.”
However, it is not just the flags that people in the industry recognize on television.
Two sisters, Carol Martin and Marsha Neuschwanter, who worked at Embassador Lace for more 20 years, remember seeing their lace on dresses worn by actresses on television.
“You’d be watching a television program and say, ‘Oh, there’s my lace,'” said Martin.
“Then you would say, ‘That’s number whatever,'” agreed Neuschwanter. “You would remember the number of the pattern.”
Many of the 300 embroidery and lace factories that still exist in this area today are still run by descendants of the families that started the businesses more than 50 years ago.
Joseph Banert, who was 18 when he started in the embroidery business, saw four generations of his family go through the embroidery industry. Banert started his own business, Banert Embroidery, on Jackson Street in Guttenberg after serving three and a half years in World War II. His son took over the business after he retired in 1990.
Embassador Lace in Union City, which closed only two weeks ago after opening in 1941, was one of Banert’s main clients. Walter Kohn, the owner of Embassador Lace, retired at 91 after more than 50 years in business.
Many of the embroiders starting in the business remember helping out their fathers and uncles when they were very young before going into the business themselves.
Cimino, who worked in West New York his whole life, remembers helping his family at the age of 5.
“When I was 5, I remember sticking flowers together,” said Cimino. “At six and a half I was hand-cutting.” However, his son did not feel the same need to continue the tradition that Cimino did.
“He wanted no part in it,” said Cimino about his son. “You have to work 12 hours a day. That is the only way you make money in this business.”
Martin, who followed her husband into the business, said that she often worked 10 hours a day at Embassador Lace. However she added that the people who did the actual stitching and bleaching stayed longer.
Although, 12-hour or more days was always common in the embroidery industry, Joseph Schneider of Schneider Embroidery in Guttenberg has noticed a definite difference in how the industry works.
“Now you have to be able to deliver [the product] immediately,” said Schneider, who said when the industry was at its busiest, people would wait two or three weeks for an order. “Who ever can make it the same day or the next day will get the order.”
Schneider, who began his business in 1941, is still operating the same machinery that his uncle ran in 1917.
True cultural thread
Embroidery also plays a large role in cultural traditions.
“So many performers’ costumes are elaborately embroidered,” said Lobel. “[These costumes] are a very important element of their presentation when they perform.”
Olena Halkowycz, a Ukranian woman who began her embroidery career in Jersey City before relocating to Teaneck in Bergen County, learned how to embroider from her friends for that reason.
“We always needed clothes for cultural events and I never had any,” said Halkowycz, whose mother was not able to embroider.
Now Halkowycz embroiders jackets for her clients to order.
Amadou Diallo (no relation to the famed victim of alleged police brutality in New York), originally from the West African Country Guinea, owns a shop in Newark where he sells embroidered clothing that is traditional to his native country.
“It gives me a lot of energy,” said Diallo about working on pieces that represent his country’s traditions.
The Folk Arts Program worked with Professor Silvio Laccetti in the Humanities Department at Stevens Institute of Technology, the Schiffli Embroidery and Lace Manufacturers Association and the Newark Museum on this project.
The project has received funding from the New Jersey Council on the Humanities, National Endowment for the arts, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Hudson County Freeholders and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. The exhibit is on the second floor of the Park Theater on 32nd Street between Central Avenue and Summit Avenue. For more information call 865-6980 ext. 15.