A Store Selling Style by the Bolt Started on G Street, and Is Still Owned by Mr. G.
By Annie Groer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 2, 2005
Judah Greenzaid, a dapper gent of 76, runs a practiced hand over a bolt of brown Belgian mohair velvet and emits a sigh of $100-per-yard contentment. Moments later, he will wax rhapsodic about
a Valentino ivory Indian silk, bordered with hand-
made crepe flowers, wispy feathers and sparkling beads priced at $370 a yard.
His enthusiasm quickly shifts to $12.77 denim twill (he adores both the chartreuse and the red) and $2.97 floral prints so beloved by quilters and crafters who flock to his four-store G Street Fabrics empire.
"Some of these fabrics are like little works of art," says the company chairman, explaining in great detail the dyeing, weaving and finishing processes involved in the manufacture of exquisitely patterned Japanese silks and the lightest-weight Italian wools.
For more than 50 years -- first in downtown Washington and now at stores in Rockville, Centreville, Falls Church and Potomac Mills -- Judah Greenzaid, or Mr. G., as he is universally known, even to grown sons Joel and Michael, has indulged a passion for fabric.
He learned the business from his own father, David, a Russian immigrant and onetime pushcart peddler in New York's teeming Lower East Side, who moved to Washington during the Depression and sold bolt ends, zippers and lining to the city's tailors and dressmakers. By 1942, David had opened the tiny G Street Remnant Shop a short walk from the White House, returning regularly to Manhattan by Greyhound bus to restock.
"The first shop at 11th and G was 100 square feet," recalls Judah during a recent tour of his 20,000-square-foot Rockville flagship. "My baby brother was sleeping on cashmere remnants. There was no air conditioning. You'd open windows to get some air and then the bugs and moths came in, so you had to put all the woolens in mothballs. When it got really hot in the summer, we slept at Hains Point."
In those early days, G Street Remnants was all about apparel fabric: fine men's suiting preferred by diplomats and politicians; exquisite satins and chiffons favored by socialites and embassy wives; sensible cottons for the thousands of "government girls" who came to work in wartime Washington and never left.
In the mid-1950s, David closed the store and moved the family to Israel. But when Judah -- in his mid-twenties and an international relations graduate of George Washington University -- didn't find work he liked there, back he came. Using a cache of apparel remnants his father judiciously left behind, he opened a shop at 805 G St.
In the 1960s, he added a small department: "home dec," as in decorating.
"It was not nearly as sophisticated as it is now," says son Joel, 44, company president and CEO. "There was a lot of lime green and Naugahyde upholstery fabric."
When downtown development forced Mr. G. out in 1983, he leased a 10,000-square-foot, second-floor space, including a small home dec area, in what is now Rockville's Mid-Pike Plaza.
"We enlarged it when homebuilding was progressing and interest rates hadn't quite come down. Even so, people were moving into places we had never heard of, like Gaithersburg and Clarksburg."
A decade later, he took over the first floor and moved home dec downstairs. Today it represents 35 to 40 percent of sales at all four stores, and has the company's largest growth potential. Near the entrance, a white wall is hung with myriad window treatments, all in deep gray cotton to focus the eye and imagination on pleats and folds, swags and jabots.
Shoppers range from decorators (with and without clients) to patrons who know just what they want to customers who haven't a clue (and seek advice from the staff). In addition to the bolts of fabrics arrayed on both floors, thousands more can be seen in dozens of sample books.
While there are shoppers willing to pay full price for home dec fabric, others head straight for the remnant tables: $3.97 per yard for drapery bolt ends, $7 for upholstery remnants.
There is something almost primal about the process of rooting through the plaids and florals in search of a perfect stripe. "At our $2.97 table, some people want it neat, others really want the hunt. For Mr. G., it's the hunt," says Joel. "I can't tell you how many basements and subbasements we've been in. One place was so mildewed and musty that he had to put his handkerchief over his face like a cowboy's bandanna."
About 40 percent of G Street customers make their own Roman shades or recover faded wing chairs. Sixty percent let the stores arrange to have their bedding, draperies and furniture coverings custom-made in "very, very good immigrant workrooms," says Mr. G.
Collectively, the four stores now offer nearly three dozen home dec classes in everything from basic upholstery (schlep your own chair back and forth each week) to "high-end decorator valances."
After more than a half-century in the business, Mr. G.'s heart is still in apparel, while Joel sees home dec as the future. Both agree that their interior textiles are not as consistently fabulous as the couture fashion yardage.
"That's the battle I fight. You have a certain amount of money for every product line," says Joel.
However, the lines are blurring, says the father. "People are buying Chanel tweeds to use for pillows, Indian silks for window treatments. And they are using upholstery jacquards and brocades and some of the trim for jackets"
Still, Mr. G., who considers "anyone who sells fabric" a competitor, is thinking strategically as he considers offering ready-made draperies.
While his sons run the day-to-day operations, Mr. G. is still totally involved in fabric buying. He also comes to the Rockville store seven days a week, where he often can be seen cutting cloth for delighted customers, some of whom remember the old downtown shop.
"This is my retirement," he says. "I like the commerce."