When Howard Held opened Winmil Fabrics in 1969, Boston’s Garment District was not just a place on the map, it was a way of life.

Along crowded sidewalks, salesmen pulling sample bags jockeyed for space with stockboys pushing rolling carts. In every building, in every direction, people huddled over sewing machines and leaned over long tables — so many stitchers and cutters, pressers and finishers, jobbers, and samplers, and sellers.

It had been that way for generations, and Held, now 72, can picture it still, from Washington Street to the Expressway, Summer Street down to Kneeland, a pulsating garment district rivaling anything beyond Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue.

The idea that it might all vanish was inconceivable, like Cape Cod falling into the ocean. Harder to imagine still was that Winmil would be the last business standing, a small firm that started on the periphery, ringing up around $9that first day.

Forty-seven years later, Held and his wife will close Winmil on June 14, ending a run that took them from bit players in a bursting ensemble to the only ones left on stage.

When they turn out the lights it will mark the end not just of the last full-service fabric store in downtown Boston but the last trace of the trade that defined the neighborhood.

Over the decades, the Helds have made lasting friendships with customers, employed dozens of people, endured two gunpoint robberies, put two children through college, and sold at least 3 million handpicked pieces of fabric, from polyester double-knit to pure cotton. And witnessed the erasing of an industry.

When Held was a boy, imports barely registered in the United States clothing market, and local newspapers boasted of the “$200,000,000 Hub garment industry.’’ Although New England’s mill cities had largely lost their textile production to the Sun Belt, Boston retained the skilled work of turning so much cloth into clothing.

When Winmil opened on Chauncy Street, the towering building across the way housed needle-and-thread operations like Beale Brothers menswear, Charles S. Gelles & Son neckwear, and Madison Sportswear, all of them there before Held was born.

Today, the anchor tenant in that building is Bolt, not a winking nod to a standard roll of cloth but a venture capital firm jolting high-tech startups.

The thrum of sewing machines in the neighborhood started fading long ago — from about 15,000 union garment workers in the 1960s, to 8,000 in 1980, to none today. Gone as well are all the manufacturer’s representatives, middlemen, and purchasing agents who swirled around them, and all the other fabric shops that dotted the first floors.

And so many Winmil customers have known it only as an island, unlocked from history, in a vague section of Boston that is not quite Chinatown, Downtown Crossing, or the Financial District.

Yet new customers seemed to keep on finding it: art-school freshmen, do-in-yourselfers, Halloween costume-makers, suburban stitchers who searched Google. They were all drawn to a store that had become a throwback but never a fossil, an ever-changing funhouse of exotic patterns and exploding color.

And that was only half of it; Winmil also boasted low prices and the warmth of the Helds, quick to laugh and chat up customers. They often locked the store long after the advertised closing time of 6 p.m., engrossed in conversation.

Indeed, Held said, “we love to yap.’’

Making clothing is such a personal matter — a baby blanket, a party dress, a First Communion suit — that it was a natural entry point for wide-ranging talk about life.

“We knew who was getting engaged before that person was getting engaged,’’ said Marilyn Held, who joined Howard full time after their children reached kindergarten in the mid-1970s. “We knew the deaths. We knew the illnesses. We knew the different traditions for different deaths.’’

And so customers returned, again and again, some thousands of times; the Helds learned their tastes, setting aside special fabrics discovered on buying trips.

Marie Freeman, a paralegal, has stopped in about three times a week since the 1980s. She picked up sewing after her mother died, to channel her memory. Now she has made so many skirts, tops, and dresses that she jokes about wanting costume changes at her own wake.

“I used to leave Winmil bags in my trunk and take them in in the dark, because I didn’t want my neighbors thinking, ‘Again?’ ’’ she laughed. “If you go to other stores — and I won’t mention any names — the quality is just not the same. Plus, we have Marilyn and Howie to talk to.’’

As she said that, Marilyn beamed and Held blushed. That afternoon, they got hugs, selfie requests, even flowers from a stream of well-wishers, some tearing up, the Helds welling up, too.

They included Rachael Burger, a Web developer who grew up in a North Shore magic company (Le Grand David) and visited Winmil often with her mother to buy costume fabric; Bolade Owolewa, who has been coming ever since she emigrated from Nigeria in 1977, finding fabric for everything from head wraps to tablecloths; and Va Lynda Robinson, a social worker who did not discover Winmil until she took a sewing class a few years ago.

“I just found out! Oh my God!’’ said Robinson, swooping toward the counter with a flourish, clad in a two-tone shawl and red linen hat she fashioned herself. “You can’t!’’ And that was all in less than an hour. Every day has been like that since the Helds postedretirement-sale signs a month ago.

Over and over, they explain how sad they are not just to leave their customers but to leave them with no fabric store in downtown Boston. But, they say, they want to retire while still healthy enough to travel and be active grandparents. They are curious to try out life without six-day workweeks, grateful for a business that has been better to them than they ever dreamed.

So much of Winmil’s success was a happy accident. Held, who grew up in Winthrop, worked initially for an unemployment-compensation firm but dreamed of his own business. His father, Melvin, a ­window-washer’s son and World War II veteran, had owned a pair of East Boston fabric stores. So they decided to go in together as fabric wholesalers, figuring they would be less likely to fail at something familiar.

They would carefully select the most interesting pieces from jobbers — middlemen in New York or Boston who dealt in batches of fabric leftover when clothing companies made samples of potential new designs — and resell them to the fabric stores that were a fixture of every downtown in New England. It was like a treasure hunt, coupled with the joy of schmoozing.

They knew they wanted an office in the Garment District — “where the action was’’ — but it was luck that they ended up in a first-floor space, on Essex Street. Immediately, garment workers on break began wandering in, looking for fabric to make their own clothing at home. After a few days of turning them away, the Helds started retailing. Soon, they stopped wholesaling entirely — far less driving, no need to wait weeks for shopkeepers to mail checks.

The business grew quickly through word of mouth. Though Winmil was small, the Helds had a vibrant selection, reflecting their careful eye and deft touch.

Soon, they tripled their space to 3,000 square feet by moving around the corner to a basement store on Chauncy, the spine of the district, in the old Frost Brothers building. A post office filled the first floor; clothing workshops and sales offices occupied the upper stories.

When the post office moved, the landlord pressed the Helds to fill that bigger space, threatening to rent to another fabric store if they did not. They agreed, and signed a lease to the end of the 20th century.

It was a stroke of luck; the garment firms around them would fall because of global forces like technology and tariffs, but also because of rapidly rising rents in a resurgent city. In the mid-1980s, as developers gobbled up Garment District buildings, one swooped in with a $10 million plan to turn the Frost Brothers building into first-class office space.

The developercared little for Winmil, with its green awning and piles of fluorescent-lit fabric. But the lease protected the Helds, and the developer was unable to squeeze them out. When he folded in the next recession, they managed to buy their slice of the building as a commercial condo.

That helped Winmil thrive, and the Helds expanded, branching out at one point to include five suburban stores and 30 employees. But they could see home sewing would decline; fewer people had come of age taking home economics or had time to make clothing, and affordable imports had flooded the market.

They discouraged their children from taking over. Their daughter became a management consultant; their son, a lawyer.

Still, they scarcely talked about retirement until basking in the warmth of a late-winter trip to Florida. They quietly put their space on the market, and when it finally sold — to a dental practice — they started breaking the news to customers.

“I was hoping [it might become] a little sewing factory,’’ said Steve Finch, a 33-year-old North End hatmaker, as he wistfully paid for one last purchase, $6.49 for a yard and five-eighths of upholstery fabric he could fashion into newsboy caps. “I do need dental work. So. We’ll see.’’

Down the counter, two customers chatted who had been coming to Winmil for decades — Freeman, the paralegal, and Linda Russo, a nurse who first wandered in on a Floating Hospital lunch break 44 years ago. Like Freeman, Russo sometimes concealed how much she was buying from her hospital friends. “It’s an addiction,’’ Freeman said. “A good one, but it is.’’

Russo fondly recalled making a silk dress from Winmil fabric for her daughter’s wedding, and Freeman plans to do the same this fall; both joked they had stashed enough fabric to open their own store. They took turns hugging and posing with the Helds, lingering before stepping out into what was once the Garment District.

They promised to meet for lunch — old friends, it seemed, though they had actually just met. Winmil, Freeman explained. “We have this common thread.’’

Eric Moskowitz can be reached at eric.moskowitz@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeMoskowitz.