Tour New York City’s Garment District With Developer Tom Creighton ’25

On a freezing January day in 2024, Tom Creighton ’25, then a junior, stood deep in concentration on a busy sidewalk in New York City’s Garment District, once synonymous with clothing manufacturing and fashion, and now a vibrant hub blending its past with public art, small businesses and creative industries. New Yorkers and tourists sped past Creighton as he painstakingly zoomed in on his iPhone, verifying the latitude and longitude coordinates of famous landmarks throughout the neighborhood — part of his work developing The Garment District’s official GPS-guided walking tour app.

“Sophomore year, I took a class on programming languages, implementation and design,” said Creighton, a computer science major and Chinese studies minor. “We did a semester-long group project, and I learned the programming language Swift, which is the main language used for programming apps that are available on the App Store.”

After learning Swift, Creighton was determined to use his new skills to create. He reached out to friends for ideas. Through one of those contacts, Creighton learned that the nonprofit Garment District Alliance was seeking a developer to create an app that would allow visitors to learn about the area’s rich history, architecture, landmarks and public art installations — including the iconic, bright yellow “Big Button” sculpture, the “Garment Worker” statue (a tribute to the Jewish garment workers who shaped the neighborhood), the Fashion Center Building and Mood Fabrics (well known to Bravo TV’s “Project Runway” fans).

Creighton got the job. He worked on the project from his sophomore year until the app’s launch in early 2025, adjusting and improving the code as he developed his skills through computer science coursework at Holy Cross.

“As I continued my education and was exposed to new ideas, I was able to undo some of the rookie mistakes I made early in the development process,” Creighton said. “For example, I improved the speed by moving away from using one struct, which is essentially a layer.”

The project was completely self-directed, independent work, which meant squeezing in development hours whenever he could. “Over the summers, I would lifeguard during the day, then go to the library immediately after work and stay there until I had to leave and go to bed,” Creighton recalled. “It was a busy couple of summers and school breaks.”

After back-and-forth revisions and streamlining the code, The Garment District app was finalized and published in the spring of 2025.

“It was surreal,” Creighton said of seeing the app go live. “I immediately started checking the statistics and could see the numbers go up as people downloaded it. “New York Locals” even shared it on Instagram. The App Store lists my name as the developer, which is wild to see.”

While Creighton completed the work completely independently, he still received encouragement along the way, including from Farhad Mohsin, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at Holy Cross.

“Tom was very sharp with the concepts, asked good questions and had good answers to my questions as well,” shared Mohsin, who taught Creighton in two courses during his senior year. “When Tom mentioned that he was taking on this project as a solo task, I was very impressed. We always hope that students will take the skills they learn and build real-world projects. His project showcased not only strong programming abilities but also excellent user experience design and project management skills.”

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As the only developer on the app, Creighton fit in the work during school breaks and summers, lifeguarding by day and coding by night.

“I was the only one coding for this, so I learned self-discipline and the ability to think things through independently,” said Creighton, who is pursuing a career in software engineering. “At the same time, I learned how to communicate ideas about computer science in order to get people who didn’t necessarily understand the behind-the-scenes a product that they would like — which is another important skill.”

Creighton also learned to accept the ups and downs that are an intrinsic part of computer science: “You are going to make mistakes. It is going to be frustrating. You are going to be sitting, staring at lines of code, wondering what you did wrong. But that is the best way to learn. When you fix one thing and see the program running the way you expect it to, it is a great feeling.”