The Business of Flowers
The flower market at 28th Street is the historic heart of America’s $18 billion flower industry. Its traditional structure was simple: local florists bought from wholesalers in the markets, who in turn sourced flowers from growers or their agents. There are two ways into the flower business: by birth or by accident. Alongside a dozen or so family firms, 28th Street employs ex-pint-pullers from Ulster, oil riggers, Punjabi toughs and a Serbian former Marlboro Man, who have all found a happy home in a place that sells dead plants with names such as “Hot Eskimo” and “Charming Babe Spray”.
Yet for all its gritty sophistication, 28th Street is a shadow of its former self. It was set up in the 1890s and dominated by Greeks, mainly from a town called Nafpaktos, according to Louie Theofanis who runs Major Wholesale Florist, a second-generation firm founded by his father who, legend has it, started out sleeping in a flower box on 6th Avenue. Steven Rosenberg of Superior Flowers, a third generation florist, says his grandfather spoke Yiddish when he arrived in New York and learned Greek to work on 28th Street.
Transient, superfluous and beautiful, flowers decorate the pinnacle of New York society. The city’s wealthiest, whose Upper East Side penthouses can be spied from the Met’s roof, might spend $10,000 a week on them…
Read the full article in The Economist, Dec 20, 2014
