Journalism Portfolio

 In New York City’s Flower District, the Decline of a Century-Old Trade

As autumn leaves scattered over Manhattan’s sidewalks, the holiday season was in full swing inside Tropical Plants & Orchids, a wholesale plant shop in New York City’s Flower District. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” played through the speakers as Ashok Kumar, owner of Tropical Plants & Orchids, leaned over his desk at the checkout counter, studying the receipts of an upcoming wholesale tree delivery.

At the same time, a family of four tourists walked out of the hotel next door through the sidewalk, pausing outside Tropical Plants & Orchids and marveling at the blooming bouquets and pots of popular holiday plants like paperwhite narcissus, amaryllis, lavender, and rosemary that lined Kumar’s storefront. The group resumed walking to the end of the block and turned right, disappearing onto Sixth Avenue.

Welcome to the historic Flower District on West 28th Street in Chelsea, where the sidewalks are lined with blooming flowers and evergreen plants sold by a network of small businesses. While the block is alive in the biological sense, it is often described as a dying district.

Kumar’s plant shop survived the COVID-19 pandemic, but his resilience is tested by supply chain woes, dwindling demand, and high-rise hotels encroaching on the block. In recent years, the increased foot traffic from the hotels on the block hasn’t improved sales, Kumar says, and as New Yorkers turn to Trader Joe’s and big box stores for cheaper plants, some fear the end of the district could be near.

Esther Cain, a city historian and founder of Ephemeral New York, an online platform that publishes articles about New York’s forgotten people and places, says the ongoing decline of the Flower District is emblematic of New York’s vanishing unique trade districts, which contributed to a loss of diversity in the urban landscape.

“There used to be so much of a diversity of industries and commercial entities - and experiences,” Cain says. “We are in a weird spot where everything is a new high-end residence, a restaurant, or a Duane Reade, Target, or bank branch. It affects your experience when walking around, you are almost on repeat from neighborhood to neighborhood.”

Keeping a disappearing district alive

During the day, green foliage and colorful petals crowd the sidewalk and spill over on West 28th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Manhattan. By 6 p.m., the block is vacant. Kumar and his staff lug all the inventory into the store to protect against theft overnight. They bring out the plants on heavy-duty metal dollies at around 6 a.m. the next morning.

“That’s our gym,” Kumar, 47, says.

Tropical Plants & Orchids sells around 700 types of plants from its two adjacent stores. Outside, abundant greenery creates a clean and fresh scent rare on the sidewalks of central Manhattan. Indoor, small succulents to seven-foot tall trees are tightly packed under fluorescent lights.

The main store at 106 W28th St. is spacious and extends to a back garden and basement. A narrow staircase leads to the second floor of the four-story pre-war building. It has a bathroom, kitchen, and meeting area for the 10 to 15 employees, predominantly immigrants from Latin America, India, and Africa.

“This is the floor manager,” says Kumar, pointing to his blue-eyed Siamese cat, Nuna Kumar, who is chewing on the thin tip of a ponytail palm leaf. She has a litter box in the basement and lives in the store. Kumar calls her his daughter.

Although much has changed about the Flower District, certain elements endure. Like the current occupant, in June 1903 wholesale florist J.K. Allen opened at 6 a.m. at 106 W28th St., according to the shop’s advertisement in The Weekly Florists’ Review. In January 1911, J.K. Allen placed an ad in The Weekly Florists’ Review, urging growers to call the business in the “very center of the wholesale district.”

A bygone era

At the fin de siècle, Chelsea emerged as the center of New York’s wholesale floral trade. The New York Florist Club, comprised of affluent city residents and headquartered on West 23rd Street, convinced florists to move their businesses from the Lower East Side to West 28th Street in Chelsea by the turn of the century, according to James Francois-Pijuan, a floral designer, in his book NYC Historic Floral District: 176 Years Strong.

Between the mid-1800s and the 1960s, Long Island’s floral farms and nurseries supplied the Flower District’s wholesale companies with cut flowers and plants “meticulously packed in wooden crates and preserved with ice,” Francois-Pijuan says. The plants were shipped by ferry from Long Island City to the piers of East 34th Street and then to their clients in West 28th Street.

In his book, Francois-Pijuan pinpoints the 1940s as the era of a flourishing Floral District, largely thanks to the foot traffic of wealthy patrons who shopped for fur coats in the nearby Fur District and strolled through the Flower District.

“It was nice to have a Flower District to walk through different shops and see different types of flowers to flowering plants to tall trees, and expand your knowledge base of plants, almost like walking through a museum,” says Cain, who wrote the book The Gilded Age in New York 1870-1910, published in 2016.

Bill Bianchi, 92, owner of Bianchi-Davis Greenhouses, a plant nursery and supplier in Long Island, recalls walking down West 28th Street with his father in the 1940s. He visited the bustling plant businesses on the block, turned east on Sixth Avenue, and found flower shops stretching north and south of the thoroughfare. “It was a totally different kind of market,” he said.

During the 1940s, Kumar’s shop was occupied by “S&S FLORAL CO.” Siebrecht & Siebrecht, stylized as S&S, was a wholesale market of orchids, gardenias, and violets at 136 W. 28th Street in January 1911, according to The Weekly Florists Review. By October, socialite Julia W.A. Siebrecht was suing her husband, Henry A. Siebrecht Jr., the son of a “wealthy Fifth Avenue” florist, reported The New York Times in an article on their divorce trial.

The Siebrecht family’s floral fortune began when Henry Augustus Siebrecht Sr. set sail from Germany to the U.S. in 1866. He was 18 years old with “$11 in his pocket,” according to his New York Times obituary in 1934. By the turn of the century, Siebrecht Sr. was the first florist to open a flower shop on Fifth Avenue. He did landscape gardening on the John D. Rockefeller Estate, built the Bronx Park’s botanical gardens, and developed the New Rochelle Nursery, one of the biggest nurseries in the world at the time of his death. The New York Times and The Daily News credited him as the first to introduce “the orchid for commercial use.”

Changing landscape

Over the past decade, Chelsea’s rising retail rental prices and new high-rise hotel chains turned the district into a tourist zone and put plant shops out of business. Cain said the decline of commercial districts in New York City began after the Second World War and hasn’t stopped since.

“New York City doesn’t really have room for these districts anymore with the value of real estate,” Cain says. “The New York that we live in now is geared towards residential and restaurants and coffee places.”

The average asking rent in Manhattan’s retail corridors has been increasing for four consecutive quarters as of July 2023, buoyed by growing demand for retail space and a post-pandemic resurgence in tourism, according to a report by CBRE, a commercial real estate consulting firm.

When Tropical Plants & Orchids opened in 2000, the monthly rent was around $5,000 to $6,000. Now, Kumar says he pays $40,000 per month for the entire space. During the pandemic, landlords were more lenient with delayed rent payments as business activity halted. Post-pandemic, little can be done to negotiate rent, Kumar says. “The landlords get the rent on time, that’s all they care about.”

Threats to the neighborhood

The pandemic exacerbated financial pressures for plant shops since wholesale customers tend to be indoor places that value beautification, such as hotels, office lobbies, and restaurants, which were forced to close or wind down operations for much of 2020.

“Covid killed everything,” Kumar says.

Three years on, Tropical Plants & Orchids has yet to recoup its pandemic losses. In the last two years, the business barely broke even. This year, thanks to improved sales during Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, Kumar is hoping to double the profit made in 2019.

“Triple!” says Gurdeep ‘Lucky’ Singh over his shoulder as he rushes up the staircase.

Lucky, 24, tall and slim, has been an employee of Tropical Plants & Orchids since 2018. He waters the plants, marches in and out of the store in sudden bursts of energy, and with inviting eyes he walks up to every single visitor and says, “Need any help?”

Lucky hails from India while the majority of Kumar’s employees are of Hispanic or African origin. The district’s lingua franca is English but a mix of Spanish, African French, and Punjabi slips into conversations and reverberates along the sidewalks of the district.

“Agua...agua outside” Lucky says as he instructs his colleague to water the plants on the curb.

The Flower District welcomes immigrants of diverse backgrounds and historically flourished for it. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Europeans from Germany, Poland, Greece, and Italy made up the bulk of the neighborhood, according to Starbright Floral Design, a floral company in New York City.

“This flower business is for everybody,” Kumar says. “I love the competition on the block.”

Kumar’s true competition lies outside the Flower District. In less than a ten-block radius around the congested Avenue of the Americas, there is a Home Depot on West 23rd Street where a white fuchsia orchid pot retails at $24. In the Flower District, the same size product costs at least $35. At the Trader Joe’s on the corner of West 21st Street, buckets of solstice dark sunflowers, three-stem hydrangea, and bright green shamrock bouquets, retailing between $3 and $8, are packed in rows across the floor-to-ceiling window display.

Big box stores have made some owners in the Flower District less hopeful than Kumar about future success, if not simply survival, as small independent sellers, including William ‘Bill’ Frazer, owner of Flowers on Essex, a floral shop filled with neon lights, velvet chairs and a grungy decor aesthetic, hinting at its original Lower East Side location in the 1980s.

“Young people buy everything at Trader Joe’s and don’t care about the quality. That’s the world we live in,” Frazer said, with a thick Brooklyn accent. “The new generation is coming in and pushing out the mom-and-pop business. It’s sad.”

Frazer, a Brooklyn native with whitish-grey hair and a towering presence at over six feet tall, has been working in New York’s floral industry since 1975. He saw his competitors in the Flower District disappear over the last four decades. “It was much busier, there used to be 40 wholesalers now there’s seven or eight,” he says.

Hotels on the block

According to a New York Times article in November 2000, around 31 wholesale florists and other plant sellers occupied the two blocks on 28th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue. 23 years later, a crop of three and four-star hotels have taken the place of the shuttered plant businesses.

The increasing presence of hotel guests in the district in recent years was described by a New York Times article in 2019 as a potential savior of the block’s remaining floral businesses by driving foot traffic into the stores. But Kumar says hotel guests simply wander through the district without purchasing plants.

In late October this year, Kumar’s brother Suki Singh stood outside the modest storefront of his shop, Holiday Flower and Plant, and stared with dismay into the distance at the sleek façade of the new Aloft New York Chelsea, a Marriott property expected to open in the forthcoming weeks. Aloft is the latest addition to around eight hotels on the block, which include brand-name chains like Hyatt House and Marriott's Fairfield Inn & Suites.

In homage to the Flower District, some of the hotels adopted botanical motifs, such as the ‘Fleur Room’ lounge and club inside The Moxy Chelsea, a boutique hotel with 35 floors that dwarfs the pre-war building of Tropical Plants & Orchids directly across the street. The Fleur Room is a disco garden-themed rooftop with panoramic views of Manhattan and serves edible flowers floating in cocktails called ‘buy myself flowers’ ($28) and ‘lilac jane’ ($19).

Kumar hesitates to criticize yet another hotel on the block. He struck a deal with Aloft to supply boxwood and ornamental cabbage, which now decorate the wide entrance area outside the hotel, and his small succulents, corn plants, and orchids can be found around the lobby and restrooms.

Family roots

To reach the Flower District, Kumar drives his van from his house in Jamaica, Queens. He wakes up at dawn, drinks coffee, prays, and then feeds his birds and fish. On his half-hour commute, he listens to the raspy cries of Pakistani singer Nusrat Fatih Ali Khan, who sings qawwali, a genre of devotional Sufi music from South Asia. The Encyclopedia Britannica says qawwali “aims to lead listeners to a state of religious ecstasy.”

On his afternoon break, Kumar is still found in the Flower District leaning against the backdoor of his delivery van, smoking a cigarette and watching Indian news clips on his phone. His year-round uniform is a grey beanie and navy hooded jacket that hides his big frame. He often smiles, with full cheeks and kind eyes.

Kumar knows the names, origins, and care instructions of over 700 plant species sold in his store by heart, a mental library he says took 25 years to build. He takes a day off once a week, sometimes.

“I want to work until I die,” he says.

Kumar immigrated to the United States from Punjab, India, in March 1993, and worked as a supervisor for a photocopying company in New Jersey. Growing tired of the commute from Queens to New Jersey and recently married, he opened Tropical Plants & Orchids in 2000 with his cousin Karvinder, who moved shortly afterward to Colorado Springs. Now, Kumar runs his store alone.

“I don’t need a partner,” he says. “God have no partner.”

Suki Singh co-runs Holiday Flower and Plant with his older brother Harvinder “Ben” Singh, 50. Their cousins and uncle work across the street at Foliage Paradise. “It’s nice to work with family but there’s a lot of competition between us,” Suki Singh says.

In 1986, Singh and his maternal uncle Sees opened Foliage Paradise, the family’s first store in the Flower District. Four years later, Singh opened his shop, Holiday Flower and Plant, across the street.

Phalaenopsis orchids are propagated in Taiwan and travel in cooled containers via air freight to California, and by truck to the Bianchi-Davis Greenhouses in Riverhead, Long Island. At the greenhouse, rows of potted orchids grow for six months in controlled temperature and light. Winters in the Northeast are too harsh for the orchids, says Bianchi, so the orchids are shipped to Florida during the colder months. The southern state’s warmer climate creates a more suitable habitat for tropical plants.

A month or so before the orchids bloom, they are trucked back to Long Island. Once the orchids bloom in Riverhead, like the process was done over a century prior, the plants are hand-delivered to various wholesale retailers in the region, including Tropical Plants & Orchids.

Supply chain issues

Bianchi-Davis’ system is highly structured but not immune to logistical delays. In 2019, a shipment of around 20,000 orchids took four to five weeks to travel from Taiwan through California to Long Island. When the pandemic hit, the plants got stuck in a California warehouse for over two months, spoiling away in four-by-four containers.

“It was very difficult and expensive,” says Bill Bianchi, the owner of Bianchi-Davis Greenhouses.

The Covid-19 pandemic first disrupted the global supply chain and since last year, inflationary pressures and geopolitical conflicts like the Russia-Ukraine war have been destabilizing the flow of goods coming into the US, including containers of plants imported from Southeast Asia and South America.

Longer times in transit also mean costlier pre-cooled containers. Bianchi-Davis raised its prices after its growers in Taiwan did. “We’re trying not to raise the prices anymore,” Bianchi says.

Kumar sells a double-stem orchid for $45, up by around $5 this year to account for inflation and his suppliers’ increasing rates. He buys orchids from more than four suppliers for $18 to $25 per piece. “It’s hard to raise prices,” Kumar says, because long-time customers were accustomed to buying at the same price for decades. Kumar also raised his delivery fees in response to record-high gas prices after oil sanctions were imposed on Russia. Tropical Plants & Orchids sends two delivery vans around New York City and as far as Virginia and Connecticut, charging up to $5 per mile, up from $3 per mile a decade ago.

“At that time, gas prices were good because there was no fighting,” Kumar says.

A fragile ecosystem

Small business owners in the Flower District like Kumar are constantly wrestling with external forces that appear beyond their control. Wars abroad, such as the Russia-Ukraine war and the conflict in Israel and Gaza, have not only impacted the costs and the supply chain, Kumar says, but also dampened the mood for festivity and celebratory events, keeping customers away from the Flower District.

The Flower District’s walk-in and wholesale clients pay premium prices for individually inspected plants. Customers are cautious about where they spend their dollars in times of economic uncertainty, but now they also have broad access to cheaper and more convenient options. After the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Kumar’s client, a United Nations office, replaced his fresh orchids with cheaper, plastic ones, and never looked back.

“Flower is the last choice, flower is only for decoration,” Kumar says. “First people think about food and clothes. We are the last person here.”

On a cold winter morning in the Flower District, a young woman wrapped in a black fur coat stood outside the SpringHill Marriott hotel. She didn’t speak English well, she said, while clutching her iPhone. Next to her feet on the curb, she put down a doubled brown paper bag from Trader Joe’s, out of which was a bouquet of fresh white flowers.

Sources

Official deed from 2004 for 106 WEST 28 STREET. New York City Department of Finance, Office of the City Register. ACRIS. https://a836-acris.nyc.gov/DS/DocumentSearch/DocumentImageView?doc_id=2004041 201198003

Complaints for 106 WEST 28 STREET MANHATTAN. NYC Department of Buildings.

https://a810-bisweb.nyc.gov/bisweb/ComplaintsByAddressServlet?requestid=3&allbin=1 015083

106 West 28th Street #4. StreetEasy. https://streeteasy.com/building/106-west-28-street-new_york/4

Page 835 of “The Weekly Florists Review”. Issue Jan. 19, 1911. The University of Illinois Library. https://archive.org/details/5205536_27_1/page/n834/mode/1up?view=theater

Page 54 of “The Weekly Florists Review”. Issue June 4 1903.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Weekly_Florists_Review/gMd-IrhnCaEC?hl =en&gbpv=1&bsq=106%20W%2028

“H.A Siebrecht Dies; Landscape Artist” Page 21, The New York Times, June 20, 1934.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1934/06/20/94542735.html?pageNum ber=21

“Henry Augustus Siebrecht.” Daily News Archive. 20 June 1934.

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/25515921/daily-news/

“Society at Siebrecht Case.” Page 22, The New York Times. Saturday, October 28, 1911.https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1911/10/28/104841237.html?pag eNumber=22

“106 West 28 Street” 1939-1941, 1940s Tax Photos Digitized at the NYC Department of Records.https://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/NYCMA~5~5~234213~5040 70:106-West-28-Street?sort=borough%2Cblock%2Clot%2Czip_code&qvq=q:106%20W est%2028%20Street%20803;sort:borough%2Cblock%2Clot%2Czip_code;lc:NYCMA~5 ~5&mi=0&trs=1

Mother’s Day Orchid Plant in 4 in. Grower Pot with Red Wrap. Home Depot. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Mothers-Day-Orchid-Plant-in-4-in-Grower-Pot-with-Red- Wrap-MomOrcR04/313520479

Real Touch 21 in. Pink Fuchsia Artificial Phalaenopsis Orchidin Pot. Home Depot. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Mikasa-Real-Touch-21-in-Pink-Fuchsia-Artificial-Phalaenopsis-Or chidin-Pot-5275267/325568227

Year of the Orchid. National Garden Bureau. https://ngb.org/year-of-the-orchid/ “Climate of Florida” Dr. Morton D. Winsberg, Florida State University, National Climatic

Data Center (NCDC) https://climatecenter.fsu.edu/images/fcc/climateofflorida.pdf Orchid Resource Center, “How Long Do Orchids Live?” https://orchidresourcecenter.com/how-long-do-orchids-live/

Florida Indoor Gardens http://floridaindoorgardens.com Bianchi-Davis Greenhouses Inc., https://bdgreenhouse.com/ Town of Riverhead, NY. https://www.townofriverheadny.gov/

“Supply Chain Trends in 2023”. KPMG. https://kpmg.com/xx/en/home/insights/2022/12/the-supply-chain-trends-shaking-up-202 3.html

“Retail Gasoline and Diesel Prices” EIA. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_gnd_a_epmr_pte_dpgal_a.htm

U.S. Floral Industry Research, USDA, 2023. https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2023/02/14/ars-research-helps-us-floral-industry-bloo m

“US houseplants participation in the US from 2010-2020.” Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/716535/us-houseplants-participation/ “Qawwali.” Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/qawwali

NYC Historic Floral District: 176 Years Strong. October 10, 2023. James Francois-Pijuan. Palmetto Publishing.https://www.amazon.com/NYC-Historic-Floral-District-Strong/dp/B0CHZF4HRR/ref=sr_1 _1?qid=1699306500&refinements=p_27%3AJames+Francois-Pijuan&s=books&sr=1-1 &text=James+Francois-Pijuan

Aloft Chelsea Hotel. https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/nycec-aloft-new-york-chelsea/overview/?scid=f2ae0541- 1279-4f24-b197-a979c79310b0

Moxy Chelsea Hotel. https://moxychelsea.com/
The Fleur Room. Moxy Hotel. https://www.instagram.com/p/CsHiHOUOWSh/

“Will Selfies Save the Flower District?” Alyson Krueger. The New York Times. April 26, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/26/nyregion/the-flower-district-hotels.html

“Bill's Flower Market” VANISHING NEW YORK BLOG. Jeremiah Moss. Friday, August 23, 2019. https://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2019/08/bills-flower-market.html

“More Hotels, Fewer Flowers” VANISHING NEW YORK BLOG. Jeremiah Moss. Monday, July 24, 2017. https://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2017/07/more-hotels-fewer-flowers.html

“The Flower District & Superior Florists” VANISHING NEW YORK BLOG. Jeremiah Moss. Monday, July 24, 2017. https://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2007/10/flower-district-superior-florists.html

“Manhattan Retail Figures Q2 2023” CBRE. July 11, 2023.https://www.cbre.com/insights/figures/manhattan-retail-figures-q2-2023

New York’s Historic Flower District. Starbright Floral Design of NYC. https://newyork-flower-shop-talk.com/2014/05/30/1851/

Flower District Considers a Repotting; Wholesale Market Feels Pressure As Neighborhood Is Transformed. By Terry Pristin. Nov. 1, 2000. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/01/nyregion/flower-district-considers-repotting-wholesale-market-feels-pressure-neighborhood.html

Passer-by Flower District DOWNTOWN NYC VTG 1940s Press Photo PIX.