Mother’s Day Is Madness in Chelsea’s Pruned Flower District

In the cool before the sun rose, the aromas of lilacs, peonies and hyacinths mingled with the air on West 28th Street.

But for the workers between Sixth and Seventh Avenues responsible for those flowers, there was hardly time to stop and smell the lilies on Wednesday morning: Mother’s Day, one of the Flower District’s busiest holidays, was just four days away.

“It’s usually quite insane,” said Caroline Bailly, a 50-year-old floral designer shopping the wholesalers that morning. “It’s funny, because men love their moms more than their wives, so they always order ahead of time for Mother’s Day, but they always ask me for Valentine’s Day stuff last-minute.”

At the unlikely Chelsea block that’s remained the city’s wholesale flower market for nearly a century, distributors hustling to open up shop arrived on the block around 3 a.m. Then came the delivery trucks from Kennedy Airport, which started to trickle in by 4. What had been a quiet Chelsea block now rumbled with the clinks and clanks of metal carts wheeled between trucks and stores, as runners unloaded boxes of flowers that had passed through customs overnight, freshly cut from the soils of South America, Asia or Europe.

A flock of florists and event planners began to amass bundles of beauties wrapped in brown paper by 6, just after dawn. By 8 a.m., 26-year-old florist Lindsey Nugent was already hurrying back to her Williamsburg store and studio to fulfill orders ahead of the big day.

“Today’s the first day we’re starting to build all of our Mother’s Day arrangements,” she said before rushing off into a white van. “It’s crazy, but it’s fun.”

A Busy Ecosystem

At G. Page Wholesale Flowers, Chester the tabby cat roamed the store as florists perused selections from Colombia and Italy and Japan while workers swiftly packed up orders. “Please don’t touch or annoy me (or call me fat),” instructs a flier taped throughout the store with Chester’s photo.

Owner Gary Page, who started working on the street in 1984, said the store has imported more than 1,000 boxes for this weekend, about 25% more than its usual stock, to meet the Mother’s Day demand.

Busy mornings like these are lively and vibrant, he said, but they can get loud and contentious too.

“People want stuff at a particular time, they want to be taken care of, they want to be served,” Page said. “Sometimes people get a little antsy because they don’t like to wait, especially if they’re under the gun to get back to their store.”

That hurry seemed wholly unrelatable to Chester, who was now perched in the shape of a loaf on a cleared-out slab between buckets of dark-purple delphiniums and fuschia-colored sweet peas, seemingly drifting into sleep as brisk footsteps passed.

Wholesaling perishable flowers is a tricky business that requires nimble focus, Page said, as the internet has changed the way people shop and demand for these non-essential luxury items constantly ebbs and flows. Plus, the Manhattan real estate market has come to threaten the district’s survival in recent decades, with the area becoming gradually inundated with hotels that have squeezed out floral businesses.

Now, he’s got to think about congestion pricing too, which is set to take effect below 60th Street this summer — adding to the already-complex calculations many market buyers and sellers take into account each day.

“We’ve got enough going on the plate right now as it is, and we will try to adjust to it the best we can,” Page said.

Overall, he said, “I’m surprised that the flower market continues to exist where it does.”

‘It’s Lost Its Character’

As Chelsea has gentrified over the past three decades, what had been more than 60 wholesalers are down to fewer than 10. The Flower District is now only a shell of what it was, said Steve Rosenberg, the third-generation owner of Superior Florist , which has been in the area since 1930.

The district used to stretch from Seventh Avenue to Broadway, and spanned between 27th to 29th Streets on Sixth. Now, what remains is almost entirely on the one block of 28th between Sixth and Seventh, while Superior Florist has been pushed to the outskirts, sandwiched between a jewelry and a hair-weave wholesale shop.

“This neighborhood — it’s lost its character, it’s lost its flavor,” said Rosenberg. “We can’t really afford to buy around here anymore.”

Gone are the cigar-chomping market characters and drinkers and gamblers and womanizers of the District’s heyday, Rosenberg lamented, as they have been replaced by the McDonald’s and Bank of America branch across the street.

“On Mother’s Day weekend, like this week, you think it’s busy here? This is nothing,” Rosenberg said. “If you walk down 28th Street, it used to be so busy they used to post a cop to direct traffic.”

He then turned to his father, 86-year-old Sam Rosenberg, who continues to arrange bouquets in the store: “And how long ago was that?”

“Oh,” he paused. “That was about 20 years ago.”

Steve added: “I think more than that.”

Steve’s grandfather, Louie, was 16 years old when he landed a job as a cutter in the nearby Fur District shortly after arriving from Poland. (“There’s nothing left of that either,” Steve noted.) But Louie soon found himself allergic to the flurries flying around the shop. So he quit without notice and found his way east on 28th Street into the Flower District, where he would work for wholesalers for eight-dollars-a-week before eventually setting up his own shop nearly a century ago, amid the Great Depression.

All this history is documented on a wall where dozens of black-and-white photos sit behind a display glass, next to where store cats Jackson and Sweet Pea (namesake of the flower) observed the shop from a chair. One photo shows Steve’s uncle peddling flowers on the streets of the Upper East Side, while another has Louie and a school-aged Sam posing inside of the store.

Sam and Steve said they’ve both worked in the store since they were kids, first sweeping floors and folding boxes after school before moving up to arranging their first bouquets by the time they turned 15.

“Mother’s Day used to be complete insanity … I remember on the Fridays and Saturdays before Mother’s Day, we used to be here until midnight, one o’clock in the morning,” said Steve, who confessed that he didn’t give his late mother anything on the holiday. “Back in the day, it was just the idea that I made it home to see her.”

Business is still decently busy this week, but Steve said Valentine’s Day is now the “only really good holiday left.” (“Some holidays, you might as well just take off the calendar,” he added.)

At a little past 9 a.m. Steve was anxiously awaiting the arrival of late delivery trucks so he could start putting together the day’s orders. In the meantime, he peeled oxidized petals off of dozens of coral roses, stripping excess leaves with his trained hands.

“Once in a while a thorn will catch me,” said Steve, who lost half of the nail on his right thumb at some point. “You can stick a pin through the top of my finger, and it doesn’t bleed anymore.”

Old-School in an Old School

While the district’s florists once sprawled horizontally, mixed in with the wholesalers, many of those who remain today are stacked vertically on top of one another in an Anglo-Italianate-style building at 120 W. 28 St. — one of Manhattan’s three oldest surviving public school buildings, which once catered to children with parents who worked in the garment district.

By Wednesday, about 20 Mother’s Day orders had already come in for Bailly, the daughter of a botanist and the owner of bespoke floral design studio Buunch , which is based in a snug space on the building’s fourth floor.

On busy holidays, studio owners like Bailly would often turn to rolodexes of freelance florists like Dawn Hubbard for help. Hubbard, a self-proclaimed “flower whore,” would in turn make her way around different shops in the industry, including Petal Designs Studios , owned by 43-year-old Corrie Schankler and located just next door to Bailly.

The 54-year-old beauty school dropout said she’s always considered Mother’s Day to be one of the “more genuine” holidays: “Valentine’s Day — the sort of cards that these people write, and they send out five arrangements to five different women … and I’m just sitting there like, ‘Mhmm…’ And they’re like, ‘You’re not going to tell anyone, right?

“I’m not telling anyone,” Hubbard said, chuckling. “Just give me the money.”

From Schankler’s studio one could hear bursts of laughter from Bailly’s neighboring crew as they doled out dozens of arrangements for a bar mitzvah party on Wednesday, featuring large, dark maroon tree peony blooms and orchids put together in ikebana style .

“The fourth floor in particular is, like, pretty tight. We share things, we borrow from one another, we celebrate everyone’s birthday on the floor. We have fun,” Schankler said. Moo Kudeesrisopa, one of her employees, joked: “We’re gonna put a window here,” pointing to the wall connecting Schankler’s studio to Bailly’s.

Part of what’s kept Schankler in the Flower District despite rising rents each year, she said, is the convenience of having the market just downstairs along with the camaraderie. Florists on the floor, she said, often help each other fill orders whenever they’re overwhelmed and in crisis mode.

Schankler, for her part, plans on taking Mother’s Day off to spend with her 13- and 10-year-olds. But first, she must fulfill the 100-or-so bouquets lined up for Sunday — and make her own mother an arrangement out of vibrant, colorful floras unlike the popular pastel pink peonies and creamy white tulips that now sat on her workbench.

After that, Schankler said, all there’s left to do is to enjoy her Mother’s Day breakfast — and to secretly rearrange the deli flowers her kids and husband gifts her come Sunday.

The same goes for Bailly, who has 19- and 12-year-olds at home — except she can’t be bothered to rearrange her children’s flowers from Trader Joe’s.

“They know I love getting flowers because no one ever gives me flowers,” Bailly said, bursting into laughter. “I think they’re scared, or they think I have them  — and it’s kind of true. But it’s still the best gift you can make me.

“And you know what?” she added. “On Mother’s Day, I’m just like, I just want to relax and have a nice day.”

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