Where the flowers are from is one thing. Getting them to the buyer while still fresh is quite another.

From farm to wholesaler to florist, each stem found in New York’s flower district has traveled farther and faster than most people ever will. Take, for example, a simple red rose. The one you pull out of the plastic wrap in your kitchen was likely grown in Colombia. After its stem has been snipped, it’s put in post-harvest hydration solution and boxed in a refrigerated room. From there, the bundle is transferred to a cooled plane in Bogota and flown to Miami. After passing through customs, the package is received by truck drivers, who shuttle it up the East Coast to New York. From start to finish, the process takes three days.

The New York flower district dates back to the late 19th century, when immigrants from Eastern Europe, particularly Greece, identified an untapped market: providing flowers for department stores, funerals, and even nearby steamships. “The flower market is a shadow of its former self,” says Steven Rosenberg, a third-generation owner of Superior Florist, which was opened by his grandfather in 1930 and then run by his father Sam. “It’s still colorful to walk through, but it’s nothing compared to what it used to be.”

Rosenberg’s grandfather Louie arrived from Poland in the early 1920s. Living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, he eventually got a job in the Chelsea fur district—that is, until he realized he was allergic to fur. Louie crossed the street and sought out a job as a flower runner; he learned Greek to get a leg up in his new profession, supplementing his fluent Yiddish and clunky English.


In 1930, Louie Rosenberg opened his own wholesale shop and began competing with Greek, German, and Irish immigrants to sell fresh-cut flowers to retailers. This was a time when elegantly dressed men haggled with growers from Long Island. Decades before the jet age, New Yorkers had to make due with hydrangeas and gladiolus from Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island.

Many immigrants work in the flower district these days, though now they largely hail from Mexico. Frankie Mendez, a salesperson at Caribbean Cuts, has made a career out of selling to clients from Christian Louboutin and Barney’s exotic bamboos or purple dancing ladies for catalog and window displays. Mendez was only 12 when he moved to New York from Mexico City. By the time he was 14, he was unloading boxes of flowers in the predawn gloom. Like the elder Rosenberg, he spoke little English, but worked hard to succeed in a physically strenuous environment.

“Everyone here starts from the bottom,” he says.

Now 30, Mendez is a naturalized citizen who has spent more than half his life working on West 28th Street. “I’ve learned so much here,” he says, pausing to tend to a fashionably dressed customer purchasing tropical plants for a photo shoot. “New York is the only one for me,” Mendez says. “If the market moves away, I’ll stay here and continue working with flowers.”

The U.S. flower industry has shifted radically over the past two decades. Page, who has worked in the flower district since 1984, says the industry has always been volatile, ebbing and flowing with the economy. Flowers, after all, are a short-lived luxury that sell well only when people have money to burn.

“Nothing has ever been as bad as the recession,” Page says from an office above his Chelsea shop. “New York has always been about bling. But after the recession hit, there was an inflection point where people suddenly didn’t want to show wealth like they used to. We have struggled to come back from that.”