New York: Flower city

When you’ve lived in a city for a long time, and even sometimes for your whole life, you stop marveling at simple things that are part of your everyday environment. These last weeks, I have visited many corners of the City. I have also observed the judgmental attitude of some people towards me when I was taking pictures of taken-for-granted parts of the New York landscape – which I can understand, I always found it weird when tourists in Montreal were sitting in the stairs of my apartment for pictures –. All of this made me realize that too many New Yorkers are just too busy to appreciate and enjoy their city’s simple eccentricity and all the little details that make it unique.
 
One of these details is flowers. In Manhattan and especially in Chelsea, one of my preferred neighborhoods that I affectionately renamed the “flower district”, there is a flower shop at every street corner and almost every grocery store has its own blossom section. As wonderfully colored – often so intensively colored that it is obvious that it is not natural – as the concrete jungle can sometimes be gray, these flowers bring not only a good scent to the area, but also a charming and glamorous feel to each of my walks.

 

 

Close to our place, the man who owns the flower shop is fondly taking care of his wares, meticulously placing it on the wooden display every morning and removing it at the end of the day, which I find very “small town” in feel. While I am observing him with fascination and admiration, some people seem to be thinking that I come from another planet…

I sometimes wonder how these shops manage to get rid of their inventory. Are New Yorkers such big flower consumers?