RUDIMENTS, pt. 688
(sopping up all sorts of info)
If you get to the flower district
at the right time of very early
morning, sun coming up, with a
long slant of light from the east,
you can see some amazing sights.
I don't know how the wholesale
flower district got started but it's
still functioning. Jobbers, cutters,
arrangers, all sorts of handlers
of, yes, flowers. They're all
over the place, in the street, at
storefronts one after the other,
getting carted around, being
put onto or taken off of trucks,
etc. I've talked a few times with
people there, guys hanging
around, in the business, taking
breaks, overseeing, and such.
They talk; they like to talk. It's
all a lot like the garment district,
and the diamond district too,
except most all of the diamond
guys are orthodox Jews and they
don't much like talking to others.
The fish market is long gone.
The meat and produce markets
are long gone. Flowers, and
diamonds are mostly left; with
the majority of the garment
district apparently now having
transplanted itself to China
somehow. There also a really
good car district, up in the
w50's, to which I walk too.
But that's totally different
and made up of completely
different things. It's not
hands-on nor is it in any
way 'primitive'. It can't be.
Modernity runs it.
-
Modernity doesn't do too much
in the flower district. There's
ladies with shears, trimming
newly arrived plants; there
are arrangers, lots of Asians
now, gay flora-dora guys too,
prancing gleefully while they
work among the colors and
blossoms. Floral designers.
Even architects and interior
layout guys. I asked once
what it was all about and
why. The guy said 'You'd
never know it, but what
we do here is one of New
York's unspoken goldmines.'
He was right about never
knowing it, because from
the visual aspect the area
seems doomed. Everything
is low, 5 stories, maybe;
old, crummy, run-down
fronts, interiors always
wet and loaded with odd
hangings, flowers, bundles
of strange things like thick
bamboo or the enormous
blossoms of some sort of
tropical or Hawaiian
plantings. When I asked
him to go on, he began
carefully explaining the
premise : Each of the tall
buildings and corporate
skyscrapers you see, and
the restaurants, meeting and
conference rooms, hotel spaces,
and stores too, have need for
decorative floral set-ups, in
lobbies, windows, main-floor
info areas, wall-hangings, etc.
These are carefully done, and
kept fresh, and contracted for,
right out of these streets I was
now on. That's the real money.
Secondary to that are the forms
of supplying jobbers, florists,
retailers, etc., in as many
far-flung suburban places as
you could think of including
malls and movie-plazas. A
distant third was the retail
trade, among the individuals
right there around us, picking
through and buying small things.
That low-rung trade was nice,
but not truly important. OK, so
some of that was real news to me;
nothing secretive or mysterious,
but mostly unknown anyway.
-
Yes, and he was mostly right.
I gave him the faith. Going on
about the low buildings, (which
were, and still are, a real anomaly
there), he said, correctly, that
back when they started building
this stuff, this area was swampy
wetland, like of lot else around
lower Manhattan, and if you
look at a building map it
shows. This entire section
was a rim of low-rise, much
simpler buildings, and the
reason for that was that back
then, with their far more
primitive building and
excavating equipment,
they couldn't dig and go
deep enough for bedrock
and anything large that may
have been built here would
have simply sunk. Over time,
but sunk nonetheless. So the
tall buildings went elsewhere,
anchored to bedrock much
nearer the surface - which
guaranteed stability and
strength of the sort you
couldn't then get in these
lower areas. It all made
sense, and I'd heard it all
before. And it was visible
yet too - all that Collect
Pond, Lispinard Meadows
and Canal Street and
Minetta Brook stuff. East
and west, the Village area
and lower Manhattan was
once a soggy mess - and
even up to the present day
the remnant evidences of
that are often still visible.
-
Just by being there a person
absorb a lot of this sort of
information, but most people
don't. I was like that for a
while myself but I did
soon enough get over the
reticence about things like
that, figuring it was either
talk or wither away. The big
city can be lonely, and was
was sopping up all sorts of
info, from library sittings
to those dives along Book
Row - for a while I almost
had my own table seat at old
Biblo & Tannen. That was
kind of the bookstore that
got it all going for me. It
was an ancient pace, by
NY standards, poorly lit
and old, Like a Lighthouse
For the Blind sort of place,
but without he lighthouse,
as funny and stupid as that
may sound. Estate books,
books until recently owned
by dead people or cranks or
hoarders or the failed or the
miserable in any of their
hundreds of manifestations.
In 1967, old NY was still
dying off, in bunches, and
you had to figure, with the
accumulations of things
since probably 1930 this
whole Fourth Avenue section
of used bookstores, sheds
and lean-tos was basically
a salvage shop for making
pennies on the dollar from
a million, old books once
owned by a million
old people.
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