A wholesaler's cold room on West 28th Street before dawn: strip curtains at the door, steel racks of buckets, tulips and roses by the hundred under frost coloured light, cold air pooling on the wet floor, the works on white fins floating over the flowers.
Wholesale cut flower dealers began gathering on West 28th Street in the late 1870s. George E. Bradshaw and John R. Hartman opened one of the first wholesale florist houses in 1891 at 53 West 28th Street, and Guttman and Raynor followed in 1894 at 101 West 28th Street. The trade spread from 23rd Street to 34th Street before settling between 25th and 29th Streets. At its height more than 200 wholesalers and suppliers worked the block, through Easter week 1895 and the snowstorm of January 1908.
Source · New York's Historic Floral District ↗
The green awnings and sidewalk buckets of the wholesalers, the plastic strip curtain, insulated panel walls, black buckets on wire racks, tulips and roses in colour blocks, a hand truck of buckets rolling the aisle, the evaporator fans, the loading dock and the delivery van at the curb. Mood: four in the morning. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.