It’s Mother’s Day weekend, and workers at the family-owned Superior Florist in Midtown Manhattan are bustling.
Sam Rosenberg, the 86-year-old patriarch who still works six days a week, is inspecting arrangements as his son, Steve, sits behind a computer parsing through orders.
It’s not as busy as it used to be — displays of cheap supermarket flowers decorate every corner of the Big Apple, and an office population that never returned to pre-COVID levels have left Manhattan’s flower district a skeleton of what it once was, Steve said.
But for a holiday such as Mother’s Day, there the workers are, fluttering around before the big event and helping whoever happens to walk in — while taking The Post on a time-traveling trip through the now-vanished heydey of the local florist.
“This is the real deal here,” Steve, 60, said Saturday as he opened the ancient, solid-wood door to the business’s cooling room. “Not like that bulls–t around the corner.”
His dad, Sam, told The Post that his father, Louis, started Superior in 1932 after emigrating from Poland.
Louis packed and ran flowers for 8 bucks a week until he finally opened his own store.
Nearly a century later, the Rosenbergs own the low-rise at 828 Sixth Ave. at West 29th Street that houses their establishment, whose green awning bills them as “New York’s Leading Florist.”
At one point, Steve breaks out an old book he keeps in the back: “Eugene Smith: An Aperture Monograph.”
Smith — considered one of the most influential photojournalists in American history — used to snap pictures of the store when he lived across Sixth Avenue, Steve said.
That includes a famous shot of a little girl in a white dress flying out the store’s front door and into a smattering of flowers festooning the sidewalk and another of two women standing in front of the store, buying Easter flowers.
“This picture is not posed — he just shot it like this,” Steve said. “Easter used to be a big holiday, the biggest holiday of the year. People used to go to the cemetery and bring flowers.
“Everybody used to come here,” he continued. “There was no Costco, there was no Trader Joe’s, there was no Whole Foods. We used to put the plants out the streets. The streets were filled with flowers.”
Things are different now, of course. Foot traffic has slowed over the years, the neighborhood has changed, and everyone sells flowers.
But just because they’re selling them doesn’t mean they’re quality, Steve said.
“Supermarkets get bouquets that are made by bouquet-makers either in South America or Florida,” he said.
“They’re made three weeks before the holiday, they pack them upright in campers with a little bucket of water on the bottom and they ship them directly to supermarket distribution centers, and they’re redistributed from there,” he said. “So the things were made probably two weeks ago.”
The people who strolled into the family specialty shop included late-comers looking for a last-minute gift of peonies, roses or lilacs for their mothers.
“It’s been a while since I saw my mom,” said Will Boffa, a 24-year-old stock analyst who showed up looking for a bouquet.
Jesus Rivera, who has worked at the florist for 36 years, whips something up. Boffa is stunned.
“Fantastic arrangement,” the young man said before adding that he’d definitely be back.
Another walk-in is thrilled that he finally found lilacs — he said he searched all over the city, to no avail.
And the stockroom — once cooled by ice, now with a condenser — is loaded up with floral arrangements for a Brazilian party uptown.
“In any business, it’s better dealing with people who have a lot of experience,” Steve said. “They know the seasonality. You wouldn’t buy fish from me — I don’t know anything about fish!”
The store’s future is a bit uncertain — Steve’s son lives in Florida, and works in marketing and promotion for online gambling.
Will he take over one day?
“Not for now,” his dad said.. “He’s happy, that’s the most important thing.”
But those are questions for another time.
For now, Superior Florist hums along in the same way it did during the Great Depression and all the years after.
“The flower business, this is it — history,” Steve said. “You can’t replace this.”
