I can’t find much or anything recent about visiting NYC’s Flower District, also called the Chelsea Flower Markets, between 6th and 7th streets on 28th Avenue.
But as my mother is a bit of a flower fanatic, I found what information I could (a recommendation to arrive between 7am and 9am, and that the markets are closed on Monday) and we headed down.
It’s a very pleasant street. A working environment rather than a tourist environment. On the street are many different stores, with different specialisations. There’s a Dutch flower shop. An all-purpose one that has lots of pots, containers and even crystals. One that specialises in tropical plants. Various clusters in different stores of orchids, cacti and flowers.
We had fun poking around, and the store owners were extremely nice. No one worried that we were only looking (and many are wholesale only, so we wouldn’t be able to buy if we’d wanted to). One store had particularly lush flowers, and we went in, and I laughed to discover it was a fake flower store. They were pretty convincing when not up close.
In any case, if you’re a lover of plants and flowers, this is a lovely thing to put on your tourist itinerary for New York City, and then after you can relax over a nice coffee or breakfast in the area too.
It’s hard to find info about this on the web. TripAdvisor wouldn’t accept this as a proposed ‘attraction’ or ‘things to do’ in NYC. Other posts are quite out of date, including one that talks about how the shops are moving out of the area (predicting its demise, though it is still alive and kicking). Considering that so many visitors to NYC stay in the Midtown area, this is a pretty fun, and unusual thing to do.
