How the Macy's Nighttime Team Keeps the Flowers Fresh

New York Times

01-05-2025

Good morning. It's Thursday. Today we'll look at how an indoor flower show stays fresh. We'll also get details on a possible strike by train engineers for New Jersey Transit.
When the last customers have been shooed out of the giant Macy's store at Herald Square — at 9 p.m. most nights, an hour later on Fridays and Saturdays — the hoses come out.
It's time to spritz what's above the perfume and cosmetics aisles — carefully, so the counters don't get drenched. It's time for touch-ups. It's time to bring in the stars of tomorrow, if the stars of yesterday have faded.
So it goes after hours at the Macy's Flower Show, which has turned part of the store into a dreamscape with 50 varieties of plants. That translates into 8,000 plants and 50,000 stems with banana-yellow blooms, delicate pink swirls and purple necklaces.
What shoppers probably don't realize when they snap selfies by the roses and hydrangeas is that watering tanks for all the planters are hidden away. The nighttime team props up ladders to reach the flowers that have been arranged in swirls around the building's support columns. The flowers closest to the ceiling need a drink, too.
Macy's says that each night of watering takes six to nine hours. What about middle-of-the-night emergencies? If it's 1 a.m. and the sunflowers or gerbera daisies in the 'Honeycomb Heights' installation need refreshing, that is not a problem, said Will Coss, the Macy's executive who oversees the creation and construction of events like the flower show.
There is a storage area in the store, away from shoppers, where floral replacements are kept until they are needed. 'Everybody and everything that's needed is here,' he said. Macy's flower supplier, the Bouqs Company, said the opening of the show last weekend had demonstrated that it could 'persevere through the pivots' as it also prepared for Mother's Day, one of the biggest holidays on its calendar.
The flower show is one of the fixed points on Macy's calendar, along with the parade for Thanksgiving and the fireworks for the Fourth of July. This year the flower show comes as Macy's is pressing on with a turnaround plan that includes closing 150 underperforming locations. In March, Macy's reported its best quarter in nearly three years, but it expects comparable sales to fall as much as 2 percent this year, in part because of the store closings.
The flower show is different from the parade and the fireworks. It unfolds in the Herald Square store, not outside in the streets or the sky.
Only a few steps past the revolving doors on Broadway is what Coss referred to as the 'entrance statement,' an installation called 'The Floral Ascent.' He mentioned that it contained hydrangeas, roses and asparagus ferns, but that is not all. Bromeliads, calathea, chrysanthemums, dahlias, lisianthuses also swirl toward the ceiling.
'We're living in a fantastical space,' Coss said, but it is space that was defined generations ago by the architects and engineers who placed the columns that reach from floor to ceiling. Coss and his team couldn't move them, so they gave them 'column surrounds,' blue vinyl wraps printed with clouds. Then they wrapped the flowers around the wraps.
They created other nonfloral elements, like a beanstalk with mirrored surfaces that shimmer. It was, Coss said, 'constructed by hand,' by the same team that makes the floats for the Thanksgiving parade. 'In this day and age, so much can be done by 3-D printing,' he said, 'but here, there's a personal touch.'
There are also planters that mimic the shape of a cruise ship (a tie-in to the Holland America Line, which Macy's lists along with Bouqs and Lego as 'creative partners') and a section with YSL Beauty fragrances that carry the scents of different combinations of flowers. One is an alcohol-free citrus floral scent; another features notes of ferns and geraniums. Lined up in nearby stands are hundreds of calla lilies to be given to shoppers who make a purchase.
Coss was a live-event producer for television before Macy's hired him four years ago. He was the executive producer of the 'Kids' Choice Awards' for Nickelodeon and the 'TV Land Icon Awards,' among other programs. But the impresario of the flower show is not much of a gardener.
'I aspire to be one one day,' he said. 'I'm a city guy right now.'
Expect a mostly sunny day with the temperature in the high 60s. In the evening, there is a chance of rain, as well as cloudiness and a drop to the mid-50s.
In effect until May 26 (Memorial Day).
The latest Metro news
N.J. Transit riders are warned to prepare for a strike
New Jersey Transit had an ominous message for the 70,000 commuters who take its trains into New York City every day: The trains may not be running in two weeks.
Negotiations with the union representing train engineers have been strained, and the engineers could go on strike on May 16.
The transit agency said it was prepared to substitute buses for some of its trains on weekdays. But Kris Kolluri, the new chief executive of New Jersey Transit, said that the buses, which would pick up passengers at four 'park and ride' lots around the state, could accommodate only about 20 percent of the riders who normally take New Jersey Transit trains.
He then made a suggestion that might not please bosses who have been telling work-from-home employees to get back to their desks: 'Those folks who have the ability to work from home during the strike should plan to do so.'
My colleague Patrick McGeehan writes that Kolluri has been trying for weeks to work out a new contract with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which represents about 460 workers. The two sides announced last month that they had reached a deal, but on April 15, rank-and-file engineers voted it down. That started a 30-day countdown to a May 16 strike deadline.
May 16 is a Friday. The agency said that if the engineers walked off their jobs, commuters should use the rail system for 'essential purposes only' and work from home if they possibly could. The contingency plan for bus service would go into effect the following Monday, if the strike had not been settled by then.
Kolluri said that announcing the plan was not a negotiating tactic. Although negotiations resumed on Wednesday and are expected to continue next week, Kolluri did not sound hopeful. Last week he rescinded the agency's previous offer, which he said would have provided annual salaries of $172,000 on average, up from about $135,000 now. He said that the engineers' current demand of a 14 percent wage increase would cost taxpayers and New Jersey Transit $1.363 billion between July 2025 and June 2030, $684 million more than the contract proposal the union members rejected two weeks ago.
Union officials said that the contract they were seeking would cost the agency only about $250 million. They maintain that New Jersey Transit engineers are underpaid compared with engineers on the two commuter railroads run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York.
Loose change
Dear Diary:
It was the 1980s, and we were going to visit relatives in Manhattan.
I had read that the fare boxes on the buses did not take dollar bills. You had to have quarters to pay the fare. So before we left for the visit, I went to the bank and got a $10 roll of quarters.
While we were in the city, we got on a Fifth Avenue bus near Central Park to go to Greenwich Village. I paid my fare and my husband's.
People kept coming on the bus and asking other passengers for change for a dollar. I made change for four people.
The man sitting in front of me turned around to face me.
'What are you?' he asked. 'Some sort of good Samaritan or something?'
— Marlene Hellman
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [e-mail].
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