NEW YORK – The celebrated Park Avenue neighborhood has a small enterprise to thank for bringing vacation cheer to its streets 12 months after 12 months.
Metropolis-Scape Landscaping, a family-run operation based mostly in Queens, installs 120 fir timber shipped from Nova Scotia, Canada, alongside the avenue for nearly 50 blocks, from forty ninth to 97th streets.
The enterprise has maintained the avenue’s grassy medians – generally known as the Park Avenue Malls – for 50 years. A crew of six to seven Metropolis-Scape workers positions the fir timber. The corporate brings in additional than $1 million in annual gross sales from all its purchasers, in accordance with Experian Enterprise Information. The fir tree course of accounts for near $100,000 of {that a} 12 months.
Park Avenue has been a key a part of the corporate’s enterprise since 1972, Metropolis-Scape’s house owners stated, serving to pay salaries and hold households fed.
Metropolis-Scape Landscaping began when late proprietor Vincent Sofield’s older brothers, Joe and Duke Sofield, had been employed by their neighbor Peter Van de Wetering — “the unmatched tulip impresario of Park Avenue” — to assist his crew plant and keep the shops, Vincent stated.
Christmas tress put in by Metropolis-Scape Landscaping on Park Avenue in New York.
CNBC
Shortly thereafter, Van de Wetering moved to Lengthy Island to start out Van de Wetering Greenhouses, which continues to maintain the avenue lush with tulips and seasonal flora. He handed off mall upkeep completely to the Sofields, and Metropolis-Scape was in enterprise.
“I do not assume Park Avenue would have fairly the identical glamour if the median partitions weren’t in place,” stated Vincent Sofield’s son, Dylan. “I feel it actually creates distinction with the concrete jungle — sort of softens your eyes up a bit of bit, makes it much less aggressive.”
A half-century later, Metropolis-Scape is maintaining the enterprise within the household. After turning into a co-owner earlier this 12 months, 26-year-old Dylan is taking on the operation within the wake of his father’s latest passing.
“Lots of people do not consider me after I inform them I personal the corporate,” he instructed CNBC earlier this 12 months. “They ask for the boss, and I say, ‘You are him.’ However they shortly lose that after they understand I do know what I’m speaking about.”
Sofield stated he has performed a task within the enterprise since he was younger, not as a result of he needed to, however as a result of he “all the time needed to be concerned.”
“I used to be most likely pulling a rake earlier than I may stroll,” he joked.
Regardless of the avenue’s excessive profile, Sofield stated he has felt unphased by it as a result of it’s “all he knew” rising up. However as he has gotten older, he now acknowledges that Park Avenue isn’t just any landscaping job.
“It is undoubtedly one thing to be happy with,” Sofield stated. “I see my work all over, TV, Instagram. I might be scrolling and assume, ‘Oh, there’s my tulips,’ or ‘There’s my garden.'”
Dylan Sofield, proprietor of Metropolis-Scape Landscaping.
CNBC
For many of the 12 months, Metropolis-Scape tends to the shops each Monday forward of excessive visitors weekdays. Crews weed, mow the lawns and hedges, take away particles, water the vegetation and restore broken wooden boundaries.
The corporate is employed by the Fund for Park Avenue — the neighborhood nonprofit liable for the shops — to keep up the inexperienced areas year-round.
The shops change by the season: tulips within the spring, begonias in the summertime, chrysanthemums within the fall and short-term fir timber within the winter.
“It is individuals’s entrance yard, entrance gardens alongside Park Avenue,” stated the group’s president, Barbara McLaughlin. “So everybody who’s fortunate sufficient to reside on Park Avenue actually enjoys it daily, but additionally, it is a great place to stroll and it is loved by lots of people.”
The timber are lit up on the annual Park Avenue tree lighting at Brick Presbyterian Church, an occasion that drew 4,000 individuals this 12 months, a church spokesperson stated.
Christmas tress put in by Metropolis-Scape Landscaping on Park Avenue in New York.
CNBC
“It is such an intimate occasion for New York Metropolis,” McLaughlin stated. “It is a neighborhood occasion, neighborhood really feel, however all are welcome.”
The timber might be taken down in mid-January.
“We would like to have them keep longer, however they don’t seem to be planted,” McLaughlin stated. “These timber are put in quickly, in order that they do get dry.”
And because the timber mark the altering of seasons, additionally they mark a season of change for Metropolis-Scape. It was Dylan Sofield’s first vacation tree set up working the enterprise with out his father.
“I nonetheless have the assistance of my household,” he stated. “My uncle remains to be round, and he is been doing this for 50 years; he is not going wherever.”
