Family business decorates Park Avenue in New York

NEW YORK – The prestigious Park Avenue neighborhood has a small enterprise to thank for bringing holiday break cheer to its streets calendar year after calendar year.

City-Scape Landscaping, a family-operate operation dependent in Queens, installs 120 fir trees shipped from Nova Scotia, Canada, together the avenue for virtually 50 blocks, from 49th to 97th streets.

The company has maintained the avenue’s grassy medians – identified as the Park Avenue Malls – for 50 decades. A crew of 6 to 7 City-Scape staff members positions the fir trees. The enterprise delivers in much more than $1 million in yearly product sales from all its purchasers, in accordance to Experian Organization Info. The fir tree method accounts for shut to $100,000 of that a year.

Park Avenue has been a important element of the firm’s business enterprise since 1972, Metropolis-Scape’s house owners explained, encouraging shell out salaries and keep households fed.

Metropolis-Scape Landscaping began when late owner Vincent Sofield’s older brothers, Joe and Duke Sofield, were being hired by their neighbor Peter Van de Wetering — “the unrivaled tulip impresario of Park Avenue” — to assist his group plant and sustain the malls, Vincent stated.

Soon thereafter, Van de Wetering moved to Long Island to start out Van de Wetering Greenhouses, which continues to preserve the avenue lush with tulips and seasonal flora. He passed off shopping mall servicing permanently to the Sofields, and City-Scape was in business enterprise.

“I really don’t consider Park Avenue would have pretty the similar glamour if the median partitions weren’t in position,” stated Vincent Sofield’s son, Dylan. “I imagine it actually generates a very good distinction with the concrete jungle — variety of softens your eyes up a small little bit, tends to make it significantly less aggressive.”

A fifty percent-century afterwards, City-Scape is maintaining the small business in the spouse and children. Immediately after turning out to be a co-owner previously this 12 months, 26-year-old Dylan is using about the procedure in the wake of his father’s current passing.

“A great deal of men and women you should not imagine me when I explain to them I personal the corporation,” he informed CNBC previously this calendar year. “They inquire for the boss, and I say, ‘You’re wanting at him.’ But they swiftly drop that as soon as they realize I know what I am conversing about.”

Sofield mentioned he has played a purpose in the business enterprise given that he was younger, not for the reason that he had to, but for the reason that he “usually preferred to be associated.”

“I was probably pulling a rake in advance of I could walk,” he joked.

In spite of the avenue’s large profile, Sofield said he has felt unphased by it since it is “all he realized” expanding up. But as he has gotten older, he now acknowledges that Park Avenue is not just any landscaping career.

“It is definitely anything to be very pleased of,” Sofield reported. “I see my perform all about the area, Television set, Instagram. I will be scrolling and imagine, ‘Oh, there’s my tulips,’ or ‘There’s my lawn.'”

For most of the year, City-Scape tends to the malls each Monday ahead of higher visitors weekdays. Crews weed, mow the lawns and hedges, get rid of debris, drinking water the plants and fix broken wood barriers.

The company is employed by the Fund for Park Avenue — the community nonprofit dependable for the malls — to sustain the inexperienced areas 12 months-round.

The malls transform by the period: tulips in the spring, begonias in the summer, chrysanthemums in the tumble and temporary fir trees in the wintertime.

“It is really people’s entrance garden, front gardens together Park Avenue,” mentioned the group’s president, Barbara McLaughlin. “So everyone who’s fortunate ample to stay on Park Avenue genuinely enjoys it each individual day, but also, it is really a excellent position to stroll and it truly is liked by a ton of people.”

The trees are lit up at the yearly Park Avenue tree lights at Brick Presbyterian Church, an event that drew 4,000 persons this year, a church spokesperson claimed.

“It truly is these an intimate party for New York Metropolis,” McLaughlin claimed. “It can be a neighborhood occasion, community sense, but all are welcome.”

The trees will be taken down in mid-January.

“We might appreciate to have them keep longer, but they are not planted,” McLaughlin said. “These trees are set up quickly, so they do get dry.”

And as the trees mark the altering of seasons, they also mark a year of improve for Town-Scape. It was Dylan Sofield’s very first getaway tree installation running the business without having his father.

“I still have the support of my relatives,” he claimed. “My uncle is however about, and he’s been accomplishing this for 50 many years he’s not going everywhere.”