Household enterprise decorates Park Avenue in New York

NEW YORK – The distinguished Park Avenue neighborhood has a small enterprise to thank for bringing vacation cheer to its streets yr after yr.

Metropolis-Scape Landscaping, a family-run operation primarily based in Queens, installs 120 fir timber shipped from Nova Scotia, Canada, alongside the avenue for nearly 50 blocks, from forty ninth to 97th streets.

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The enterprise has maintained the avenue’s grassy medians – often known as the Park Avenue Malls – for 50 years. A crew of six to seven Metropolis-Scape staff positions the fir timber. The corporate brings in additional than $1 million in annual gross sales from all its purchasers, in keeping with Experian Enterprise Knowledge. The fir tree course of accounts for near $100,000 of {that a} yr.

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 preserve households fed.

Metropolis-Scape Landscaping began when late proprietor Vincent Sofield’s older brothers, Joe and Duke Sofield, have been employed by their neighbor Peter Van de Wetering — “the unmatched tulip impresario of Park Avenue” — to assist his group plant and keep the department stores, Vincent stated.

Shortly thereafter, Van de Wetering moved to Lengthy Island to begin 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 an excellent distinction with the concrete jungle — sort of softens your eyes up slightly 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 yr, 26-year-old Dylan is taking on the operation within the wake of his father’s current passing.

“Lots of people do not imagine me after I inform them I personal the corporate,” he informed CNBC earlier this yr. “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 job within the enterprise since he was younger, not as a result of he needed to, however as a result of he “at all times wished to be concerned.”

“I used to be in all probability 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 is not only any landscaping job.

“It is positively one thing to be pleased with,” Sofield stated. “I see my work all over, TV, Instagram. I will likely be scrolling and assume, ‘Oh, there’s my tulips,’ or ‘There’s my garden.'”

For many of the yr, Metropolis-Scape tends to the department stores each Monday forward of excessive site visitors weekdays. Crews weed, mow the lawns and hedges, take away particles, water the crops and restore broken wooden obstacles.

The corporate is employed by the Fund for Park Avenue — the neighborhood nonprofit liable for the department stores — to take care of the inexperienced areas year-round.

The shops change by the season: tulips within the spring, begonias in the summertime, chrysanthemums within the fall and non permanent fir timber within the winter.

“It is folks’s entrance yard, entrance gardens alongside Park Avenue,” stated the group’s president, Barbara McLaughlin. “So everybody who’s fortunate sufficient to stay on Park Avenue actually enjoys it day by day, but in addition, 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 folks this yr, a church spokesperson stated.

“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 will likely be taken down in mid-January.

“We might 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, in addition they mark a season of change for Metropolis-Scape. It was Dylan Sofield’s first vacation tree set up operating 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 isn’t going anyplace.”