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20 November 2004
A city within the City
Yesterday, Amrit and I went to the Los Angeles Flower District wholesale market for buying flowers for decorations for the Diwali event that was scheduled the same evening. The market is part of an entire street of wholesale merchants who vend flowers to the whole of the Los Angeles area. The street strangely titled Wall Street adjacent to Flower Street that has no such specialisation lies in the heart of the downtown amidst whatever passes off as the Los Angeles skyline. The market is open to flower trade members -- flower dealers from around the city and beyond -- from 2 in the morning to 8 in the morning. It opens its doors to the public after 8am and charges a $2 admission fee per head. This was my first downtown experience in Los Angeles and it was quite a surprise to find such noisy commonplace hustle and bustle right smack in downtown. The wholesale market area itself was a huge warehouse structure that stocked many individual flower-sellers who showed off their stock in self-designated pockets around the warehouse. As everything else that is labour-intensive in the United States, flowers are prohibitively expensive even if purchased wholesale. We gasped at first and then grew accustomed to seeing $20 price tags for small and ornate bouquets.The demographic inside the warehouse was predominantly Hispanic with some representation from Chinatown and Koreatown. The white Caucasian contingent was largely absent not just in the warehouse but for the large part in the rest of the street as well. In fact, subsequently when we got out of the street and headed back for Pasadena we were surprised to find that we were in the middle of an anachronistic market locality replete with shops with shutters, street-peddlers, cloth merchants and grocery stores much akin to what we were used to seeing in India.
At the warehouse itself, there were beautiful orchids with long stalks coyly peeking out from their plastic pots, marigolds in yellow, orange, beige, scarlet, crimson and every other imaginable shade of yellow and ubiquitous roses and their ersatz -- carnations. As we patrolled the alleyways, one Hispanic woman stopped us and asked what colours of flowers would be appropriate for the funeral of a Hindu man. After getting over the amazement at her having recognised us as such, we shrugged and shirked until her anxiety was expressed so evidently that we made top-of-the-hat suggestions of white and orange. She seemed reasonably satisfied at having elicited an answer out of us and walked on.
In the end, we walked away with flowers worth $58.10. Our naïveté at picking flowers showed with the abundance of diversity in colours and varieties in our purchase -- it was a safe hedging of bets. The trip downtown at an unearthly morning hour was a pleasurable trip if only because we were lucky to be in an empty pocket of traffic on the 110 freeway.
