Chrysanthemum Display, Midtown Manhattan Street, 1950s

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Chrysanthemum Display, Midtown Manhattan Street, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Chrysanthemum Display, Midtown Manhattan Street, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1955–1959

AA-2026-C30B01

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Sometime in the 1950s, a American city decided that the most convincing proof of its civic vitality was to fill a downtown pedestrian mall with thousands of yellow chrysanthemums, banked so densely they swallowed the fountain beneath them whole — a fountain that, a small sign carefully announced, recirculated its own water and used none belonging to the city, which was apparently a boast worth making. The setting, a canyon of mid-century commercial facades running toward a large limestone office building, has the proportions of a street that was briefly closed to traffic and handed to good intentions. Shoppers move along the edges the way people move around any installation that occupies space they would otherwise walk through, giving it the respectful wide berth due something that involved a committee. The chrysanthemum, chosen presumably because it blooms in autumn and makes a reliable spectacle in bulk, was the civic-beautification flower of choice for downtown merchants' associations in the postwar decade, on the confident theory that beauty, organised and installed by a subcommittee, would draw foot traffic the way window displays no longer quite could. What the scene really records is a city at the exact moment it decided that competing with the suburbs meant putting flowers where the cars used to be.

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