CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/28/2016

The Floral Ghost

"The first time I ever visited the Flower District was late in the afternoon on a hot day so many years ago that even my memory of it has crisped around the edges," Susan Orlean begins her wonderful new collaboration with painter Philip Taaffe, launching tomorrow at Rizzoli. "This was when Manhattan was a very different place than it 
is today, when the city still rumbled with manufacturing and trades; when it was still a clutch of sovereign business regions: the luminous gleam of the Lighting District; the damp and tangy-smelling Meat District; the Notions District, its windows paved with buttons and rick-rack; other districts of clothing, of fish, of dishware. Men with ropey arms and dour expressions moved up and down the streets of those neighborhoods day and night, wheeling carts, delivering a pallet of goods here, picking up a container there, threading between the traffic that barely squeezed by."