For several years now, floral designer Lewis Miller (who runs Lewis Miller Design) has been going around the city leaving gorgeous flower displays in garbage cans, statues, phone booths and anywhere else that inspires him, in an attempt to lift New Yorkers' spirits and take our minds off of the fact that every square inch of this city is covered in pigeon poop. For Valentine's Day, he came up with a particularly enchanting combination: four custom-made hot dog carts teeming with thousands of multi-colored roses, carnations, and hydrangeas. Because nothing is more romantic than picking a flower for your Valentine from a NYC hot dog cart.
The hot dog flower carts will be on display at Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan all Valentine's Day long, until around 9 p.m. tonight. Each of the carts has its own color scheme as well, ranging from whites to shades of pink, rich reds, and deep purples.
As one person wrote on Twitter, "Only in New York could you drape a hot dog cart in flowers, call it a Valentine's Day decoration and get absolutely insane crowds to come out and take pictures."
Miller has been repurposing flowers from events since 2016 to stage a "flower flash" about once a month. The project first kicked off in October 2016, when he and his team brought 2,000 flowers to the John Lennon "Imagine" Memorial in Central Park, and proceeded to create "a psychedelic halo of day-glo yellow, pink, purple and orange dahlias and carnations."
Since then, they've placed flowers at a multitude of urban locations, including construction sites, subway entrances, gravel pits, historic statues, dumpsters, subway nooks, and abandoned church steps.
He previously told Gothamist his initial idea was to "create an emotional response through flowers," and "gift the people of New York the same experience he gives his paying clients." Any time he can delight New Yorkers, he's happy: "New Yorkers are hard to surprise and hard to please, so if we can lure a childlike reaction out of them, that's a victory and a gift to [me and my team]."
If you're looking for the perfect song to soundtrack a romantic trip to visit the hot dog flower cart, I humbly recommend this Captain Beefheart classic.
