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Charlie Poekel, a Greenpoint resident who works a day job at a documentary film company, had for years been interested in the tree vending business. "A couple years ago, my roommate and I were trying to get a tree in Greenpoint at the stand across from Matchless," he told us. "We went down at 11 at night and asked what time they closed. They actually don't close because they don't lock up the trees. I thought, Wow, this is such a unique job. I starting asking questions, and the next year, I went to a few more stands and asked some more questions. As a job, there's really nothing like it."
After volunteering at a couple of Greenpoint stands, Poekel decided to open his own this year, at a spot on the corner of Nassau and North Henry, across from McGolrick Park. This made for a marathon Thanksgiving Day (the vending season runs from Black Friday to Christmas), including a trek to pick up the trees, 8 hours of loading and unloading, a 30 minute break for Thanksgiving dinner, and then hours more to get back to Brooklyn and set up the stand. "By 6 a.m. we were finished, and then I kept going to work the first shift," he said.
The stand operates with two shifts, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., and 10 p.m. to 10 a.m. Poekel is there mornings, evenings after his day job ends, and on weekends. His rotating staff of employees -- friends who live in the neighborhood who are musicians, photographers, or between jobs -- sit in at the other times.
?"The hardest part was trying to decide what trees to get and how many and what sizes," he said. "Turns out, we sell a lot of trees to first-time tree buyers. The couples or people who haven't had a tree in quite some time, like since they were kids -- they usually start small. There aren't many people who get a 10-footer."Price is dependent on height, the tree itself, and any "flaws," like a bald spot or weird top. Due to a law passed in the '30s by the New York City mayor, as long as you don't obstruct sidewalk traffic, you don't need a permit -- just permission from whomever owns the property upon which you're setting up. Poekel brought in an RV to give his employees an escape from the cold. Bathrooms, however, mean a trip to a nearby bar or, he said, "I'll leave that to your imagination."
Stories tend to accumulate over the years, told from vendor to vendor, some of them real, some of them with the trappings of urban legend. "There's one I heard from a tree guy," he said. "Someone new was selling trees late one night. A good-looking girl came around, talked to him for 30 minutes or so, got him to sneak away, and gave him head in a nearby alley. When he came back, the story goes, every tree was gone."
In another tale, "This woman sold a tree to a drunk guy three nights in a row. The first two nights the tree apparently didn't make it home."
For Poekel, the best part of the job is the people, and the neighborhood spirit the stand creates. "Kids love every tree in there; I could show them the Charlie Brown tree, and they'd love it," he says. "Also, 90 percent of tree-vending jobs are worked by out-of-towners. I have nothing against people who come from out of town to do this, but most of that money is just leaving the city. There was something admirable in my mind about having locals working the stand. People think of New York as this cold city where you don't give a stranger the time of day. But there's a woman who brings us wine twice a week, and people bake cakes and bring hot cocoa and cider. People see me in the street and are like, 'Hey, you're the Christmas tree guy!'"
Some stands can be extremely lucrative, selling more than 1,000 trees in a season. Poekel's first year meant a lot of first-time operating costs, so it remains to be seen whether he'll make a profit, but either way, he says he'll be there again next year: "A little kid smiling and asking if you work for Santa can just make your day."
The last day to buy trees is Christmas Eve, so if you're still in the market, head over, say hi, and pick one up.
[JDoll]
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Win the Ultimate Mountain Bike Christmas Giveaway
By RoadCycling.com
Dec 13, 2010 - 3:17:01 PM
Click here to access the giveaway. In this amazing giveaway one lucky cyclist will have the chance of winning a complete bike as CRC is giving away a Turner 5 Spot frame, Marzocchi 44 RC3 Ti forks, a DT Swiss EX1750 wheelset, Chromag: Fubars, Ranger Stem, Lynx DT Saddle and Seat Clamp, Hope Tech M4 183mm F and R Floating Rotors Braided Hoses, Schwalbe Nobby Nic 2.25 tyres, Continental Xking tyres, Wellgo MG1 Magnesium Pedals, North Shore Billet Disc Brake Adaptors, Renthal 34t Chainring, a set of Kore Torsion Riser Bars, an Elite Aheadset Stem and finally a set of ODI Lock On grips. Click here to access the giveaway.
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Win the Ultimate Mountain Bike Christmas Giveaway - Dec 13, 2010 - 3:17:01 PM
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Merry War on Christmas! This conflict has been dragging on for years, which is not entirely a bad thing, as it has produced a thriving War on Christmas industry, which our economy desperately needs.The opportunities for outrage this year are slim, but where there's a rightblogger, there's a way, whether via imaginary banning of the colors red and green or via Planned Parenthood gift certificates. Cover the children's ears and continue!
Canonsburg, Pennsylvania recently decided to move its traditional creche from civic to private property because someone complained. The creche was relocated four doors away. This seems only a small inconvenience; "Pa. residents to celebrate despite creche removal," reported the Lebanon Daily News.
Well, Pa. residents may be celebrating, but South Capitol Street was not. "Can't have the little liberal darling being offended," they said. "Have to ruin it for everyone else..." Radio host Dennis Miller got in on it after a caller told him the creche had been "taken down": "We can have one loser whining about the Magi visiting the kid... I say you hold a candlelight vigil outside that one person who's whined's house... make his life look as silly as he's made this one. All you losers out there..." etc.
A local radio station identified the complainant as one Megan Hartley, and Chicks on the Right reacted in Christian fashion: "Sorry about that whole not-getting-asked-to-the-prom-in-high-school thing. But it seems as though you're channeling your bitterness well." A commenter helpfully published Hartley's address and linked back to Free Republic, where posters offered their assessments of "little miss nuts" ("Getting bad vibes just reading about this freak and they got way worse upon seeing her evil face." "I bet this one is a cutter... I am wondering if she has an eating disorder too," etc). Jesus would be proud!
But they don't even need an actual outrage to be outraged.
?Last month there was a rumor -- or, as Fox Nation would have it, news -- that Heathrow Elementary School in Florida has banned the Christmas colors red and green from its classrooms.County officials shot that story down, but who cares? Fox updated, but as we wrote this, Gateway Pundit ("Florida School Bans Christmas... And Christmas Colors") hadn't. Neither had Blue Collar Philosophy ("since Liberalism is a religion and those who believe in it cannot tolerate the one religion that exposes it, namely, Christianity"), nor Weasel Zippers ("it's come to this"), nor this guy, nor this one, etc.
Full Metal Patriot did update: "After receiving a predictable backlash from angry parents, the Seminole County Public Schools district has issued the following retraction correction... This may have been a case of the school and district doing an abrupt about-face or it may have been an individual teacher taking her authority a bit too far." Or it may have been bullshit, a possibility Full Metal Patriot did not consider.
For wider distribution, there was outrage at a show at Washington's National Portrait Gallery with lots of gay art, including a David Wojnarowicz video that included an image of ants crawling on Jesus. It wasn't a Christmas show, exactly, but it will still be running at Christmas, so Republican legislators John Boehner and Eric Cantor demanded (and got) the Wojnarowicz video pulled.
Pat Buchanan sputtered about "the kind of pictures that used to be on French postcards," though regrettably he did not link to any antique postcards of ants on Jesus. "... if there are no common standards of decency, there is no moral community, and where there is no moral community, there is no country." Others wondered why the smarty-pants Wojnarowicz (who died in 1992) didn't make fun of Mohammed instead, which would be a better way to celebrate the birth of Our Lord.
This sort of thing got some folks in a bitter mood: Jimmy Z posted a song on YouTube called "Santa is a Republican" ("His suit and hat are Red/He listens to Rush Limbaugh in his sled"). The lyrics promise that Democrats won't get any presents this year because they made Santa "drink green tea and eat granola bread" and Obama taxed him, despite lack of jurisdiction. Santa in this reading runs "a small business," and is an avid follower of U.S. politics who has Tim Kaine on his dartboard. He also "loves to feast on game he kills hunting with his gun."
"I don't give a rat's butt if you are not a Christian and don't celebrate or support Christmas," said radio host Steve Bussey. "The fact is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are and do." His headline: "It's CHRISTmas - now sit down & shut the hell up!"
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Win the Ultimate Mountain Bike Christmas Giveaway
By RoadCycling.com
Dec 13, 2010 - 3:17:01 PM
Click here to access the giveaway. In this amazing giveaway one lucky cyclist will have the chance of winning a complete bike as CRC is giving away a Turner 5 Spot frame, Marzocchi 44 RC3 Ti forks, a DT Swiss EX1750 wheelset, Chromag: Fubars, Ranger Stem, Lynx DT Saddle and Seat Clamp, Hope Tech M4 183mm F and R Floating Rotors Braided Hoses, Schwalbe Nobby Nic 2.25 tyres, Continental Xking tyres, Wellgo MG1 Magnesium Pedals, North Shore Billet Disc Brake Adaptors, Renthal 34t Chainring, a set of Kore Torsion Riser Bars, an Elite Aheadset Stem and finally a set of ODI Lock On grips. Click here to access the giveaway.
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Win the Ultimate Mountain Bike Christmas Giveaway - Dec 13, 2010 - 3:17:01 PM
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Vending evergreens, it seems, is not the devil-may-care work you might think it is. But it is poetic.
Waxes the Times,
Ah, but things change for the lonely tree vendor when the crowds dwindle, the sidewalk turns cold and the trees are not selling. The whole thing -- manning these Christmas tree stands from Thanksgiving until Christmas -- becomes an unenviable slog. The moneyed masses come out on evenings and weekends, but on weekdays, the vendors sit and shiver and watch all the people who have warm places to go.
This is positively Dickensian! Where are the fingerless gloves and hot bowls of gruel?
The Times caught up with one vendor in particular, whom they call their "Serbian sidewalk salesman, Nikola Ivkovic, the woodsman of the Upper West Side." As one would hope with any multi-installment series, they have found him to have highs and lows, good times and bad. During a tree-buying boom, he did not eat for 48 hours straight. Then he ate a prosciutto, cream cheese, and egg sandwich. And now, he is sick, or possibly hungover.
Mr. Ivkovic clutched a bottle of Pepto-Bismol and made frequent trips to the bathroom in Loehmann's department store on the next block, rushing downstairs and through racks of handbags and scarves to the rear restroom.
More tragic than having to use the bathroom at Loehmann's, he only wears a thin windbreaker, and "does not even own a winter coat."
But!
Sales over the weekend were spurred by Mr. Ivkovic's appearance on City Room. It helped him close a few deals, he said, and helped him get top-dollar prices.
"I told the customers, 'Come on, didn't you see me in the newspaper? Would I steer you wrong?' "
We eagerly await the next installment in the series.
[JDoll]
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Win the Ultimate Mountain Bike Christmas Giveaway
By RoadCycling.com
Nov 26, 2010 - 3:17:01 PM
Click here to access the giveaway. In this amazing giveaway one lucky cyclist will have the chance of winning a complete bike as CRC is giving away a Turner 5 Spot frame, Marzocchi 44 RC3 Ti forks, a DT Swiss EX1750 wheelset, Chromag: Fubars, Ranger Stem, Lynx DT Saddle and Seat Clamp, Hope Tech M4 183mm F and R Floating Rotors Braided Hoses, Schwalbe Nobby Nic 2.25 tyres, Continental Xking tyres, Wellgo MG1 Magnesium Pedals, North Shore Billet Disc Brake Adaptors, Renthal 34t Chainring, a set of Kore Torsion Riser Bars, an Elite Aheadset Stem and finally a set of ODI Lock On grips. Click here to access the giveaway.
Related articles
Win the Ultimate Mountain Bike Christmas Giveaway - Nov 26, 2010 - 3:17:01 PM
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