For the Christmas tree vendors of Gopher Broke Farms, the day begins at 8 p.m. when a truck from Quebec carrying upwards of 800 Christmas trees will roll up to the corner of 124th and Madison. A crew of five workers will scamper to the top of the large piles of Fraser firs and balsams and begin slangin’ trees — tree-vendor slang for throwing trees, essentially — from that truck into other trucks destined to travel throughout Manhattan. “Tree!” the workers shout as they throw them from the seemingly endless pile.
In a cold rain a few Saturdays ago, I watched this process with Henry Race, a charismatic, boyish, red-faced younger man who helps run the Marcus Garvey location of Gopher Broke Farms’ Christmas tree operation, known as Uptown Christmas Trees. He told me that one of the two smaller trucks would haul the fresh trees to locations throughout Harlem, Inwood, and the Bronx, while the other truck would head toward other locations in Manhattan; there are 19 in all. This happens every night beginning the week of Thanksgiving until Christmas day.
Uptown Christmas Trees, the business name for Gopher Broke Farms’ Christmas tree operation in New York City, ships nearly 17,000 trees to the city over the course of a Christmas tree season. George Nash, the founder and owner of Gopher Broke Farm, a sustainable farm that began in the 1970s and is located on six acres in Hyde Park, Vermont, he told me how in a good year, the goal is to only throw away only 100 of those trees — which means that he’s selling just over 500 trees per day. It’s hard to place an exact number on how many trees are sold citywide on a given year but 25,000 trees were recycled after last year’s holiday as part of Mulchfest, a program run by the city’s Parks Department that turns discarded Christmas trees into usable mulch.
Selling Christmas trees is a wildly logistical process, involving growers in Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Vermont. This year, Nash is buying trees from eight tree farms in Canada and Vermont. He’ll pay about $12.50 for a five-to-eight foot Balsam tree from Canada — your go-to Christmas tree, with short needles and a strong scent — and up to $35 for a premium Fraser Fir, which most consistently grows into the platonic Christmas-tree shape. More expensive trees, such as White Pine and Concolor Firs, which can sell for upwards of three times what Nash buys them for, help subsidize the smaller profits he earns from the more generic ones.
This year, though, snowstorms in early October throughout Quebec — “the craziest weather we’ve ever seen,” according to Nash — buried many of the soon-to-be-harvested trees, creating a shortage. Prices are up to $10 higher than normal per tree. Seven-to-eight foot Balsams are selling for between $80 and $100, while Fraser Firs of the same height are selling for $90 to $120. Prices are also up because this year the trucking industry has begun to implement a tool called an electronic logging device (ELD), which enforces a limit on trucker drive time. Any inspector can check a trucker’s ELD, and if they are in violation of the new trucking laws, under which a driver can only log 11 hours behind the wheel over the course of a 14-hour shift, they will be grounded for 10 hours. As a result, very few truckers are willing to drive from Canada to New York City; Quebec is 10 hours away, which only leaves an hour of driving to spare. Truckers also dread “timing out” in New York City. It’s expensive, jammed with traffic, and there’s nowhere to park.
I had met Henry Race, who happens to be Nash’s grandson, earlier in the day; he said he has been “selling trees longer than [he’s] been alive.” Along with the other 47 employees of Uptown Christmas Trees, Race works 12-to 14-hour days. Day shift workers, who work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., are concerned primarily with selling trees, sweeping needles, and building relationships within the community, while those on the night shift — 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. — handle the day’s delivery of trees, ward against theft, and pass the time in a whole host of wild ways.
Uptown Christmas Trees promises its seasonal employees a hard, good, and brief season of tree sales. Each vendor is guaranteed a minimum pay of $5,500 for their work, which averages out to about $180 a day (rent included), with the potential to earn more depending on the success of their respective stands. Many of the vendors return year after year, and there’s usually a 20 to 30 person waiting list for work each season, and why many of the vendors return year after year. Cooper, from Wisconsin, has been selling trees for seven years. Mullen, who lives in Montana, has been doing it for three. Adrian, a seasonal cook and landscaper on Block Island, has been tree-slinging for seven years as well. And Race — he’s been doing it since he was practically in his mother’s womb.
I spent eight hours that Saturday at various stands in Harlem and Washington Heights, and it was the way the tree-sellers interacted with customers and community members that I noticed the most. Race told me about an older woman he referred to as “Sister Bella,” who would stop by with fresh food every day — usually two meals worth of food packaged as one — and how on one a frigid morning she took the scarf from around her neck and gave it to him. He said he has never worked on Thanksgiving without receiving a home-cooked dinner from a stranger.
Further up, on 133rd and Lenox, I watched Cooper, a thick-bearded Uptown employee who works in wilderness therapy in the offseason, prop up two Christmas trees with his arms as a couple let their baby point out which one they would purchase. On 156th and Broadway, I walked up as Mullen helped a woman pick out a tree — “not too skinny, not too naked.” With hands darkened by dirt and sap and fingers bandaged against blisters, Mullen held up tree after tree for the woman; it was her third trip to the stand that day. When I asked Mullen what her favorite part of the job was, she said it was “seeing the kids grow up.”
Three generations of George Nash’s family sell Christmas trees on the streets of New York City. His journey to tree salesmanship began in 1974, when he was hauling a load of trees from Vermont to Springfield, Massachusetts. A car behind him flashed its lights. Nash pulled over, and a young man from with a thick Brooklyn accent got out of the car and asked where he could get some of Nash’s trees; he wanted to sell them in New York City. He ended up hiring George to drive down a load from Vermont. The man’s name was Kevin Hammer, and he would become one of the most prominent tree-sellers in New York City.
For ten years, George sold trees on the streets of New York City for Hammer, who manages around 50 stands in and is notoriously reluctant to give interviews. Hammer built his seasonal empire from scratch, beginning in that highway moment with Nash, and it was with him that he learned the day-to-day mechanics and logistics of the industry before parting ways and starting an tree-selling operation of his own. But it wasn’t until his wife, Jane Waterman, joined him in the 90s that the business began to flourish. A former nurse, she took over managing personnel while Nash focused solely on distribution.
Uptown’s origin story adds a sense of mystery to an industry that is already rich with its own colorful history and feuds. There are 8 vendors, including George and Hammer and Lechner, who are, according to George, the “major tree sellers in New York City.” Most of them get along. Some even share tree shipments. The day before I spoke to Norris he had just received a load of trees from George’s most recent delivery. But Hammer is in a league of his own. Indeed, when I asked Norris about Hammer, I was only met with two statements: “Nobody ever sees him,” and, “we know he’s in the business.” Hammer is held in mythological regard by his competitors, who inhabit the aura of myths in and of themselves.
Prior to Nash and Hammer, a man named Bill Norris — to whom George as the “grandfather of the tree business” in NYC — is credited with beginning the cottage industry that has led to the abundance of tree stands across the city. In the early ‘70s, Norris rented a vacant lot between 90th and 91st on Columbus Ave. and drove to it tractor-trailers loaded with Christmas trees, initially planning on wholesaling the trees to florists and bodegas. “It was fascinating,” he told me, because, though the wholesale business worked well, people would simply walk up to his trailer and ask for a tree to take home with them. He started selling them for $20 each, and was surprised at the success. He still sells trees at his two stands, one 66th and 3rd and the other on Lexington and 88th.
The story of New York City’s sidewalk Christmas-tree trade began long before Nash, Hammer, and Norris, when in 1938 then-Mayor Fiorella Laguardia passed a law banning all peddling on the streets without a permit. There was little backlash until citizens realized that the law also applied to those who sold Christmas trees, which had been sold in the city since as early as 1851, when the Washington Market on Gansevoort Street sold trees for as little as $1 each. A 1938 New York Sun article stated, “The Christmas tree vendor who formerly set himself up in business on some busy corner is curbed this year.” New Yorkers protested, bringing their concerns to the New York City Council, which convened in 1938 and passed a law that is referred to as the “Coniferous Tree Exception,” which reads “Storekeepers and peddlers may sell and display coniferous trees during the month of December.”
Because of this, Christmas tree vendors are not required to have a permit from the city, only permission from the owner of the business or building in front of which they are selling. However, that permission can come at a price. For example, the Parks Department auctions off many of its coveted park locations to vendors; the tiny square at 6th St. and Spring St. in Soho goes for about $50,000 a year. Further north, locations can go for anywhere from $900 to $4,000 per year. For their Marcus Garvey Park location, Uptown paid the city a five-year bid that comes out to $1,100 a year. (The city, which is institute a five-year bid system for all Christmas tree locations located on public parks, makes a tidy profit from the tree business.)
For his stands, often set up in front of small storefronts, Norris told me that he pays “a couple hundred dollars” to run a power line into their shops instead of setting up a generator. Otherwise, the storefronts simply give him permission. But the city’s bid system for the use of its parks is what led to a bidding war between two Christmas tree rivals that caused one vendor to put down an upwards of $50,000 bid for SoHo Square. Kevin Hammer paid $19,425 a year as part of a five-year bid for Theodore Roosevelt Park in 2011. Both George and Norris expressed concerns about this. “Bids drive up rents which drive up prices,” Norris said, explaining how large bidding wars between some of the heavyweights in the seasonal industry are just another reason why the cost of trees are increasing for customers.
Tree vendors are willing to pay high prices to sell in certain locations because they tend to have stakes in those communities. “People really love us being here,” Nash said of his stands in Harlem. “We’re selling to the children of people that my children used to sell to.” Norris told me how others said Nash was nuts for setting up tree stands uptown. These were the post-1970 years, in the aftermath of the fires in the South Bronx and the dawn of broken-windows policing. White fear and racism dominated and skewed the perception of anything in Harlem or further north. Nash, however, saw no one else selling trees uptown, and moved his stands there; according to Norris, the neighborhood and block associations embraced him. Nash has been there ever since.
The sidewalk Christmas-tree industry is not without corporate competition. A new Whole Foods at the corner of 125th and Lenox sells trees for 15 to 20 percent less than Uptown. Both Henry and Cooper said that the store doesn’t “give the trees a fresh cut.” Cooper told me about some customers who came to his stand after having purchased a tree from Whole Foods that dried out on them; trees that aren’t freshly cut won’t take in water and die. When I walked by the Harlem Whole Foods, their trees were clumped together in a box just outside the store; no one was present to show them to customers.
But for Uptown Christmas Trees, business is good. In the 40 or so minutes I spent that day with Mullen, she sold a half dozen wreaths (which range from $30 for 12 inches to $100 for 36 inches) and trees. And yet, despite the sales, what sticks in my mind is the image of Mullen, immediately after hand-sawing the end of the tree, taking the freshly cut stump in her gloved hand, raising it to her nose, and inhaling big and deep.
