The Complete History of Belvedere Flowers
Belvedere flowers has been family owned & operated for over 50 years! My grandfather, Abe, worked for B. Frank who had 3 flowers shops at the time, one of them located in the Bellevue Stratford Hotel.
Eventually, my father, Jack, came into the business and purchased the keys to the shop & continued in the wonderful Bellevue Stratford Hotel in center city Philadelphia.
Belvedere Flowers became the preferred florist of all of the hotels floral needs for years to come, until the Legionnaires Disease in 1977.
Now with all the experience of doing flowers for weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs and party events at the Bellevue, my dad was fortunate enough to find a spot directly across the street from the hotel at 14th & Walnut St. , where he continued to prosper for another 10 years, along with my mom, Eileen, coming into the business full time also.
I remember coming down into the city when I was a little boy, and taking an interest in arranging flowers at a very young age! My parents had a large staff back then, and I learned a lot from all the award winning designers there, who all eventually went on to start their own flower shops.
We had an array of interesting designers, drivers & flower delivery walkers which was very common in center city Philadelphia. You could walk certain deliveries faster than driving, with all the construction & traffic!
One of our most talented designers, Cindy Morris, eventually moved to Boulder Colorodo, opened her own flower shop and is now a novelist with 2 books published, one of which is about her flower shop experience!
Those were really fun times back then, being in center city Philly with all the city excitement & interesting characters you run into every day. I used to always walk down to the local video arcade on Chestnut St. & grab a hot sausage & soft pretzel from the street corner vendor. I sure do miss those days!
However, due to a drastically increased cost of rent in the city, my mom & dad were eventually forced to find a new location & decided to move to our hometown of Havertown, PA to start all over again.
While we were able to keep a lot of our Philadelphia customers, we knew we needed to reach out to the suburbs and build our brand of family owned & operated quality flowers & customer service. We also knew we needed to adjust with the times and start thinking about a website.
This is where myself, Adam, came on board and started working part time, in a special program for senior high school students. A work study program that allowed me to have school half day, and work for my parents the rest of the day. Sounded like a great deal to me at the time, ha ha, only half day of school , then I could relax at flower shop at work for mom & dad!
Eventually, I figured it out, that I was good at designing flowers & marketing the flower shop. I started to take pictures of our own work & post it alongside professional Teleflora images. I was amazed that my custom pictures were selling more than the Teleflora images. Little by little, I started to take my job a lot more seriously, now, that I too, have my own family.
So, here we are today 50+ years later still going strong celebrating our 20th year here in Havertown PA.
You can visit us online & check out our brand new website with plenty of galleries to view the Belvedere Family.
Proudly serving Havertown & the Philadelphia area for many more years to come!
I hope that one day, my niece Carly, and my son Max, will also join the Belvedere Flower experience and keep it going for generations & generations to come.
Carly, now 14, is already convinced she wants to work for Uncle Adam!
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