City Blossoms: Helping Lower Manhattan Bloom Since the 1980s

Karina Granin never thought she’d join her mother, City Blossoms co-owner Inna Lipovsky, in the flower business. For decades, as a luxury floral design studio, City Blossoms has provided New Yorkers with sumptuous bouquets and arrangements. Yet Granin initially thought the business wasn’t for her.

“I never imagined myself in a creative field,” Granin told the Downtown Alliance. Instead, she got a degree in political science from Barnard and landed a job at J.P. Morgan. But after a short stint in banking, Granin wanted a more creative and entrepreneurial environment, and decided to join her mother in the business, eventually officially becoming her partner. It turns out, Granin and Lipovsky make a great team. Eighteen years later, the mother-daughter duo — and the shop, currently located at 62 Trinity Pl. — are still going strong.

Lipovsky and Granin are from the former Soviet Union, where Lipovsky had been a competitive floral designer.

“Inna participated in worldwide floral design competitions where art, in a way, became almost a sport. Once you started creating a design, you could not make any changes,” Granin said. “It had to be very seamless, organic and very structured at the same time.”

The family immigrated to the United States in 1990; a year later, Lipovsky took over what was then a tiny family-owned flower shop at Battery Place, using her floral design expertise to create dazzling arrangements for a wide range of events, corporate clients beautifying their lobbies and offices, and individuals looking for gorgeous bouquets. Though the shop had been around since the 1980s, under Lipovsky’s care it, well, blossomed. 

“My mother is the bravest person I know,” Granin said, adding that Lipovsky, who had no retail experience and spoke little English at the time, invested everything she had in the store. “She grew this business purely with her talent and personality. Everyone who met my mother instantly fell in love with her charm.”

Lipovsky was able to move City Blossoms into a larger space at 2 Washington St., and then eventually to its current Trinity Place location, which has a large production space in the building as well as the retail storefront. Lipovsky and Granin also opened a longstanding Midtown outpost, though it shuttered earlier this year. (“The Midtown area never really picked up after Covid,” Granin said.)

City Blossoms has persevered through some of downtown’s most difficult challenges. The shop was at its Washington Street location on 9/11, where “every vase fell down and everything was broken and the smell of death was lingering everywhere for months,” Granin said. During the 2008 financial crisis, the shop lost much of its weekly corporate customer base in a short amount of time. And when Covid hit and people started canceling flower-heavy events like weddings, Granin and Lipovsky kept the business afloat via retail. Granin also came up with the idea of doing flower arrangement classes online.

“I remember coming to the store to clear out the flower fridge and everybody in the city was in masks, and everything was closed, and I thought this was the end, because who cares about flowers when you are afraid for your survival?” Granin said. “But then one day I was watching a cooking tutorial online and I thought, ‘Oh, maybe we can do this kind of thing with flowers?’” 

City Blossoms launched virtual design classes with contactless deliveries, providing supplies like clippers, vases, flowers and greens while Granin led a virtual arranging session. That pivot was a big hit: “We started with smaller groups, and then began doing larger team-building classes for companies and other community organizations,” Granin said. “That got us through.”

Granin has a trove of stories, like this one from the anniversary of 9/11:

“Someone came in and gave us money for the next customer to ‘pay it forward,’” she said. “The next person who came in was getting flowers to place on the 9/11 memorial for a child who died in the attacks. She starts crying and then we’re all crying, I’m telling her the flowers are free, it was very, very emotional.”

When Covid hit, a customer who canceled her planned wedding decided not to postpone and ended up getting married at City Hall, with City Blossoms providing the flowers. The wedding was later featured in an article about love persevering amid the pandemic.

“I was very emotional [when I met this bride] that people were still getting married, people are still going to want flowers and beautiful things,” Granin said. “It gave me hope.”

Throughout it all, City Blossoms has been dedicated to its customers. The shop serves all of downtown as well as the rest of the New York Metropolitan area. The mother-daughter duo’s flowers are fresh, high-quality blooms, and their arrangements, which can come in vases or hand-tied bouquets, are professionally designed, making them far more intricate than what you might find at your local bodega. You can order arrangements for events or individual use; City Blossoms even offers a City Hall collection for brides tying the knot just a few blocks north. Granin still offers floral arranging classes for people interested in learning more. 

Though Granin ended up in the floral business accidentally, she has fully embraced it. Her favorite part of working with flowers? 

She loves working with her mother, she says, and also: “Making people happy.”