"After 137 years, N.E. flower show folds" by David Abel, Globe Staff | November 1, 2008
The city's annual antidote for late-winter blues has long been the gardens full of delphiniums, forsythia, and tulips adorning gazebos and topiaries set up at the New England Spring Flower Show.
Just look at what you will be missing, folks.
But after 137 years of dazzling its frost-fatigued visitors, next year's show will not provide Bostonians the same bridge to spring, and the state risks losing millions of dollars in potential revenue as a result.
Betsy Ridge Madsen, president of the board of trustees of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, said that financial difficulties and the slowing economy have forced them to call off the show, which has recently been held in March at Bayside Expo Center and in previous years attracted more than 100,000 people from around the region.
Last year, the Horticultural Society lost money on the show. The society's $4 million budget was sorely taxed by $850,000 spent sprucing up the Rose Kennedy Greenway with shrubs and plants.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts Literally Throws Tax Dollars Away.
Couldn't we have given that $5 million IBM didn't need to the flower-makers?
Patrick Moscaritolo, president of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau, compared the annual flower show to traditions such as the Boston Marathon and Red Sox' opening day. He said the loss of the large event would be a blow to Boston.
Yeah, but those events are SPORTS and are backed by BIG $$$!
To HELL with the FLOWERS!!!
"For many of us who have lived in Boston their whole lives, this is a big loss," Moscaritolo said. "It clearly drove business to restaurants and our hotels, not to mention money that helped the Bayside Expo Center." Moscaritolo said the flower show injects millions of dollars each year into the state's economy.
More lost revenues.
It has been a hard year for the society, which was founded in 1829. It has had to borrow heavily to pay its bills, money-raising has dried up, and the board of trustees struggled with revelations that Bob Feige, the society's new executive director, had spent three days in jail during 2007 for failing to pay former employees of a business he once owned.
Every time you turn around, the BANKS are MAKING OUT AGAIN!!
The rest of the piece was a list of problems the show has suffered.
Wow, I've never seen a flower close up like that.
