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2014/11/20

Questions over future of San Francisco Flower Mart reveal city's Tall Poppy Syndrome




The interior of the San Francisco Flower Mart seems designed for sensory overload. It's not so much the number of flowers on display within the Walmart-sized warehouse but the onslaught of more colors than you've ever seen in one place and some you may never have seen before. It can be disorienting; it's too much for the eyes to take in. 
Strip away the trappings of exoticism, however, and the Flower Mart presents a deeply typical San Francisco tale. In the predawn hours especially, it feels like a self-contained little realm. It's anything but. 
Superficially, this place looks much as it did a generation ago; some of the same faces even peer out from behind the forests of hydrangeas. But, in that time, the flower business has transformed. The Mart is an anachronism in a town where anachronisms are now perceived as a market inefficiency. It's one of the last industrial outposts in San Francisco, a sprawling, ramshackle hangar in the heart of SOMA, the burgeoning showcase of tech and imminent home to mushrooming office towers emblazoned with the gibberish names of companies defining the city's 21st-century economy. 
The Flower Mart isn't nearly as valuable as the land beneath it (and the air above it), which, like so much of the city, is primed to house yet another high-rise tech fortress.

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