A last-minute shopper in the hosiery department at Marshall Field’s State Street store was just gliding her fingers along the see-through insides of one of Calvin Klein’s Infinite Sheer stockings a week ago Wednesday night, when all of a sudden the brass-rimmed Randolph Street doors were hoisted from their hinges and what felt like a minor tornado swept down the store’s 347-foot-long center aisle.
Spring bonnets teetered, stockings fluttered, sheets of plastic hanging from a rack rattled like jibs out at sea and heads turned right and left to see what was the source of the almighty breeze.
Out at the curb, in the sulfur-yellow glow of a streetlight, a man in bib overalls unlatched the rear doors of a 53-foot rig, and out spilled a movable jungle: birds of paradise by the flock; staghorn ferns, a whole herd; a forest of Norfolk pines and fruit trees, practically an orchard, what with the oranges, tangerines, lemons and limes, bananas and pineapples too.
Then came orchids by the tens of hundreds; and calla lilies, 300 at least, each bloom big enough to fill with a half-pint of Haagen-Dazs and start licking. Silk oaks, 15 feet tall, and Brazilian pepper trees and the biggest Tasmanian tree fern anyone could find, they all rolled past, and then Mexican fan palms and windmill palms too. Black bamboo, star of jasmine, even a giant Burmese honeysuckle paraded by.
Besides queen and king palms, there were eucalyptus, a couple hundred in a dozen different species. Leather fern and papyrus were supposed to be on board, and creeping fig and juniper and jasmine and lavender vine and espaliered roses, clinging to trellises, and buckets of hairy hanging haliconia that looked like a monkey’s limbs.
It went on for one hour and 9 minutes, this unloading of the contents of Truck No. 5288, the first of five rigs that had headed east from Los Angeles two days before. Nearly every last plant was tagged and numbered so that when it reached the Randolph Street curb, one of the crew with the bulging biceps and the work boots would know just what nook or cranny of Field’s to haul it to.
This is how you turn a downtown department store into Curious George’s jungle in just three nights: You plant by the numbers.
And that is what they did, from that Wednesday night just before store closing until the wee hours of Thursday, and again through the night Thursday and Friday, they planted the pages of “Curious George,” that 1941 children’s classic by H.A. and Margret Rey, in which the most-curious little monkey gets caught in the jungle by the Man with the Big Yellow Hat who brings him home to a life of unending adventures. His latest–one that has him hanging from 60-foot kites in Field’s two cavernous lightwells and climbing for balloons 55 feet up from the sidewalk, atop Field’s famed clock at State and Randolph Streets: “Curious George Goes to Field’s Flower Show.”
It is, this sixth annual rite of spring that turns Field’s State Street store into a knock-you-over-with-its-eau-de-the-real-thing, blocklong bouquet, nothing short of “planned pandemonium.” It is plotted and graphed, computerized and color-coded down to the last square-inch and the last blooming bromeliad.
“Our floral designer doesn’t just walk in a showroom and say, `That looks good, I’ll take, oh, a dozen of this, a half dozen that.’ We know that at the Origins (cosmetics) counter or the MAC counter, there are, say, three azalea trees and 14 potted irises,” says Amy Meadows, the visual marketing manager whose job it is to orchestrate the planning and installation of the floral extravaganza. “There are very specific trucks for very specific nights. One truck can’t come one day early, one can’t come one day late. There is no room for improvisation. No last-minute runs to Home Depot for flats of impatiens.”
And you don’t plant a show that covers 80 display ledges on the first floor, 13 State Street windows and the Walnut Room with a couple of wheelbarrows and your Felco No. 2 pruners.
Nope, the folks at Field’s hauled out two forklifts (they rolled right off the Randolph Street sidewalk and down the center aisle once those doors got unhinged), something called a SkyJack that hoisted a steel platform 15 feet in the air, and enough carts and dollies to create a center aisle traffic jam that rivaled the Kennedy at 5 p.m.
They uncoiled 100-foot garden hoses right there beside the Clinique Deep Comfort Body Moisture under glass. And out came the hacksaws to cut stems off the glass-blown dragonflies darting around the Walnut Room fountain and 8-foot ladders for reshuffling the azaleas hovering over the costume necklace counter.
They raised a tent in the loading dock to serve as the makeshift flower cooler (too bad it got too cool one night and froze even the junipers–evergreens so hardy someone called them bulletproof), and set up 6-foot-long tables on the oil-stained dock so every last orchid could be unwrapped of the pages of the Honolulu Star Bulletin that kept them perky for the long, long trip.
And of course they ordered up help: A crew of eight designers flew in from California with Steve Podesta, the visionary behind the show for the last seven years who calls himself the CFO, chief floral officer. Another 20 floral designers came from around Chicago, and then there were the haulers and lifters, the carpenters, security guards, elevator maintenance crew, window washers, housekeepers, and the team of Field’s visual merchandisers, some 100 folks in all, not counting the exterminator who’s on-call for the duration of the show that runs through April 2.
And while, after seven years, Podesta and company swear they’ve got it down to a science, it is, after all, a job presided over by one Mother Nature, “and she can really be unpredictable,” says Podesta, who’s been petaling since he was 5 and whose family has been in the blooming business in San Francisco since 1872. He gave up his seven retail shops in 1995 to devote himself to the Field’s shows and other big-scale installations. Sounding like the native San Franciscan that he is, he likens the work “to painting the bridge,” the Golden Gate, of course: “You finish one side, you start the other.”
The unpredictability of Mother Nature, however, is rivaled only by the unpredictability of the truckers. And for a show that hinges on getting everything it’s supposed to get when it’s supposed to get it, a no-show truck can be more than a little aphid on the vine.
A few years back, as Podesta tells it, one of the Chicago-bound truckers got as far as Montana when he “decides he misses his wife, so he drops his load, leaves the truck idling on the side of the road and heads off to see his wife somewhere in the north of Montana.” The truck never did make it to Chicago and not a little last-minute readjusting had to be done to fill in for the stranded plants, one-seventh of that year’s show.
Another year, one of the truckers who, because of height limitations in the Loop, knew he had to drive the wrong way down one-way city streets to get to Field’s, turned a corner and saw police cars with flashing lights. He was afraid to steer into trouble so he drove off to a Burger King parking lot where he was found, asleep in the driver’s seat, five hours later.
When the truck failed to show up at the appointed hour, “we sent the police out,” says Podesta. “CPD running all over the place. No one can find the truck. We had an all-points bulletin. It’s midnight and they find him three blocks away. He’s taking a nap.”
The police cars that scared him? They’d been waiting to escort the truck to Field’s front door.
This year, there was a little snafu with the citrus trees. Seems that when the laborers in Los Angeles were loading the trucks, it got to be around lunch time, and they decided to pluck clean the oranges from the trees–for lunch. “I come back to supervise,” says Podesta, “and there’s no fruit. The laborers all sat down for lunch and ate it. They’re used to landscaping where it doesn’t matter if there’s fruit, it’ll just bloom later. We had to go out and get all new plants. Thank God I was there. They ate it, bless their hearts.”
Of course, like any fine Curious George tale, the story never ends until the little monkey is out of his fix. And so, despite the missing fruits, and the moss and mud spills in fine jewelry, and the oncidium orchids that bit the dust, and the balloon strings that almost didn’t make it to Curious George’s clutch, this tale too has a happy ending.
On Saturday morning, when the nine bells chimed, and the big brass doors were unlocked, the first shopper through the door looked up and gasped, the very gasp that everyone on the crew had waited for, toiled through the night three nights running for, planned and plotted the whole last year for.
“I feel like this is where the Curious George books take place,” said one little boy, who had tucked his very own little monkey into his coat pocket for the expedition to Field’s and the stroll past the storybook windows. “He feels proud,” said the little boy of the little monkey who by now–curious, after all–had peeked out of his pocket to inhale the department store jungle.
