19Flowers for All Occasions

This looks like an old wall sign somebody restored. It's better than that: it's a NEW coat of paint on a NINETY-SIX-year-old promise. Albert Reed came from London, lost his first shop in the 1929 crash, borrowed fifty dollars from his mother-in-law, and opened on Austin Avenue in March 1930 — in a building the Lions Club let him use rent-free. During World War II, when flower vases ran short, the shop cleaned out oil cans and decorated those instead. Three generations later his granddaughter Debbie still opens the store every morning, and told a reporter during the shop's 90th year: “I plan on making it to a hundred. I'll be 65 then.”

The cream panel, the mint-green script, the beveled blue border — that's not nostalgia. That's a working sign for a working florist, doing what it's done since Hoover was president.