Boston Flower Exchange
The Boston Flower Exchange at 540 Albany St. in 2015
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| Address | 540 Albany St Boston, Massachusetts |
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| Opening date | 1909 |
| Owner | Boston Flower Exchange, LLC |
| Environment | Indoor |
| Goods sold | Flowers and plants |
| Days normally open | Monday through Friday - 5:00 AM to 12:00 PM, Saturday 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM & certain Sundays 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM |
| Number of tenants | 13 |
| Total retail floor area | 73,000-square-foot (6,800 m2) |
| Website | http://www.thebostonflowerexchange.com/ |
The Boston Flower Exchange is a wholesale flower market located in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded as a marketplace that local growers could rent cooperatively to sell their products in a space more suited to their needs than Boston's historic Haymarket open-air marketplace, it has been the focal point of the floral trade of New England for over a hundred years. Although originally a local growers' wholesale market, the Flower Exchange now features flowers and foliage from dozens of countries and has expanded to carry potted plants, glassware, pottery and other floral supplies. The Flower Exchange is not open to the public and is limited to members of the trade only.
In December 2016, it was announced that the exchange will be moving to a 65,000-square-foot facility on 2nd Street in Chelsea, Massachusetts and changing their name to the New England Flower Exchange. The move will be final by the end of January 2017.
The Boston Cooperative Flower Growers Association leased the first space for a wholesale growers' market in 1892 in an empty storefront on Tremont Street, near the current Park Street T Station. Before the end of the year the location was overcrowded and the Board of Directors decided to lease the basement of the Park Street Church in 1894. As the success of the market continued to attract more growers and buyers, the market was forced to move again in 1903, this time to 163 Columbus Avenue. When the stalls in the newly renovated market were auctioned off, the exorbitant prices pushed some of the growers to form another organization, named the Boston Cooperative Market, which opened in the basement of the old Music Hall.
The Flower Exchange was founded in 1909 when the two organizations combined in order to find a building that could better meet their collective needs. They moved once more to Winthrop Square before settling on the Cyclorama Building on Tremont Street in 1923, which once housed the famous panoramic painting of the battle Gettysburg. Due to the increasingly haphazard parking situation and plans by the controversial Boston Redevelopment Authority to purchase the Cyclorama building, the original home to the Gettysburg Cyclorama, now the main building of the Boston Center for the Arts, the Board of Directors began looking for a new location in 1963.
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