It could be much worse for him - take a look at what happen to this poor florist yesterday:
Heart-wrenching loss
Fire destroys a Bay Shore flower shop hours before Valentine’s Day, but owner still delivers
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BY ANDREW STRICKLER
andrew.strickler@newsday.com
February 15, 2007
Charles Piazza left work Tuesday night satisfied: the showcase windows of his Bay Shore flower shop were filled with Valentine's Day balloons, red hearts, teddy bears, and, of course, lots of red roses.
In the shop's refrigerators, dozens of arrangements awaited delivery alongside thousands of roses ready for last-minute sale to procrastinating husbands and boyfriends.
But an early morning phone call shattered Piazza's plans: Patthey Flowers, which Piazza said has been in business for more than a century, was ablaze, along with all his carefully laid preparations for his busiest day of the year.
"My wife and I were numb," Piazza said, describing how he felt as he watched his East Main Street shop burn early yesterday. "It's just devastating, all that hard work gone."
Suffolk police said the fire, which gutted the shop and destroyed its contents, began around 11:30 p.m. Officials say the cause of the blaze is still under investigation. Patthey Flowers has been in its location across from Southside Hospital since 1968.
Piazza said as he watched firefighters battle the blaze in vain, he thought of one arrangement in particular, a huge vase containing 99 yellow and 1 red rose ordered last week by a U.S. soldier stationed in Iraq.
But Piazza, 47, said that Valentine arrangement and 70 or so others destroyed in the blaze would be re-made and delivered because a flower wholesaler was willing to sell him several hundred replacement roses - at almost three times the normal price - and deliver them to his two other flower shops in Islip and Brentwood. "I'll lose money on them ... but I really don't want anyone to be disappointed on Valentine's Day," Piazza said.
The Valentine's Day gift was delivered yesterday afternoon to Nicole Straehle, 24, a surgical coordinator from Oakdale. She said she met her boyfriend, U.S. Marine Cpl. Garland Winn, through the Adopt-A-Marine program.
"Oh my god, it's so big I can't even lift it," she said. "I never expected to get anything like this, especially after the florist burned."
With an icy rain falling yesterday, Piazza scrambled over debris at the rear of the shop to pull out bundles of roses, their red and yellow blooms now blackened, from the shop's destroyed walk-in refrigerator.
Each of the 8,000 or so roses he planned to sell this Valentine's Day season, he explained, had to be cleaned, cut, treated with hydrating and preservative solution, and put in a net to protect the bloom. "You can't get that work back," he said.
Piazza said the original Patthey Flowers opened on Fifth Avenue in Bay Shore late in the 19th century, where the Patthey family grew their own flowers in large greenhouses. Among the items destroyed: a series of photographs of the original business, which he said were given to him by the previous owner.
Piazza, 47, bought the shop in 2004 and spent the past two years renovating the building, which had fallen into disrepair. "I saw a diamond in the rough. I still do, it's just a lot rougher," he said.
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
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