BY YANNIC RACK | Every year around Thanksgiving, a special group of visitors from as far away as Alaska descends on New York City. They make their temporary homes on sidewalks, to ring in the beginning of the holiday season and peddle one of its essential ingredients: the Christmas tree.
“As soon as you walk in, you smell oranges. And if you walk in from that side, it smells like pines,” said Azamat Doszhan, 24, a first-time tree vendor who usually organizes concerts for a living.
This season he mans a Hell’s Kitchen tree stand next to DeWitt Clinton Park (on 11th Ave., btw. W. 53rd & W. 54th Sts.). Fraser firs are lined up on one end, Balsam firs on the other — each variety with its own signature smell.
“I’m not selling trees, I’m selling experience,” said Doszhan, who had just sold his first fir of the day on a recent sunny Tuesday morning.
Doszhan lives in Brooklyn, which makes him stand out in a business that mainly attracts workers from far away, like Vermont or Quebec.
“I’ve had at least seven people ask me if I’m from Canada,” he said with roll of the eyes.
Two blocks over, on Eighth Ave. between W. 50th and W. 51st Sts., those customers will find what they’re looking for: Helene, 44, who hails from Montreal.
“It’s a tradition,” she said, when asked why the owner of her stand hires Canadians instead of locals — her partner, who was on break, is a friend of Helene’s from back home.
“Sixty years ago, French Canadians came to New York to sell their trees,” she explained in her slightly broken English. “New Yorkers expect it, so now if you talk to many tree sellers, they are French Canadian.
Helene, who didn’t want to give her last name, said she regularly works 16-hour shifts, since there are only two vendors and the stand is open 24 hours, like most in the city. Here, at the border of bustling Midtown, business doesn’t pick up until late in the day.
“With this work you must be strong, because it’s very hard,” she said, adding that she earns money as a metal worker back home.
“I work hard all year long, so it’s not changing for me. But the difference here is I sleep in my van.”
Like Doszhan, she is a newcomer to the business, which has a long and curious history in the city.
Americans started filling their living rooms with evergreens in the late 19th century, and it didn’t take long before hundreds of thousands of trees were being shipped into New York City every year.
But most of today’s tree vendors would be out of work if not for a special vending rule introduced in 1938.
That year, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia forced street vendors to obtain scarcely issued licenses, which resulted in the disappearance of the popular tree peddlers from New York’s streets and squares.
When the people protested, the City Council introduced a seasonal exception for “coniferous trees” sold on sidewalks, which were henceforth freely accessible to vendors so long as the adjoining building and business owners didn’t object.
This still holds today, although a few large distributors compete for leases in the most coveted parks and squares, which are awarded by the Parks department.
“Everybody fights for their space. This year we lost Tribeca,” Doszhan said, adding that the owner of his stand operates locations from The Battery to Bay Ridge.
Tom Gilmartin, 62, has run Tom’s Trees on Ninth Ave. between W. 21st and W. 22nd Sts. for two decades.
When he started out, the stand sat on a corner lot across the street until the location was snatched away one year by the Chelsea Garden Center.
“We had a tree war for seven years,” Gilmartin said. “I sold cheap trees, they sold expensive trees.”
Nowadays his prices reach $700 for a mighty 14-footer, although he’s only ever sold three of them in all the years he’s been in Chelsea.
Gilmartin makes the annual trip to the city with his wife Michele and 12-year-old son Rory — all the way from their home on the Kenai Peninsula in Southern Alaska.
For the month from Thanksgiving to Christmas, they shower in a hostel, subsist on takeout (that part shouldn’t raise any eyebrows with New Yorkers), and take turns sleeping in a red-and-green camper hitched up to their truck, which is parked right next to the stand on Ninth Ave.
“It’s a hard job,” Gilmartin said. “I’ve been coming here 19 years, you know what I know about New York? This block. I never leave.”
The family sells hundreds of trees each season, but the price is a grueling schedule. Gilmartin and his wife usually work 12 hours every day, although Rory has been helping out with deliveries this year, pocketing his own share of tips.
Gilmartin, who is a commercial fisherman during the rest of the year, started the job when he was out of work one winter. His sister was operating a tree stand at Jane St. and Eighth Ave. back then, and today his brother-in-law still runs one in Greenwich Village.
“We just started doing this job to write the trip off, drive down from Alaska and visit our relatives in New Jersey and in Tennessee,” he said. “After three or four years, we kinda got hooked on the tree stand.”
By now he feels like a permanent part of the community, albeit only for a few weeks every winter — a feeling familiar even to those who have only just started the job.
“They’re very happy to see us,” said Helene, uptown on Eighth Ave. “People say, ‘Oh you are here, Christmas is here.’ ”
As Gilmartin waited around in his overalls, many passers-by stopped to greet him and chat for a while — in his camper, he keeps a list with the names of those who have been coming for years. He also donates almost a dozen trees to neighborhood parks and institutions every year.
“I know all the old-timers,” he said, standing squarely on the sidewalk with his arms around a sturdy fir, shaking it from time to time to spread the evocative smell that would hopefully attract some new faces.
“Just asking people, ‘Hey, do you wanna buy a tree?’ doesn’t work. You don’t get any customers like that,” he said. “You have to stay here and make friends.”
