Dennis Regis spends his day in his floral shop stemming roses. “I’ve adapted to the flowers,” he said.
Dennis Regis is a part of his father’s legacy.
By the time Dennis was twelve years old he had already started dressing corsages in carnations, orchids, gardenias, and roses. Unlike many of his friends in junior high, he spent his afternoons helping his father in his floral shop.
One night John Regis took his son to dinner after he took sole ownership of his floral shop. They dined at the Villa Russo just a short drive away and his father had something important to tell him.
“It’s going to be me and you against the world,” said Dennis Regis “And I never forgot that.”
Heaps of stems were strewn along the floor of his floral shop. Mr. Regis has spent his entire life creating floral designs for an evolving ethnic community in south Queens.
“That’s the only thing I ever did my whole life. I always loved flowers and what they brought to the public,” he said as he stemmed dozens of roses in his floral shop that he has owned for nearly 25 years.
Today Mr. Rigas, 67, serves anywhere from ten to twenty customers each day, working 12 to 14 hour shifts, seven days a week. And on holidays like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, the line continues right until the back alley of his shop.
His love for flowers has always been constant. “I’ve adapted to the flowers,” he said. But like his father, Mr. Regis has also had to adapt to the changing ethnic community in south Richmond Hill.
His floral shop sells “malas” or garlands of carnations for Hindu icons and funeral rituals, floral backdrops for “mandaps” in Hindu weddings, and signature designs of OM, a Hindu symbol of peace—all targeted to the emerging Indo-Caribbean immigrant enclave.
“That’s our specialty. I was the first to do it with the Caribbean people … We specialize in Caribbean culture,” he said mentioning that it took a little while to restructure his business to suit the rising Indo-Caribbean enclave — now helping him sustain a business as the leading floral designer in south Richmond Hill.
“It took me a few years to dedicate my whole structure to them, because now I carry prayer flowers, their flowers for their holidays, their plant,” he said chuckling, “and when we started this, all of the florists were German and Irish and they didn’t want to deal with the Italians.”
Mr. Regis is familiar with targeting his flower business to suit the needs of a shifting customer base. After all, he has seen the work of his father John Regis, a jovial man who was a first-generation Greek and newcomer to a local floral industry once dominated by German, Irish and Jews in the 1950s.
“Up to 1956 we did very little business, we were relatively very poor in my family,” he said. But he pointed out that his father found a new band of customers that the other florists did not want to deal with.
“We dealt with them. They were a little rough… they come in yelling and hollering, people you know they got intimidated. And Italians they want big, big, and bigger,” he said.
Mr. Regis mentioned that his father made his business with an influx of Italians ordering large floral centerpieces. And so his father was able to run their family floral shop on the corner of Lefferts Boulevard and Liberty Avenue. In 1962 John Regis was featured in LIFE magazine as one of the leading florists in the New York City metropolitan area.
Mr. Regis became a full-time florist working with his father for 20 years and in 1989 he bought his own florist shop just four blocks away from his father’s. “It’s been a long time,” said Mr. Regis who said since then his life has become about making beautiful flowers for people, just like the life of his father.
“Since the time I was ten years old up until the time I was 45 years old—I gave him my heart and soul,” said Mr. Regis about his father, now deceased.
He said even now that his father is gone, his life will always be about working with the ebb and flow of the flowers and the needs of local residents.
“I go with the flow, it’s the only thing I got left when it comes to work.”
By: Kamelia Kilawan
