Whiting Flower Shop Keeps on Blooming

Gayle Faulkner Kosalko September 2021

It's been 121 years since the Whiting Flower Shop began. The shop has been honored with an Outstanding Century Achievement Award from the Society of American Florists as the third oldest floral shop in the nation.

Back behind what we know as King Chop Suey today, there were just fields. And in these fields L.E. Klem built two green houses in the year 1900 and this was the beginning of the Whiting Flower Shop.

"There was no store per se," explained Connie Salas, owner. "Klem would put his plants and cut flowers on a cart and go through the streets of Whiting and people would come out to buy them."

Evidently he sold enough from his cart so that in 1917 Klem moved his business inside to a building on Clark Street. Now this was a well thought out choice for location because there on Clark Street was also Whiting's telegraph office. FTD had begun in 1910 so those in the floral industry wanted to get in on being able to send flowers nationally. And because of WWI, many flowers were now being sent throughout the country via FTD.

It was now 1929, right before the Depression and the Whiting Flower Shop moved to the corner of 119th Street and Sheridan Avenue in a building it would call home for 80 years. Connie was told that originally the building housed a meat packing company. In the 1930's a Northern Indiana Florist Association was formed with Whiting Flower Shop and five florists as members. At this time florists went to Water Street in Chicago or met the train in East Chicago to pick up the fresh flowers for their shops three times a week. As an association, one florist would go and pick up the flowers for all six shops at once!

"Remember there was no refrigeration then to keep your flowers fresh," Connie said. "You'd have a block of ice and a fan. In the shop if you picked up the drop ceiling tile you could see where the block of ice would drop in years ago. Electrical refrigeration didn't come in until the 1940's so keeping flowers alive was truly a challenge."

L.E. Klem had never married so eventually he brought his nephew Howard Stawictke and his wife Beatrice into the business.

Because things were so tough during the Depression, Klem arranged with a widow in town who was an extremely good baker to sell her baked goods at Whiting Flower Shop daily. The widow had no means of support since this was before any kind of federal aid, so this helped her survive as well. In the corner of the store were two tables where she began her own little personal bakery and she gave Klem 10% of her profit as rent. This "flour shop" in a flower shop lasted for a couple of years.

Connie said that funeral work has always been most interesting in the history of the shop.

"People were waked in homes and people used to take bouquets and vases of flowers and put them around the casket in the living room," she said. "This was before funeral homes began."

Somebody out of New York came up with the idea of putting a bouquet of flowers actually on top of the casket and that's when the casket spray was first developed. Connie said that later when people started sending flowers to a funeral home, the funeral homes would put hooks on their walls to display them, not wanting lots of vases standing around that could easily tip over. So florists would take flowers and lay them out in a fan shape, and bind them at the bottom with string. Next they would put greens and moss to cover the bottom and turn it upside down so it could hung on the funeral home's hook.

"Late in the 1940's as funeral homes were being built or renovated, they no longer wanted all these hooks in their walls so somebody came up with the easel spray, like an artist's easel. For some 30 years they were made out of wood but most day are not only metal by recyclable as well," Connie added.

Connie bought the business back in 1993.

"Being creative is the joy of doing this," she said. "And I still get flowers from a local farm, pussy willows in the spring and cat tails and bittersweet in the Fall." She has seen that the flower industry itself has changed a lot in the last 15 years because of the internet.

"You've got to trust your local florist," Connie said. "But today we have websites. We've become international and we've sent flowers to Lebanon, Finland, Israel, Australia and Italy."

Another change Connie has made in the last dozen years is to go into the plant scaping business as well.

"We have gone into interior landscaping or plant scape for such companies as Praxiar, Blue Chip in Michigan City. We also teach them how to take care of the plants once they're in," she said.

For the Horseshoe alone, Whiting Flower Shop has landscaped and takes care of 1600 plants.

"I particularly love making the seasonal changes from the browns and yellows and oranges in the fall to the reds for Christmas. We do 800 poinsettias alone just for the Horseshoe," she said.

Connie said that when she bought the business from Bea Stawictke that the two ladies would lunch and Bea would tell her stories about the history of the shop.

"She said that they used to do a lot of weddings in the 1940's and 1950's but then that side of the business simmered down. I brought the wedding business back when I bought the store and we've done weddings as far as South Bend, Indianapolis, Streamwood and one this weekend in Bloomington," Connie said.

Connie said that one of the "coolest things" happened when WFS did a 50th wedding anniversary recently.

"The people now live in Crown Point but they came here because we did their wedding flowers 50 years ago and since they got married at St. John they wanted to come back to the same flower shop," she said. "It's the little stories like that that I enjoy so much."

And then there's always the intrinsic good feeling of being in a service industry that brings delight to their customer.

"You do brighten up people's day when you deliver flowers to them," said one her delivery drivers. "Their faces just light up."

Whiting Flower has received the Top 500 Florist awarded by Ftd. which means that out of 28,000 shops, Connie’s is in the top 500.

“We also are the Premier 1-800-flowers Shop for Northwest Indiana, which says we can do it all and are given the most orders for the 12 towns we serve,” she explained. “Our flowers come from Chicago and direct flights from flower farms daily.”

She added that the business considered a high-tech shop receiving orders from phone, walk-ins, wire services, websites, internet, and fax.

And the business continues to “grow.”

“I still love it and now w have two extra designers which makes it a little easier.

And Connie is quick to point out that at a flower shop, everybody works as a team.

"Nobody has a better or lesser job here," she said. "You need a good person to answer the phone and take the order and then a good person to fill the order.

As one of Whiting’s oldest businesses, we hope that at Whiting Flower Shop, their business continues to bloom.