Greenhouse has gone from chrysanthemums to cement

In Edgecliff, on East Sixth Avenue, where the homes are little too small, the grass a little too high and the dogs more than a little mean, there sits a house of glass 50 yards long with a chimney 30 feet tall.

You can look right through it to the homes across the street. No one lives in this glass house anymore, this greenhouse. Like a thin ghost, it barely casts a shadow. But it has a soul, a story anyway, one few people know better than Claude Montecucco.

“Yes, I know the house,” said Montecucco last Wednesday. He spoke cautiously into his office telephone. It had been years since he had visited Sixth Avenue. He wanted to make sure he was talking about the right glass house. “Our family, we lived right there for a little while,” he said, referring to a small home attached to the greenhouse.

“We were immigrants. Dad and mom, my brother and I came from Italy in 1954. None of us knew a word of English then, literally,” explained Montecucco. “My dad took a job at Jacobson’s Greenhouse on Moran Prairie. He worked there for three years, then bought his own greenhouse,” the one on Sixth Avenue.

The story of the glass house, it seems, splays like arborvitae, touching two immigrant families, the Montecuccos, Frank and Ida, their sons Claude and Max, and also the family of Louis Halle, the man who sold it to them. It’s part of the legend of a once viable, but forgotten, cut-flower empire of the Inland Northwest.

The greenhouse was built by Halle in 1927. He, like the Montecuccos, was a European immigrant trying to make his way in America. He could not have guessed the building would one day be swallowed by suburbia.

The landscape reflected on the panes of Halle’s house of glass was lonesome and pastoral when he built it. On the south side, a single phone pole marked the intersection of Eighth and Custer. Ponderosa pines rose in a thick mane along the back of Carnahan Hill. Facing north, Halle’s construction picked up the dry golden hue of grasses native to the Spokane Valley floor.

The sea-like roar of the Interstate’s endless tide was nonexistent and would be until the late 1950s. The ticky-tacky houses of the post-World War II construction boom weren’t even on the horizon. The florist, and the rest of the country, was just nine years removed from the War to End All Wars.

Inside the greenhouse, the view was white, crimson, pink and yellow, the colors of Halle’s life work. He had picked up the flower trade at age 14 in his home city of Copenhagen, Denmark. His uncle owned a greenhouse, at which Halle worked three years before landing a five-year apprenticeship.

Halle boarded a steamer bound for the United States in 1907. In a 1955 interview with The Spokesman-Review, he said it took 20 years of working in the greenhouses of Spokane to raise the capital to build his own. He had 16,000 carnations, 6,000 snapdragons and 12,000 chrysanthemums at the time of the interview.

The Montecuccos took over the building in 1959. The new immigrant owners grew chrysanthemums, or more specifically pompoms, Claude Montecucco said. The smaller, snowball-esque flowers gave the couple a better chance at a profit.

“A chrysanthemum plant can either grow one big flower or else you can have them branch out and grow several flowers,” Claude Montecucco said. “The smaller ones are pompoms.”

Flowers were good business, not only for the Montecuccos but for a couple dozen other greenhouses in the area. In 1965 the Spokane Flower Growers Association, of which the Montecuccos were members, was shipping 3.5 million blooms a year. The growers shipped flowers to 300 retail shops from a two-story brick warehouse on Havermale Island. Spokane flowers filled vases in six Western states and two Canadian provinces.

The group had 350,000 square feet under glass.

But competition was heating up, and in 20 years, the local industry had withered. First, plastic flowers came into fashion, then came the four words in newspaper obituaries that made growers grimace – “in lieu of flowers. …” Suddenly, florists were losing business to charities.

The killer though, said Karen Montecucco, was cut flowers from South America. Karen Montecucco is Claude’s sister in-law. She and Max Montecucco took over the family business in 1977.

She and Max were operating Rosedale Greenhouses Inc. on East 29th Avenue. They specialized in cut roses.

Max and Karen not only installed more efficient glass at the family greenhouse on East Sixth; they also added sodium vapor grow lights to boost winter production. They sold their flowers through Jones Wholesale Florists, a company run by Karen.

Illness forced Max and Karen to sell everything and retire about four years ago.

Some of the business became Roses and More, and some became part of Liberty Park Florist and Greenhouses. Profits had so eroded in the cut flower industry, with South American sales booming and utility costs rising, that the Sixth Avenue greenhouse no longer grows flowers.

“We could not sell it as a greenhouse,” Karen Montecucco said. “We sold it to cement contractors. They use it for storage.”