Anonymous NYC Love Letters Bloom

In a small gallery in SoHo, flickering candles, maroon walls, and soft lighting created a warm and intimate atmosphere on a freezing winter day. Thirty unique flower arrangements are mounted on individual pedestals, each featuring an anonymous love note for visitors to read.

For a second year, this “love-letter gallery” was hosted by the Popup Florist, on Saturday, Feb. 7. Over a week, the shop and project organizers had placed 13 mailboxes in local small businesses and invited New Yorkers to submit love letters.

Kelsey Hayes, the owner of Popup Florist, said the prompt was flexible and they'd only asked people to write a love note, but didn’t dictate who or what they were required to write about.

This year, Hayes said that Popup Florist received more than a thousand letters, which was more than three times as many as last year.  Hayes collected the week's worth of submissions and along with her colleagues, chose 30 to display in the gallery with accompanying bouquets.

"It's a really interesting and sort of emotional process to go through all of these beautiful words,” Hayes said. “A lot of them this year are also [about] heartbreak and anger —some of the notes have political topics in them."

There were letters were addressed to a past or current lover. One mother wrote to her son, and a daughter reached out to her mother. Someone even sent a note to a cat.

After choosing which letters to display, Hayes and her team created floral arrangements that matched the topic of each note.

"It's a really interesting process because you really have to translate the letters — see color, see flowers, and nod to the flowers that are appropriate,” Hayes explained. As a a non-traditional floral studio, she said, Popup Florist aims to introduce people to new types of flowers and compositions and "make it really exciting for people to see.”

Hayes said the project has multiple layers, bringing positivity, light, and love to New Yorkers during the cold and gloomy winter, as well as supporting local businesses by encouraging participants to submit letters while shopping locally.

She plans to keep doing this project in future years and hopes it will continue to give people a space where they can feel welcome and experience emotions evoked by the displays.

This story rand on the What's What Podcast on Monday, 2/9/26.