Michele D’Agnillo’s first job in the United States as a teenage janitor in a Colorado copper-smelt factory was a far cry from the empire he would build about a decade later: artificial flower manufacturing. As the story goes, the Italian immigrant started out in Providence with a dollar in his pocket, which he used to buy the paper for the first flowers he ever sold on the streets of Federal Hill. In less than 10 years, his business, California Artificial Flower Company (Calart for short), grew to be one of the largest, if not the largest, artificial flower manufacturers in the country, employing thousands of workers who often came from similarly humble backgrounds.
When D’Agnillo built the Calart Tower at 400 Reservoir Avenue in 1939 in the Reservoir neighborhood, the company was reaching its peak of success. Hundreds of young girls showed up to the Art Moderne building right on the Cranston line each day to sit at their stations folding silk and paper petals, each blossom to be stamped with the tiny blue-and-silver Calart insignia. D’Agnillo’s want-ads for workers targeted young girls because he didn’t have to pay them as much, according to Albertina Carlotti — an employee who was featured in the “Accent” section of The Providence Sunday Journal in 1976 after working at Calart for half a century. Carlotti dropped out of school at 13 at the behest of D’Agnillo, who liked her speed and style when it came to crafting paper flowers.
“He loved beautiful things, including beautiful girls,” Carlotti told her interviewer back in 1976. “He liked redheads the best. He was known for having the prettiest girls working for him and when anybody wanted a model for hands, legs, anything, they came to Calart.”
The Industrial Trust building downtown is Providence’s best known example of Art Deco architecture, and the Calart Tower may be our best large-scale example of Art Moderne — a 1930s style that followed Art Deco but was much more spare. The Calart Tower is a classic example of this type with its two long horizontal wings and unembellished industrial windows, the only ornament being the stylized letters that call out the company’s name on top of the tower and at its entrance. Calart was designed by D’Agnillo and Albert Harkness, the architect of record of Providence’s first reinforced concrete frame office building downtown, the Summerfield Building on Weybosset Street (1913), many of the city’s public schools and libraries, and early modern homes on the East Side, including 25 Cooke Street.
In addition to manufacturing, one floor of the Calart Tower served as a showroom for their product. Carol McCabe, the journalist who profiled Carlotti, provided a particularly vivid description of the sales floor:
In the salesroom at the plant entrance, people were shopping for flower arrangement[s] and gift items of the style that has made Liberace famous: gold-plated chandeliers dripping crystal, rococo marble and gold vases, musical figures, and flowers arranged around madonnas, Oriental females, cute animals, and shepherdesses. (June 6, 1976)
Though their product was artificial, D’Agnillo surrounded the daylight factory with lush gardens of real plants from which to take inspiration. The grounds were transformed into an exotic rainforest right on Reservoir Avenue, complete with a triangular duck pond and a small bubbling brook.
During the holiday season, Calart’s Christmas displays attracted visitors from Rhode Island and beyond. Countless postcards of the building from the company’s heyday show snow-covered pine trees, glowing reindeer, and elaborate nativity scenes decorated with rich green and red garlands of holly and whole clusters of poinsettias out on the lawn of the factory. Unfortunately, the displays often attracted mischief and tragedy: A few days after Christmas in 1959, mannequins were decapitated and stripped naked by vandals. After Thanksgiving in 1949, nearly $4,000 — the equivalent of more than $50,000 today — was stolen from the sales floor by “whiskey-drinking burglars.” And in 1965, a 14-year-old boy died on the property when he got caught in the gears of a carousel the company had rented out for Christmas. When journalists asked if Calart planned on closing down the display for the season after the boy’s death, D’Agnillo told them, “We’ll run if the law allows us to run.”
Paper flowers were deemed “luxury” products in the ‘40s as a result of World War II, and Calart was forced to cease production. The employee population sank from roughly 850 to a mere 250, and those “girl workers” remaining refocused their manufacturing efforts on supplies for the military, specifically parachutes. Decades later during the Vietnam War, D’Agnillo supplied an artificial flower arrangement to Catholic chaplain Paul F. Toland in support of the military as anti-war protests in the U.S. began building momentum. The chaplain thanked Calart for their support in a letter that read in part, “It is hard to understand how any American could be sympathetic to the Viet Cong cause. The ignorance these protesters display regarding the situation here is frightening.”
But during regular operations, D’Agnillo lived his personal life lavishly. In 1927 — before the Calart Tower was built — D’Agnillo styled his extravagant home at 162 Beaufort Street in Mount Pleasant after his childhood villa in Italy. The sandstone brick of the walls contrasts starkly with the Beaux Arts-style home’s loud turquoise trim. Years later, he worked with Albert Harkness to build a new mid-century modern home in Warwick that was perfect for throwing parties. The house was constructed on D’Agnillo Street, which, of course, is named after him.
D’Agnillo was known to be gregarious and generous with his wealth. According to Albertina Carlotti, “people never knew how much charity he did.” She said in her profile that during the Depression, D’Agnillo lent money to girls who lost their homes or were on the verge. Calart employees also received generous holiday bonuses annually.
D’Agnillo never retired from the artificial flower business — he remained president of Calart for the rest of his life. In 1965, he wrote one installment of an advice column in the Providence Sunday Journal:
As problems mounted in my new business, I found it necessary to get away from everything and decided to go to Coney Island for a day just to forget business problems and to enjoy a day of unusual occurrences. With this in mind, I entered the booth of a fortune teller, although I had no intention of taking seriously anything he would tell me. The man in the booth said, ‘Let me give you some advice. If you should become wealthy, beware of schemes; and on the other hand, if you should suffer financial reverse, don’t tell anyone, or you’ll suffer loss of prestige. If you should have business difficulties, don’t confide in others, because you alone must bear responsibility for your decision.’ This was a strange place for a person to receive what later appeared to be a very valuable bit of advice. (May 23, 1965).
Just two years after writing this column, D’Agnillo passed away after a long illness. His son Michael took over the family business, though Calart was already on the decline. Calart fell into receivership in the early 1980s, and was acquired by Michele D’Agnillo’s nephew, Edward Sammartino, and a business partner shortly after. In the mid-1980s, the partners planned an extensive interior renovation process to accommodate suites for additional businesses — during the regular season, the number of Calart employees fell to a mere 50, rising to roughly 100 only during the busy holiday season. Manufacturing of the plants had also already been moved off-site.
Exterior changes were planned for the tower as well — the parking lot was to expand, and Sammartino and his business partner told The Providence Journal they planned to add a roughly 5,000-square-foot tiered greenhouse over the entrance to house Calart retail and a potential restaurant. The addition would require the removal of the book-shaped concrete pedestals outside the main entrance. Though the parking lot grew, the other changes never came to fruition. The concrete signs out front now announce that spaces in the building are for lease — and the entire building is for sale.
With the artificial flower company now defunct, the building is no longer in the D’Agnillo-Sammartino family; the main owner is currently New York-based developer Bruce Adler under the name Calart Associates, LLC. Some of the businesses inside the building own condos, while some rent.
Though the Calart Tower appears to be in good shape, Adler has been accused of neglecting other historic properties in Buffalo, NY, where the chimney of one of his buildings collapsed and triggered a subsequent emergency demolition. As part of Providence’s scattered site Industrial and Commercial Landmark Historic District, the Calart Tower should be protected from a similar fate. PPS will continue to monitor any developments in the ownership of this South Side Art Moderne gem.
By Keating Zelenke / Mary A. Gowdey Special Projects Fellow / kzelenke@ppsri.org