This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kristi Hemric. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I had always dreamed of buying a townhouse in Manhattan, and when I did, I knew I had to decorate my stoop. I’m from Dallas, and everyone decorates the front of their houses for every single holiday.
But soon after moving in, the building next door had work being done, and scaffolding had gone up and crossed onto my property line, covering my skinny townhouse.
Instead of complaining about it, I decided to make it as pretty as I could — less ugly — with pink flowers. I thought my neighbors wouldn’t like it, but they loved an injection of color through the sunless months of January, February, and March.
This was the start of my stoop creations. Three years later, I’m still decorating my stoop, and the themes have attracted a lot of attention — both organically, with people passing by, and through social media.
I decide last-minute what to do next
As a creative, my theme turnover isn’t well organized. After the pink flowers, I decided lemons would make a great summer theme. When the Knicks started winning, we decorated with basketballs, and as the World Cup started, we strung up country flags and soccer balls.
The decision about what to do next and when to do it is often made at the last minute, but I like it this way. It means that it doesn’t feel like work — that it is purely creative fun. It’s easy to get stuck in our day-to-day jobs, and learning something new — for me, working with flowers — is a way to switch off for a bit.
My husband (the organized one) and I (the creative one) work as a team, and my four kids, ages 6 and under, like to help too.
We have storage units in the Bronx where we store used items so we can recycle decorations for future themes. We don’t buy anything that we can only use once. If we can’t buy it, we make it ourselves.
In the past three years, we’ve given away decorations too — to the restaurants down the street and the hair studio nearby.
Someone proposed on our stoop
One Mother’s Day, we had used real flowers — something we don’t typically do because they don’t weather well — and when it was time to take them down, we gave them away to children to give to their moms. They’d tell me the color their mom loved most, and we’d find a flower of that color.
One of my favorite stoops was our first Lego theme — we built every single Lego botanical flower. A guy who had planned a date around Lego asked if he could propose to his fiancé on our stoop. They ended up inviting us to dinner and to their wedding.
For a later Lego-themed stoop, a local boys’ school sent some of their 8th graders to help build the sets. The parents messaged us to say how amazing it was that the boys were away from screens.
When we decorated with a Knicks theme, the whole city was enamored, and people kept passing by our house in jerseys to take pictures. That was a magical month.
Who would have thought that my stoop — initially just to beautify scaffolding — would have brought community cohesion and joy?
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