This Online Guide entry is based on a lengthier article published by PPS in 2024, which went into detail about the California Artificial Flower Company’s establishment and later downfall. You can read that article here.
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 California Artificial Flower Company founder Michele 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.
The building served the California Artificial Flower Company as both daylight factory and product showroom. The vast majority of employees were young girls from working class and immigrant families, especially early on in the company’s history. These girls helped make the flowers and worked the sales floor. One Providence Journal writer provided a particularly vivid description of the building’s interior back in the 1970s:
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. (Carol McCabe for The Providence Journal, June 6, 1976)
The company was known not only for their superior products, but their flamboyant Christmas displays on the factory’s grounds at 400 Reservoir Avenue every year.
D’Agnillo was an Italian immigrant who reportedly came to the United States with one dollar in his pocket. He used that dollar to buy the supplies to make paper flowers, and to start an empire. During the company’s heyday in the 1930s and ’40s, it was one of the most successful artificial flower manufacturers in the country — if not the most successful. During World War II, when paper flowers were deemed luxury products by the U.S. government, Calart briefly switched to manufacturing parachutes for the military.
Michele D’Agnillo died in 1969. His son took over the family business, and then his nephew, but without its original founder at the wheel, Calart wasn’t able to survive. The company was placed into receivership in the early 1980s.
