The bloom is off the rose at Pepo

Darleene Barrientos

Bare, sagging refrigerator shelves and traces of glitter on the

naked, pale-green walls of Pepo Florist mark the absence of heavy

buckets of water and flowers and decorations that filled the store

for many decades.

After nearly 70 years of adorning Burbank’s churches, hospitals

and parties with fresh flowers, Charlie “Chuck” Cohen will close the

flower shop that has seen Burbank mature from a dirt-road town into

the media hub that it is today.

“I’m gonna miss this old homestead. I watched Burbank grow,” said

Cohen, who plans to close his doors Thursday. “It’s been a lot of

years.”

Cohen, 72, inherited the shop from his father, Joseph “Pepo”

Cohen, who began the business in 1935 by selling flowers out of

buckets where the dirt roads of Magnolia and Victory boulevards met.

After two cars crashed through the buckets in 1938, the city of

Burbank insisted Cohen build a store. Pepo Florist became the second

flower shop in Burbank after construction was finished in 1945 on the

building at 335 N. Victory Blvd.

Pepo Cohen passed away in 1992, but Chuck Cohen has been at the

helm of the shop since the 1940s or ‘50s, he said. In his years of

business, Cohen has seen Burbank’s roads become asphalt, watched the

goings-on at Lockheed Martin from his storefront, and decorated the

parties at Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Studios.

“Do you recognize this creep?” Cohen jokingly asked Shelly

Leibovitz, his son’s fiancee, holding up an autographed picture of

Burt Reynolds. “He would hang out in the shop while he was filming on

Victory.”

Pepo Florist once knew brisk business. Chuck Cohen’s son, John,

said that in its heyday, the shop was so busy that three crews were

working at once some days.

“In the ‘70s, we used to have a line of people down the block on

holidays,” John Cohen said. “They didn’t care if they had to wait, as

long as they got what they wanted.”

But with the explosion of flower shops in the city and in

neighboring areas, floral departments at most grocery stores and

floral sellers popping up on city streets, business dwindled until

Chuck Cohen decided to shut down completely.

Much of Cohen’s equipment and stock has been cleared or sold, with

some remaining items waiting to be donated. His house accounts,

however, will follow him to the grave, he said, and he will not make

a last stand for Valentine’s Day business.

“I’m just a little burned out,” Cohen said. “I figure I’ll let the

other guys pick up a few bucks. My customers will run here and ask,

‘What happened?’ They’ll have to go around [to other shops].”

It was time to retire, Cohen said, especially after losing his

wife, mother and uncle over the span of a few weeks last year.

“I should have quit years ago,” he said. “I’ve more or less had my

fill.”