Hall Of Flowers Nyc 2026 Picks Up An Accent

Pier 36 was buzzing on Oct. 21 and 22 as Hall of Flowers returned to Manhattan’s Lower East Side for its second New York show. On a sunny, 60-degree opening day, more than 200 exhibitors packed the show floor, and buyers from 500 licensed stores had signed on to attend, according to Hall of Flowers. Outside, food trucks lined the pier and a smoking lounge sat right on the water. The energy ran high but focused.  and returning faces from across the country traded handshakes and worked deals in every aisle while cannabis culture network The Plugg TV filmed interviews.

Inside, the show wore New York on its sleeve. Queens-born artist Craig Costello, better known as KRINK, designed its visual identity, and his dripping blue “NY” splashed across a wall on the show floor. The crowd looked the part, too.

“The fashion you see here is very New York,” said Spencer Hemingway, senior business development rep at True Terpenes, a terpene supplier founded in Oregon in 2016. “You kind of feel like you’re walking in the city.”

Hall of Flowers launched in California in 2018 and made its New York debut at this same pier last October. If year one was about California arriving in New York, year two felt like the city setting the tone. When Cannabis Now asked exhibitors and buyers what makes the cannabis scene here feel like New York, their answers kept circling back to three things: hustle, homegrown pride and customers who know their stuff. And many of the people describing New York’s accent came from somewhere else.

Fast Talk, Real Business

Mark Zatta, senior brand manager at Zig-Zag, is from just across the river in New Jersey, and he noticed the difference right away. “It comes down to the people,” he said. “These are my people, even just down to the way that people talk. It’s a lot different here than it is in other places of the country.”

That directness carries into business. “New Yorkers can be blunt, but it’s just because we’re all trying to get what we need to get done and get home,” Zatta said. On the show floor, he added, that made it easy to get down to brass tacks with buyers.

Hemingway sees that same pace shaping the market itself. “Everywhere you go, you feel that hustle and bustle,” he said, “and I feel like that translates to the market.”

Robert Everdeen is co-founder and chief creative officer of turn, a brand that keeps its name lowercase to signal “consumer first, turn second.” For Everdeen, New York’s energy never really clocks out. “The streets in New York are quite literally buzzing, like 24 hours a day,” he said, “and that carries into the people and how they show up here at Hall of Flowers, or at the dispensaries.”

Grown Close to Home

If hustle is how New York moves, local is what it buys. Alex Davis, general manager of Exotic World, a Binghamton dispensary opening Nov. 1, is building his shelves around upstate brands and steering away from big multistate operators. “We’re from the upstate New York area,” he said. “I like to go for those brands because it’s local.”

Nico, an event coordinator at Muha Meds who goes by his first name only, has noticed the same thing, even though his brand started in Los Angeles. “When you go upstate, they don’t necessarily like the brands out of Manhattan. They don’t like the brands that are from out of state,” he said. “They like the stuff that’s homegrown.”

Hemingway, who spent the day before the show visiting clients upstate, hears it too. “New Yorkers also want to smoke local,” he said, “something that has a little bit of story and culture to it.”

Few brands on the floor had a deeper local story than Skyrose Farm. Jenny Hindes, its farmer and founder, said Skyrose was among the first growers to earn a New York license in 2022, after about five years of hemp production on its Hudson Valley land. Skyrose grows regeneratively in full sun and packages its flower in glass. This was its first Hall of Flowers.

No Fronting

The third trait came up again and again: New York cannabis consumers know what they’re talking about. Noah Millard, an account executive who runs New York and New Mexico sales for the California-based vape brand Ghost, compared the scene to the West Coast’s early days. “It almost feels like old California vibes,” Millard said. “A lot of heady people, a lot of people that know a lot about weed. And there’s not a lot of fronting going on.”

Nico drew a similar line between the two coasts. “In California, everyone just kind of smokes, but in New York,” he said, “people care about every step of the process.”

For Hindes, that knowledge runs deep in the city. “It’s an ingrained culture of cannabis,” she said. “I mean, you smell it when you open your door and walk out.” The people working in the industry here, she added, bring “a kind of professional, but yet street vibe to the game.”

Off the Pier

This year, Hall of Flowers spilled into the city for the first time, with exhibitors and retailers hosting mixers, comedy shows and parties across Manhattan and Brooklyn under the banner of Hall of Flowers Week. To Everdeen, that’s how New York does business. “There’s just a lot of hustle,” he said, “and it doesn’t really stop at the shows or the after-parties.”

On Wednesday night, Cannabis Now and Zig-Zag hosted an after-party with Terphouse and Lost THC at Torches, a dispensary housed in the former townhouse of storied New York tobacconist Nat Sherman, a block from Grand Central. As the Chrysler Building glowed at sunset down the street, guests headed downstairs to the dispensary’s basement lounge for custom mocktails from The Higher Craft, including one named The Hall of Flowers and another called Torch Me Blue, then left with grab bags of Zig-Zag rolling trays and accessories.

The next afternoon, Gotham, which runs dispensaries in the Bowery, Chelsea, Williamsburg and Hudson, hosted its own industry gathering, The Highrise, with Cultivated Media at The Greene Space at WNYC. Gotham founder and CEO Joanne Wilson told Cannabis Now that her stores, which sell streetwear, candles and lotions alongside cannabis, work because of where they are.

“We are the epicenter of culture and art and food and banking and fashion,” she said. “You can actually just come in and dress yourself and not buy any cannabis. It’s just a cool store, so I think that’s what makes it very New York.”

Wilson was also candid that New York’s legal market still has growing up to do. “It’s the capital of the world, and I think we all thought because of that it would be rolled out easier and better, and it hasn’t,” she said, estimating it will take two to five years to right the ship.

Back on 42nd Street, a sign outside Torches had already summed up the week: “No translation needed. Cannabis.” Hall of Flowers may have been born in California, but in New York, it’s learning to speak like a local.

Hall of Flowers heads to Sacramento next, Nov. 4 and 5.

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