![]() According to the New York Times, there had been a miscommunication between Trump and the event planners. Siravo wouldn’t say who had called, or if he knew how Donald Trump’s campaign had even heard of the small landscaping business, or anything else, really, that might tell how this stretch of asphalt became the official site of the end of the presidency and the beginning of the ass-backward pseudo-legal effort to reverse the results of the election. If that was true, it didn’t explain how it came to be that the phone rang at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in the first place. The sign has become a prime backdrop for selfie-seekers. “We just kinda picked up the phone and said yes and cleared some stuff out and managed to make it happen.”Ī man locks the gate at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. We heard it might’ve been a mistake or something,” Mike Siravo said. The Siravos were nothing if not good marketers, and by December, they’d sold more than $1 million of the merchandise they’d drawn up to capitalize on all the attention, like stickers that read “Make America Rake Again!” and “Lawn and Order!” She had been shrewd enough to release a statement amid the frenzy that said the landscapers were not partisans and then to mostly avoid speaking to the media as she rushed out the door, clutching a Louis Vuitton bag, to a white Jeep with a FOUR SEASONS license plate on the front bumper. But it had been nearly a week since Rudy Giuliani’s press conference in the parking lot out back, and the only evidence anyone could turn up to support the theory that what had occurred here wasn’t just a freak public-relations accident or hilarious fuckup were a few pro-Trump Facebook posts from Mike’s mother, Marie Siravo, who owns the business. “Everyone will get it.” (Including me, in the literal sense, since the Neuberger-Golds kindly added my address to their mailing list.)īy then, there were all sorts of rumors on State Road about the Siravo family’s connections with the Trump campaign and the Philadelphia Republican Party. ![]() “It’s become such a thing that we decided it would be a fun idea,” Gold said with a laugh. Lois Neuberger and Matthew Gold said they were in town from California, visiting their daughter at school, when it occurred to them they were just a short distance from the festive greeting–slash–political meme of a lifetime. Siravo leaned back into the street, making sure the angle captured the green-and-white awning with the company name.Ī couple of feet away, a family of four was staging a holiday card. There was an awkward silence, but then Siravo smiled and shrugged in the direction of the sidewalk, asking the curious bicyclist the obvious question: Was he looking for a photo? He leapt down the steps to take the man’s phone and, with the enthusiasm of a mall photographer, instructed him how to pose. ![]() On the other side of the blinds, there were desks and filing cabinets illuminated by fluorescent light and people going about their day, which would have been a normal one were it not for the 20,000 T-shirt orders to process and the intrusion of tourists who saw the place as some kind of zoo exhibition. “I don’t know anything.”Ī man on a bicycle paused near the front office to stare at the building. “I’m just an employee,” one of them said. Workers walked in and out of the parking lot, sometimes shaking their heads but mostly keeping them down and not saying much to any of the outsiders for whom the landscaping company was now an unusual monument to the end of America, or the end of the thing that had symbolized the end of America, or something. All of them spent a few minutes taking in the sight and, more importantly, documenting their visit with selfies. Alone, they wore bemused expressions, eyes focused on their screens. ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED AT OWNERS’ EXPENSE. They all came for the same reason: to see for themselves the words FOUR SEASONS TOTAL LANDSCAPING. On the afternoon of November 13, Mike Siravo was standing outside his family’s landscaping business in Northeast Philadelphia, dressed in khakis and a company polo shirt, watching as strangers pulled up in nice cars, parked without care on the busy street, and approached the barbed-wire-topped fence with iPhones gripped in outstretched hands. ![]()
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