The corner of Rush Street and Bellevue Place is a busy corner, as busy as any in the city, especially on nights when the weather cooperates. The restaurants on the corner and close by — Gibsons and Hugo’s Frog Bar, Tavern on Rush, the Bellevue, Luxbar, with Carmine’s soon to join rejoin the action, and Whispers Coffee and Tea (and ice cream, I’ll gladly add) in the triangular Mariano Park — fill with people thirsty and hungry, and others looking for a good time and maybe even love.
There are reasons that Rush Street has long been called the “Street of Dreams.”
Sunny summer days can be frantic too, since the restaurants fill their ample outdoor seating areas and there are packs of couples and families and others waiting, easily entertained by people watching.
One of the people to be seen last Friday afternoon was a buoyant blond woman named Amy Lechelt.
She is a sort of modern-day Eliza Doolittle, the flower girl of “My Fair Lady.” She is in the same business and has had, so far, a full, interesting and rewarding life.
She is part of the city’s floating outdoor economy, which includes, most obviously, food trucks, but is nowhere near the vibrancy and variety in such places as Paris or New York.
Standing on the corner Friday, Lechelt was saying, “I don’t think of what I’m doing as a sales job. I think of it as a series of human interactions where the flowers are the medium. Every bouquet tells a story. What I am doing is bringing joy on wheels.”
Frankly, most people notice her car before they see her.
That’s understandable, since the car — a 2003 Mercedes-Benz convertible painted a dazzling pink — is certainly eye-catching, its back seat filled with all types of flowers.
It is also iPhone-catching.
“If I had a dollar for everyone who stops and takes photos of the flowers or selfies with the car, I’d be a millionaire,” she says.
Customer Julie Mackey, left, listens to flower-care instructions from Boho Bouquet Bar owner Amy Lechelt on July 18, 2025, on North Rush Street in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. Mackey picked out her own bouquet and Lechelt helped her organize and package it. (Dominic Di Palermo/Chicago Tribune)
But she happily allows people to pose with the car and the flowers. Some will talk to her, ask questions. Some will buy flowers.
She buys them from a local wholesaler and sells them by “the stem,” roses, hydrangeas, daisies and on and on. She will work in collaboration with customers, opening the car’s truck for ribbons and paper.
“Sorry, you just missed a wonderful sale,” she says. “A man eating at Gibsons with two women sent over a note asking me to put together two bouquets for the ladies, who I think might have been a mother and daughter. Isn’t that sweet?”
Two women and a tiny dog stop and talk and buy a bouquet. Lechelt gave the little dog a treat that she fetched from a plastic bag on the floor near the front passenger seat. “I love dogs,” she says and she might share stories about Vino, the dog that was her companion and pal for nearly 20 years.
She might also tell you that she was born and raised in Arlington Heights, did a bit of acting with such companies as The Second City and Children’s Theatre; produced fashion shows, did some styling for clients; sang with some of the local cabaret talents. She still does a bit of singing and Beckie Menzie, that leading light on the local cabaret scene, says, “Amy brings a creative joy to the flower business, which is the same contagious energy she brings to her singing. She is just fun and always full of ideas.”
And, oh yes, she was married and lived what she calls “the corporate wife lifestyle,” seven years of which entailed living in Nice, on the French Riviera, a very nice place.
Amy Lechelt’s pink Mercedes Benz sits on North Rush Street in the Gold Coast neighborhood as she prepares her flowers for sale from the car on July 18, 2025. (Dominic Di Palermo/Chicago Tribune)
Her marriage, which produced two now-adult male children and three grandchildren, shattered. She divorced in 2019, at which time she and Vino moved to Mexico to sit out some of the COVID-19 years.
Back in Chicago late in 2023, she dealt with Vino’s death, earned certification as a life coach and began speaking on the issue of domestic violence. “But I needed to work more than that,” she says. “And I kept seeing all these social media posts, filled with flowers, with people on bicycles selling flowers. … Vino and I had so many wonderful times with the gardens we had in Nice and elsewhere that I thought to myself that this was a message that maybe I should be doing something with flowers.”
So, in September of last year, after much research, she obtained the appropriate licenses and went into business, naming it Boho Bouquet Bar. She began in a pink van but she soon traded it — too hard to park — for her current car. “It’s been a real learning experience,” she says. “But I embrace it.”
She does not have a website but rather communicates via Instagram, where you will discover her weekly schedule. In addition to Rush and Bellevue on Friday, she can be found at such spots as Erie and Kingsbury Streets, Old Town and Lakeshore East.
Those who run the restaurants, valet parking operations and other businesses in the areas where she parks and sells have been accommodating, some even welcoming. She buys flowers four or five mornings a week from a local wholesaler and arranges them artfully in her car, filling the entire backseat.
On a good day, she can make a few hundred dollars. She is, of course, at the mercy of the weather, but business has been good, expanding beyond sidewalk sales into making deliveries across the area and doing on-site indoor jobs.
“I now do almost 50% of my business indoors, and that will get me through the winters. And I keep seeing old friends from my previous life,” she says. “That reconnecting has been a real gift.”
She is an ebullient woman, quick with a smile and a laugh. She lives in a building that offers a view of the lake and the river. She is writing a memoir, but her schedule does not lend itself to having another dog.
“Maybe one day,” she says.
And wouldn’t that be loverly?
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/07/22/pink-mercedes-flower-shop/