At age 18, Peekskill native Chappy Manzer set his goal in life to become a landscape architect.
Success as an All-County high school wrestling champion earned him a scholarship to Manhattan College, starting him on a winding trail of experiences that led to the creation Manzer’s Landscape Design and Development, Inc., in 2002.
Now, after more than 20 years building that business into one of Westchester County’s leading landscape design and maintenance companies, Manzer has purchased Whispering Pines Nursery and Garden Center on Route 6 — right at the Yorktown-Somers town line — combining the two operations into a full-service solution for residential and commercial customers. (The Whispering Pines property is located on a narrow strip of Somers land between Yorktown to the west and Mahopac to the east.)
All of Manzer’s Landscape operations have relocated from Lower South Street in Peekskill to Whispering Pines. Manzer’s will continue to serve its landscape customers and now has the opportunity to expand that business into the Yorktown-Katonah area, as well as Connecticut.
“The great thing about the Manzer’s and Whispering Pines combination is our ability to provide a full range of services to customers,” Manzer told the Peekskill Herald in an interview last week.
“A lot of people come to Whispering Pines to buy plants and shrubs and now we can plant the items for them, we can design a landscape and we can maintain the property. We were at a customer’s house recently after she came to shop here and asked us if we could come to her house. She sent me a text yesterday saying your guys were great – the property looks great – it hasn’t looked this great in years.”
Ambitious plans ahead for Manzer’s, Whispering Pines
Whispering Pines will now also become a place for commercial landscape contractors to purchase trees, shrubs, annuals, perennials and other plants they need for their customers.
“We’re letting contractors know they can come here to purchase product instead of having to drive other places,” Manzer said. “I just want to be able to attract the contractors to give them a good product and so they won’t have to travel a half-hour or 45 minutes away.”
Manzer isn’t growing those items yet, but he buys trees and shrubs from Oregon, south Jersey and Maryland, so he has products that he “re-wholesales” to other contractors.
On the retail side, he plans to turn the 11-acre Whispering Pines site he bought into a destination for gardening and nursery shoppers.
“We want to make coming here more like an experience. We have the flat packs of annuals and pachysandra but we’re not Lowe’s or Home Depot. We’re someone who is going to help you learn and teach you.”
A small pond on site has been expanded into a koi farm for anyone interested in having one. Free classes include a “Rose 101” course presented by well-known Peekskill gardener and “Mr. Rose” Mike Stewart. Future classes will include lessons in beginning pruning and the proper way to trim bonsai plants.
Whispering Pines will sell Christmas trees and pumpkins to help offset the slow seasons in the nursery business. “The biggest challenge with the garden center nursery is the seasonality of it,” Manzer said. “Usually April-May-June is very busy, then it slows down by August, picks up again in September-October-November then it’s dead for the winter.”
Down the road Manzer plans on making the 11 acres accessible to the public for activities including kids’ parties, hay rides, a visiting petting zoo and other attractions. He learned how to make outstanding French fries on a recent trip to Belgium and would like to a food truck with fries and churros. Maybe even add drive-in movies, which some garden centers had success with during covid.
Grabbing the opportunity to expand
Given his love of outdoors and the landscape industry, Manzer always wanted to own a tree farm or nursery. He’s been friends with Tommy Kuk, whose family is the decades-long owner of Whispering Pines, for more than 25 years.
“Tommy called me one day about Whispering Pines – I thought he was joking at first,” says Manzer. “We had lunch a couple of times and we talked things through. He gave me a great opportunity.”
Kuk still owns the other 11 acres of the property, where he will continue to operate Whispering Pine Landscape and Supply Yard, comprised of a stone yard and lawn mower sales and repair shop, above the nursery property. Kuk sells stone, Unilock, mulch, topsoil and other products to contractors.
Manzer’s academic career started at Manhattan College, and included a two-seek stint at Syracuse University’s School of Environmental Science and Forestry, and culminated with a bachelor’s degree in business and studio art from SUNY Oneonta.
He started on a business career path at the finance and trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald in the World Trade Center. He left in late 1999, after realizing he hated working inside. [The firm lost 650-plus employees when its offices were obliterated on Sept. 11, 2001. Longtime Cantor CEO Howard Lutnick now is U.S. Secretary of Commerce].
Manzer subsequently got his Series 7 and Series 63 brokerage licenses and worked at American Express and Dreyfus. He traded his own day accounts for a time before the economy crashed and he left that field forever.
Bartending and managing restaurants came next, until his former high school coaches convinced him to try that himself. Coaching at Walter Panas High School made him decide teaching would be a good idea, so he got his master’s in education from Brooklyn College and taught K-5 grade in the South Bronx and then in Haldane in Cold Spring. He also coached football at Hendrick Hudson High School and wrestling at Walter Panas.
At that point, his high school dreams to be a landscape architect finally won out. He started mowing lawns, first by himself, then bought a pickup truck and hired one worker. He was still teaching when the lawn mowing business expanded to five guys and three trucks, and ultimately to 25 guys and 14 trucks.
Today, Chappy Manzer’s deep roots in Peekskill remain. He has an ownership interest in 1060 Lower South Street, where Manzer’s was based; he’s looking for a new tenant for that space. He has an ownership interest in The Central coffee shop at the Peekskill Train Station and he will remain active in the Peekskill Rotary, the Hudson Valley Gateway Chamber of Commerce, the Peekskill Youth Bureau, the Hope for Youth Foundation and numerous other civic and community groups.
But he won’t be missing the gritty industrial site near the railroad tracks on Lower South Street where he ran his business for two decades.
“Here at Whispering Pines, it’s like heaven. We put that pond there and I could sit all day just watching the koi fish swimming around.”
