To enjoy life, the wise ones tell us, we must stop and smell the roses.

That's hard when the roses keep getting yanked away.

So many of New York's little surprises and delights a bookstore here, a button shop there, even an old-fashioned, overcrowded, overbearing bra bazaar - are
going the way of all real estate: They are be
ing razed or refurbished to make way for what else? -luxury apartments.
New York is becoming a bedroom commu
nity.

Now comes word that the Flower District around 28th St. and Sixth Ave. may be the next New York rose to get uprooted.

"It's getting harder and harder to work in this part ofthe city," says Victor Rallis, owner of George Rallis wholesale flowers, the company his family started in the 1940s. "Slowly but surely we're being forced out."

The reasons are as old as money but date in particular to 1995. That's when the area was rezoned to allow for residential development.

What followed, sure as yuppies follow marble lobbies, was an explosion of apartment construction that has yet to abate. And with the apartment buildings came apartment dwellers who wanted to park and to sleep - two activities antithetical to the needs of the floral wholesalers.

At 4:30 in the morning, when I visited the market the other day, the place was alive with beauty - snap dragons, larkspur, tulips fresh from Holland - and noise. Trucks were finishing up deliveries. A radio blared from the storefront where workers were slashing open boxes of buds.

It was not what I would want going on under my window were I attempting to sleep.

The market, for its part, is not thrilled with the idea of tiptoeing. For more than 100 years, W. 28th St. has been its domain, and its working hours run roughly from 10 p.m. till 10 a.m. Parking has become impossible. And traffic?

"When we have to do a late run at 9 a.m., I have to circle the block five or six times," says Alan futterman, a flower truck driver. "It's a nightmare."

like several of the others in the biz I spoke with, Futterman thinks it might not be so bad if the market moved, en masse, to another location. Maybe to 12th Ave. Maybe someplace else. "It would make things easier for me."

It would make -things cleaner and quieter on Sixth Ave., too. But would it make things better for us plain old I ♥ New Yorkers?

It is a thrill to smell lilies in the middle of Manhattan. It is fun to duck under a canopy of ficus. It is even somewhat educational to pass a window where there's a palm tree growing out of a coconut (so that's how it works!).

But marble lobbies are not thrilling. And a whole city of marble lobbies is a forest where no wild roses bloom.