Super Bowl Fever Hits Midtown, but Many There Aren't Catching It Cliff Jacobs, of Peters Flowers and Gifts on Broadway, says Super Bowl Boulevard has disrupted the shop's business. The orchids are dying, and Cliff Jacobs blames the Super Bowl. No, the kickoff is not until Sunday. What is killing the orchids, he said, is Super Bowl Boulevard, the urban theme park celebrating the big game that was constructed on 14 blocks of Broadway that were closed to traffic on Monday. Whenever the door opens in the flower shop he runs, at 1407 Broadway, at West 38th Street, cold air blasts in. This week, the door has been opened not by people who want bouquets, but by people who want warmth after standing a little too long on Super Bowl Boulevard. On the wide new stages that have gone up on Super Bowl Boulevard - and in the tents and on the toboggan run, tall but temporary - the theme is fun: the fun of the Super Bowl, the first ever played in the New York area; the fun of big-name celebrities; the fun of crowds. But in shops like the one Mr. Jacobs works in, and in the back seats of taxis inching along side streets - and in the front seats, after impatient passengers start yelling at the drivers - the theme is misery. "It's a disaster," Mr. Jacobs said on Wednesday. That is a refrain in Midtown Manhattan among the New Yorkers who were there last week and will be there next week, and see this as a disruption for the record books. Office workers complain that the crowds on Super Bowl Boulevard clog the sidewalks, slowing the dash to the subway at the end of a long day. Students grumble that they have to allow additional time to get to class to avoid being marked as tardy. Some store clerks say they are seeing fewer customers and ringing up smaller tabs than in a normal week. "Where are the people?" asked Pat Hughes, the owner of Lansdowne Road, on 10th Avenue. We are a sports bar, and the Super Bowl has brought no additional business. The conventional wisdom used to be that the weeks between Thanksgiving Day and New Year's Day, when crowds poured into the city for a glimpse of the tree at Rockefeller Center, brought the worst traffic of the year, or at least the most gridlock-alert days. But the Super Bowl celebration has many New Yorkers sounding crankier than usual as they cope with blocked-off streets and unexpected detours. "You'd think the city would have a better plan than just putting a Super Bowl party in the middle of town," said Wilson Montoya, a delivery-truck driver, moments after shaking his fist and shouting at a traffic enforcement agent on Ninth Avenue. He said slow traffic had tacked three hours onto his workdays on Tuesday and Wednesday. Some drivers said the tie-ups outdid traffic jams during the United Nations General Assembly sessions, when even diplomacy seems to move faster. "Twenty-five years driving in Manhattan, and this is the worst," said Jose Rodriguez, who delivers orders to restaurants for O. Ottomanelli & Sons Prime Meat Market in Greenwich Village, as his truck idled on West 40th Street. He was not the only one who was going nowhere fast. Juan Rodas, stuck on Ninth Avenue, said it had taken an hour to go from 57th Street to 42nd Street. Super Bowl Boulevard itself struck some New Yorkers as jarring in a city that pretty much invented all things urban. "It looks like a county fair that got vomited on by a lot of advertising," said Shane Furey, who works for an e-commerce website, as he looked up at Super Bowl banners and backdrops with sponsor logos. He was no fan of the toboggan run, either. "To me, it's an eyesore," Mr. Furey said. They spent a lot of money, and I don't see the point. For his part, Mayor Bill de Blasio - who attended the official opening of Super Bowl Boulevard on Wednesday evening - said on Thursday that he would not attend the game itself. "I've enjoyed participating in all the festivities leading up to Super Bowl Sunday," he said, "but I've decided to watch the game on TV, just like the vast majority of New Yorkers. Dante and I are still talking about where we should watch. He promised to "let people know when we pick a spot." Mr. Jacobs, in the flower shop, said he would watch the game at home. But Sunday is still days away. He is preoccupied with problems like tighter traffic regulations in Midtown this week, which he said had played havoc with his delivery people. "We're using the subway," Mr. Jacobs said. We have to get the flowers out of the cold quick. We can't run over to Eighth or Ninth Avenue" - a long block or two from the shop and as close as the delivery van can get. His deliverers tried coordinating pickups. The idea was to push a hand cart loaded with flowers to a corner and meet the delivery van. But the van got there first, and the police made the driver, Manny Rodriguez, move on before the cart arrived. Since then, Mr. Rodriguez has made the rounds on foot. He said he had caught a bad cold. "This would have been a good week to take a vacation," Mr. Jacobs said, "and, in fact, the owner went to Florida. So the only blessing is, he's not here. An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of the flower shop manager. He is Cliff Jacobs, not Davis.