Sympathy flowers in Allentown

Allentown is a cathedral city, which is not obvious from Hamilton Street but shapes an enormous share of the funeral work here: the Cathedral of St. Catharine of Siena stands on West Turner Street as the seat of the Diocese of Allentown, whose parishes run across Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, Schuylkill and Carbon counties. That is why a first sympathy order in this market so often turns out to be Catholic Mass work — an easel piece for the church, a spray the immediate family arranges for the casket, and a vase arrangement or plant that goes to the house afterward. Before any of it, do one unglamorous thing: read the obituary twice and copy the chapel or parish name and its street address onto the order exactly as printed. In the Lehigh Valley the viewing is frequently at a funeral home on one evening and the Mass at a parish the next morning, chapels change ownership and names more often than families expect, and there are Allentown and Bethlehem churches with nearly the same dedication a few miles apart. Flowers delivered to the right name at the wrong building on the right morning is the one mistake in this category that cannot be fixed by the afternoon.

Chapel and cemetery geography here runs along two corridors and then out into the county. In the city, the funeral homes sit on the old streetcar streets — J.S. Burkholder on Hamilton Street and Trexler Funeral Home on West Chew are the two Allentown names that come up most, and both are short runs from the West End bench. Across the river, Connell Funeral Home on East Broad Street and Cantelmi Long serve Bethlehem's north and south sides, and Heintzelman Funeral Home sits on Main Street in Hellertown — the same Main Street as Patti's Petals, which is proximity on a road and not an arrangement between them. For burials, Cedar Hill Memorial Park on Airport Road is the most frequent graveside address on the east side of this grid, with Fairview Cemetery and the historic Union and West End Cemetery in the city, Holy Saviour on the Bethlehem Catholic side, and Nisky Hill at the end of Market Street on the bluff above the Lehigh, where the Moravian town buried its dead after God's Acre on Market Street filled. Graveside work has its own physics: it has to be in place before the committal rather than during it, and on an open Lehigh Valley hillside in March a tall glass vase goes over within minutes — ask for a stand or a weighted low vessel.

Four traditions sit side by side in this market, and what you should send differs across them. Catholic services under the Allentown diocese take the widest range of floral work: standing easel arrangements, cross and wreath forms at the funeral home and church, the family's casket spray, and hand-tied or vase arrangements to the home after. Moravian and Pennsylvania German Lutheran and UCC services — Central Moravian at Main and Church in Bethlehem, and the Lutheran and Reformed congregations scattered out through Schnecksville, Orefield, Macungie and Alburtis — lean plain: white and green, restrained, something that can sit on a chancel step without competing with it. For Jewish families, and Allentown has an established community centered in the West End around Congregation Keneseth Israel on Chew Street, Temple Beth El on Springhouse Road and Congregation Sons of Israel on Tilghman Street, flowers at the funeral are generally not the convention; a charitable donation is, and the gesture that lands is a plant or a fruit-and-flower arrangement sent to the shiva home during the week of mourning, addressed to the household rather than the chapel. In Puerto Rican and Dominican households — more than half of Allentown's residents are Hispanic, the highest share of any city in Pennsylvania, concentrated in the center-city wards around Seventh Street — the rosary evenings after the burial matter as much as the service itself, and a piece sent to the home during that week is often the more useful gift. Our studios hand-write the card in Spanish if you write it in Spanish. When you are unsure which convention applies, ask the funeral director; they field that question several times a day and will answer it plainly.