The second fact is about buildings, and it is the reason romantic deliveries here fail more often than any other kind. Belleville housing is overwhelmingly two- and three-family, with a shared front door, four or five steps up from the sidewalk, no driveway, and frequently more than one household behind that door. Add the reality of a township with this cost of living and this many multigenerational homes: a meaningful share of the people you are sending roses to live with parents, siblings or roommates. Which means the person who opens the door for a bouquet at three in the afternoon is very often not your recipient, and on a romantic order that changes everything. Tell us the floor — upstairs or downstairs — and the surname on the bell. If the relationship is new, or private, say so, and the driver will not hand the arrangement to whoever answers; they will call the number you give us and wait. For the apartment buildings over the Washington Avenue storefronts and along Union Avenue, the vestibule is locked and there is no concierge, so a phone number is not optional — without one the flowers go back on the truck or sit in an entryway.
For the evenings that leave the house, the romantic geography around Belleville is a fifteen-minute arc in three directions. West, Montclair: the Church Street and Bloomfield Avenue restaurant blocks, the Wellmont Theater, the Clairidge cinema, and two hotels — the MC Hotel on Bloomfield Avenue and The George on Valley Road. South, Newark: the Robert Treat Hotel at 50 Park Place and the Hilton Newark Penn Station at Gateway Center, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center on Center Street, the Prudential Center, and Ferry Street in the Ironbound, which is where most first anniversaries of most Belleville relationships get eaten. East, across the Passaic and the Hackensack, the skyline rooms: the W Hoboken on the waterfront, the Westin Jersey City Newport, the Hyatt Regency Jersey City on the Hudson, the Sheraton Lincoln Harbor in Weehawken, plus the Hilton Meadowlands in East Rutherford — every one of them inside the 18-mile radius, every one with a front desk that will hold an arrangement against a reservation name. And for the proposals: the northern division of Branch Brook Park runs along the township with more than five thousand flowering cherry trees, the largest collection in the United States, and during the April festival weeks it is the obvious backdrop in this county. Loose petals and a hand-tied travel better there than a vase does.