Birthday flowers in Bloomfield

The most famous birthday errand in Bloomfield ends at a soda fountain. Holsten's Brookdale Confectionery at 1063 Broad Street still makes its own ice cream and still sells onion rings at the booth where the last scene of The Sopranos was filmed, and on a Saturday in this township a decent share of the tables are somebody's family doing a birthday the way it has been done here for decades. That is a useful thing to know about the place before you order flowers into it. Bloomfield is not a downtown with a suburb attached; it is roughly 53,000 people packed into about five and a half square miles of Essex County, most of them in two-family houses on grid streets, with a genuine 1790s town green in the middle and the Garden State Parkway cutting straight through the western side of it. Birthday flowers here land on porches far more often than on reception desks, and the porch is usually four steps up off a narrow street with no driveway. The single most useful thing you can put in the delivery notes is not a gate code. It is whether the recipient is the upstairs apartment or the downstairs one.

The grid has one real simplification that most cities do not give you: Bloomfield is all one ZIP code. There is no puzzle about 07003 — Bloomfield Center, Brookdale, Watsessing, Halcyon Park, Brookside, the Oakeside blocks on Belleville Avenue, the streets behind Bloomfield High School and the stretch running down to the Newark line all share it. What changes across the township is character, not postal routing. Bloomfield Center is the old core: the Green with the First Presbyterian Church of Bloomfield, founded in 1796, and the Civil War monument; the Bloomfield Public Library and the municipal offices on Broad Street; Bloomfield College of Montclair State University spread along Franklin Street and Liberty Street with the Westminster Arts Center. Brookdale is the northern end, the Broad Street run up toward the Montclair line and the edge of Brookdale Park, the Olmsted Brothers-designed Essex County park that Bloomfield shares with Montclair and that holds the county rose garden. Watsessing is the southern end along the Newark and East Orange border, named for the other Olmsted park in town, the one the Second River runs through. Halcyon Park is the small historic district of Victorian and Queen Anne houses near the Glen Ridge side. Drivers here work Broad Street north-south, Bloomfield Avenue east-west, Belleville Avenue toward Nutley, and JFK Drive along the Parkway.