Sympathy flowers in Carlstadt

The first thing to understand about sending sympathy flowers to Carlstadt is that the service is usually not in Carlstadt. The borough is four square miles, over half of it Meadowlands marsh and warehouse floor, and it holds no cemetery of its own. When a Carlstadt family loses someone, the arrangements travel south and west along one road: Ridge Road. The Lyndhurst funeral homes sit on it — Nazare Memorial Home and Ippolito-Stellato Funeral Home are both Ridge Road addresses — and Ridge Road keeps going south through North Arlington, where Holy Cross Cemetery takes most of the Catholic burials out of these towns. Arlington Cemetery is a few minutes further on Schuyler Avenue in Kearny. Collins-Calhoun Funeral Home on Lincoln Avenue in Rutherford handles a large share of the Rutherford and Carlstadt side. So the practical shape of a Carlstadt sympathy order is a single axis: chapel flowers go to Ridge Road or Lincoln Avenue on the afternoon or evening of the viewing, and graveside pieces go a mile or two further down the same road the next morning. It is unusually easy to get right, precisely because it is so concentrated — as long as the order says which building and which time, not just which town. There is a second pattern worth knowing about here, and it comes from the far side of Route 17. When someone who worked in one of the Gotham Parkway or Commerce Road buildings dies, the arrangement that arrives at the chapel is often sent in a company's name by people who never met the family, and the card has to carry that weight without a first name to lean on. Our shops write those differently from a relative's card, and if you are ordering on behalf of a workplace you should say so at checkout rather than leaving the designer to guess.

Carlstadt's own history sits oddly against all of this. The borough was founded in 1860 by a German settlement society that bought the land outright, named it for Dr. Carl Klein, and was led in large part by Free Thinkers — people who had left Germany in the aftermath of 1848 and who built a deliberately secular civic life here. That founding stock has long since been joined and outnumbered. The towns immediately around Carlstadt carry some of the most specific ethnic concentrations in New Jersey: Wallington, directly across the Passaic to the northwest, is one of the most heavily Polish-American municipalities in the United States, and Garfield just beyond it is similar; Lyndhurst, North Arlington, Nutley and Belleville to the south and west are long-settled Italian-American towns; Kearny carries both its old Scottish industrial community and a large Portuguese and Brazilian population. What this means in practice is that the same florist bench is asked for a Polish-language ribbon one week and a Portuguese one the next, and that the scale of what families send varies enormously between a Wallington wake and a Free Thinker family's quiet graveside in North Arlington. Tell us at checkout which it is. Our shops do not guess.