Birthday flowers in Cherry Hill

Cherry Hill is one of the few American municipalities named after a shopping center. It was Delaware Township until 1961, the year the mall opened on Route 38 as the first enclosed, climate-controlled shopping center east of the Mississippi, and the new name spread from the building to the whole township. Six decades later the birthday map still follows those retail spines. Route 70 and Route 38 carry the commercial traffic, Route 73 and Haddonfield Road tie the corners together, Ellisburg Circle knots Kings Highway into the middle of it, and behind all of that sits mile after mile of postwar housing — ranches, split-levels and colonials on curving streets, mature trees, driveways you can actually pull into. That layout produces two completely different birthday deliveries. One is a desk: TD Bank keeps its United States headquarters here on Route 70, the professional-services floors fill Woodland Falls Corporate Park, the Greentree Road office parks sit three miles east in Marlton, and ten minutes west the Camden waterfront holds Subaru of America, Campbell Soup, Holtec International and American Water, with Lockheed Martin up in Moorestown, Virtua's corporate offices in Marlton and Burlington Stores farther north on Route 130. The other is a front door at two in the afternoon on a street where the recipient is not home, because half of working Cherry Hill is across a bridge in Philadelphia until six. Deciding which of those two you are aiming at is the single most useful thing you can do before you pick a bouquet.

The residential half of a Cherry Hill birthday spreads across three ZIP codes and a long list of named subdivisions that locals use instead of street names. Roughly speaking, 08002 covers the western side — Erlton, Colwick, the blocks around Cooper Landing Road and the Ellisburg end of Kings Highway, plus the apartment and condominium clusters off Chapel Avenue. 08034 runs through the middle: Barclay Farm, Downs Farm, Old Orchard and the streets feeding Brace Road and Kresson Road, with the Barclay Farmstead Museum and its preserved acreage sitting right in the center of the neighborhood that borrowed its name. 08003 pushes east and south toward the Voorhees line — Kingston Estates, Wexford Leas, Springdale, Woodcrest and the developments off Evesham Road and Springdale Road, including the Katz JCC and Jewish Federation campus that anchors a large share of the township's community life. Outside the township, the same 18-mile circle takes in Haddonfield's brick-sidewalk grid off Kings Highway, Collingswood's walkable Haddon Avenue, Haddon Heights along Station Avenue, Merchantville, Pennsauken, Maple Shade, Mount Laurel, Marlton, Voorhees, Runnemede, Bellmawr, Deptford, Woodbury and Lumberton. Drivers working these routes think in circles and pikes rather than compass directions, which is why a note that says the house behind the Ellisburg Shopping Center lands better than a note that says north side.