Cliffside Park fits into one square mile and one ZIP code, 07010, and it is one of the most densely settled municipalities in New Jersey. That single fact reorganises what a birthday delivery is here. In most towns the hard part is the drive; in this borough the drive is nothing — Sunset Flowers at 470 Bergen Boulevard in Ridgefield is about a mile from the borough line — and the hard part is the last forty feet. Very few birthdays in 07010 happen behind a front door you can walk up to. They happen on the eighteenth floor of a building on Gorge Road, in one of the Winston Towers buildings, in the upper unit of a two-family house on a side street off Palisade Avenue, or in an apartment reached through the door beside a shop on Anderson Avenue. Each of those is a different handoff, and the order form is where you settle it. Give the building, the apartment number and the name exactly as it appears on the buzzer panel or the lobby list — not the name you call them. A woman known to her family by a nickname for forty years is on the intercom under something else entirely, and a driver who cannot find the name on the panel is standing on the sidewalk with a birthday bouquet and a phone.
The office birthday works differently here than the phrase suggests, because Cliffside Park is not where most of its residents work. The borough's own employers are small and local — the shops, restaurants, bakeries and professional offices strung along Anderson Avenue, the municipal building, the public school district and Cliffside Park High School, the medical and dental practices tucked into the avenue's second floors. Those are easy drops: a storefront or a front desk, open hours, somebody who will take it. But when a colleague says "send it to her office," the office is very often not in the borough at all. It is across the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan, or down Route 5 and along River Road in Edgewater, or north into Fort Lee. That changes which shop should take the order. A bouquet going to a Midtown or Washington Heights desk should be built by a shop on that side of the river — Afortwashington Florist at 4257 Broadway or Greenpoint Florist NY at 729B Manhattan Avenue — rather than by a New Jersey shop that then has to sit in bridge traffic with it. Enter the delivery address, not the recipient's home town, and the network picks accordingly.