Birthday flowers in Demarest

Demarest is one of the few Bergen County boroughs you can drive end to end in six minutes without passing a shopping block. Call it a square and a half mile of the Northern Valley, roughly 4,800 people, almost entirely houses on wooded lots between the Tenakill Brook and the slope that climbs east toward the Palisades. That one fact settles the shape of a birthday order placed here. There is no apartment lobby to leave a box in, no mailroom, no doorman, and no passenger platform to meet anybody at — the Northern Branch tracks still run through town past the old Demarest depot, but they have carried freight rather than commuters for decades, so every bouquet that reaches 07627 arrives in a van on a residential street. What the order needs is therefore not more address, it is better access. Which door does the household actually use. Does the driveway run eighty feet back off Hardenburgh Avenue. Does the bell work. Is anyone home between two and five. Thirty seconds in the notes field covers all four; leaving them out converts them into a phone call the driver makes from the curb while the birthday person is still at work.

The one non-residential cluster worth planning around sits along the borough's eastern edge, and it is a school belt rather than a business district. Northern Valley Regional High School at Demarest stands at 150 Knickerbocker Road, and it is regional in the literal sense: it enrolls students from Closter, Harrington Park and Haworth alongside Demarest, so a staff birthday there means a front office serving four municipalities and a campus that empties in minutes after the last period. Academy of the Holy Angels, the independent Catholic girls' school at 315 Hillside Avenue, is the borough's other secondary campus a short way north. The younger grades are at County Road School and Luther Lee Emerson School. All four buildings take deliveries through a main office, and two things decide whether one lands properly: the recipient's full name spelled the way office staff would know it, and an arrival aimed at mid-morning instead of at the cutoff. Something that gets there at twenty to three waits in a dark office until tomorrow. If the birthday belongs to a student rather than a teacher, send it to the house instead — a vase in a homeroom is more often a burden to carry around than a treat.

Desk birthdays get sent out of town, because Demarest barely has desks of its own. The closest office concentration is about three miles north at Rockleigh, the Link Drive and Paris Avenue cluster reached straight up Piermont Road through Closter and Norwood, and it is the one commercial address a Demarest driver can reach without entering a highway corridor. After that, the row people here actually commute to is Sylvan Avenue in Englewood Cliffs, with LG Electronics USA at 111 and CNBC at 900, about fifteen minutes south down County Road through Cresskill and Tenafly and then east toward the river. Samsung Electronics America at 85 Challenger Road in Ridgefield Park and the Glenpointe offices off Frank W. Burr Boulevard in Teaneck lie further along that same southern approach, with Fairleigh Dickinson's Teaneck campus on River Road on the way. Any of them needs three things a house does not: the employer, the recipient as payroll spells them, and a floor or suite number. A reception desk will happily sign for a box and then have no idea which of two people on the fourth floor it belongs to. If family are in town for the weekend, the nearest hotel room is the Clinton Inn at 145 Dean Drive in Tenafly, and there the order stands or falls on the surname matching the reservation exactly.