Love Romance flowers in East Rutherford

The romance problem in East Rutherford is a timetable problem. This is a small commuter borough eight miles from midtown Manhattan — fewer than ten thousand residents on a tight grid west of Route 17 — and a great many of the people who live on Park Avenue, Union Avenue, Uhland Street and the Boiling Springs blocks leave before eight in the morning and come back after seven at night. The bus runs out along Route 3 to Port Authority, the Bergen County Line picks up at Rutherford station just over the borough line, and Secaucus Junction catches everything else. The stadium's own rail spur does not help with any of it: the Meadowlands line runs on event days only, which is a fine way to reach a concert and no way at all to get to work. So the romantic gesture that fails here is the classic one — flowers ordered at two in the afternoon for a doorstep nobody reaches until half past seven, by which time the shop has closed and the arrangement has spent four hours on a landing. The gesture that works is either sent for the morning, so it is in their hands before they leave, or sent to where they actually are at four o'clock, which is usually not this borough. Decide that before you decide the flowers.

If it is going to the house, the second thing to get right is the doorway. Much of the residential grid is one- and two-family homes, and on a two-family the number on the street is shared: there is an upper unit and a lower one, sometimes a side entrance, and the buzzer labels are frequently handwritten and frequently out of date. Write the floor or the unit on the order — upper, lower, rear, side door — and it arrives at the right door the first time. These houses do have one large advantage: the front steps are usually covered, so an arrangement waiting an hour on a landing is out of the sun and the rain, and neighbors here take things in for each other more readily than the average suburb does. The third thing is the name of the town. Rutherford is 07070 and East Rutherford is 07073, two separate boroughs sharing street names straight across the line, with Lyndhurst at 07071, Carlstadt at 07072, Moonachie at 07074 and Wood-Ridge at 07075 all inside a couple of miles of each other. A house number on Park Avenue exists in more than one of them. Put the ZIP on it and write East Rutherford in full; that one habit prevents most of the late arrivals we see on this grid.