Love Romance flowers in Edison

There is one town in the United States where sending flowers by electric light is a local joke worth making, and this is it. Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory stood on Christie Street in what is now the Menlo Park section of the township, the street was lit by his incandescent lamps around 1880 in what is generally called the first electric street lighting anywhere, and the Edison Memorial Tower still stands over the spot at 37 Christie Street with a museum beside it. It is a decent place to take somebody on a first date in this township, which is otherwise not a romantic-destination sort of place: Edison is a working suburb of split-levels, strip plazas and rail lines, and the romance here happens indoors, in houses and restaurants and hotel rooms rather than on a waterfront. That shapes what actually works. Almost every romantic delivery on this grid goes to one of four destinations — a house, a workplace, a hotel front desk, or a restaurant that is holding a booking — and each of them has a different failure mode. Pick the destination first, then the flowers.

Home delivery is the default and the timing is everything. North Edison in 08820 — the blocks off Inman Avenue, Oak Tree Road and Grove Avenue — and the older sections in 08817 are commuter housing, which means the recipient is very often not there between eight and six. If you want flowers waiting when they walk in, the shop needs a safe, shaded spot named in the order, because a hand-tied bouquet on an unshaded step in July is a lost bouquet. If you want them handed over, aim at the evening: a great many Edison households return on the Northeast Corridor, through the Edison station itself, through Metuchen on one side or Metropark just over the line in Iselin on the other, and the reliable window is after the evening trains land rather than before. Apartment and townhouse complexes want the complex name plus the building letter — a bare street number resolves to the wrong entrance more often than not. And put the recipient's mobile number on the order, not yours, unless the surprise depends on it, in which case say which number is which.

Off the township there are three destinations worth knowing. The hotel cluster on Raritan Center Parkway in 08837 — the Sheraton Edison and the Hilton Garden Inn at Raritan Center — takes front-desk deliveries against a guest name, and for flowers waiting in the room rather than at the desk, the delivery has to reach the property before housekeeping clears that floor. Ten minutes down Route 27, New Brunswick has the restaurants and the stages: Stage Left Steak and Catherine Lombardi on Livingston Avenue, the State Theatre New Jersey and the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center on the same block, with the Heldrich on Livingston and the Hyatt Regency on Albany Street for the overnight version. Flowers to a restaurant go to the front of house with the booking name and the reservation time — never to a table mid-service, where they end up behind a host stand. And the Rutgers campuses, College Avenue in New Brunswick and Busch and Livingston in Piscataway, absorb a steady stream of romantic deliveries from Edison; residence halls need the hall name, because a campus mailroom and a hall desk are not the same place and only one of them will call the recipient.