Birthday flowers in Fort Lee

Start with the thing that decides every Fort Lee delivery before anyone picks a bouquet: roughly half this borough lives above the tenth floor. The tower row along Palisade Avenue, the buildings on Center Avenue and Horizon Road, the two glass towers of The Modern on Park Avenue beside the bridge approach, and the apartments stacked over the shops at Hudson Lights on Main Street add up to a town where the front door is a lobby and the person who receives the flowers is an attendant on a shift. That is good news and bad news at once. Good, because there is always somebody there — no bouquet in Fort Lee has to sit in the cold on a January afternoon waiting for a car to pull in. Bad, because a desk that takes forty parcels an hour will not hunt for a resident with a first name and a floor. The order needs the building's street address, the apartment number and a mobile for the recipient. Without the apartment number the arrangement goes behind the desk into a package room, and a birthday that was supposed to be a surprise at six becomes a text message at nine asking whether anything was left downstairs.

Weekday birthdays are workplace birthdays, and Fort Lee's working population splits three ways. Some of it stays in the borough, in the office buildings around Bridge Plaza North and Bridge Plaza South and on Center Avenue, where a bouquet goes to a lobby that routes by suite number. Some of it drives two miles north into Englewood Cliffs, to the Sylvan Avenue corridor along Route 9W — CNBC at 900 Sylvan Avenue, LG Electronics USA at 111 Sylvan Avenue, ConnectOne Bank at 301 Sylvan Avenue — where security desks are real security desks and the recipient's department matters as much as their name. And a very large share of it walks to a bus at Bridge Plaza and works in Manhattan, which means the birthday desk is on the other side of the river and the Bronx and Washington Heights benches become the sensible choice rather than the awkward one. The other big employers in easy range are the hospitals — Englewood Health on Engle Street, Holy Name on Teaneck Road, Hackensack University Medical Center on Prospect Avenue — where staff birthdays go to a nursing station rather than a patient room, and the Glenpointe complex off the Teaneck interchange of I-95.