What still varies is the door, and Fort Lee has four kinds. The towers — Palisade Avenue, Center Avenue, Horizon Road, the Park Avenue buildings, the apartments above Hudson Lights — are the fastest deliveries in the borough: a staffed desk, a signature, done in ninety seconds. They need the apartment number, though, and without it the flowers go into a package room with the parcels. The two-family houses west of Lemoine Avenue and through Coytesville are the slowest to get right, because the standard porch has two bells and no labels, and a driver guessing between them is a driver handing your bouquet to a stranger. Say upstairs or downstairs. The walk-ups above the Main Street shops need a buzzer code or a mobile number, because the street door is locked and the nearest legal parking space may be two blocks away. And the detached houses on the quieter blocks off Anderson Avenue and up toward Bluff Road are straightforward until the weather turns, at which point nothing gets left outside: the ridge catches everything coming up off the river, and a bouquet on a step at four in January is finished before anyone gets home.
Who receives these, in practice, is the part that makes Fort Lee's everyday volume different from a commuter suburb's. A large share of just-because orders here go to a parent or grandparent living alone in one of the older buildings — this borough has a substantial older population, a good deal of it in apartments a short walk from the Main Street shops and the Korean groceries and bakeries that supply half the households in town. Those orders come from adult children who live somewhere else entirely, often across the river, sometimes across the country, and the thing they are buying is not really flowers: it is somebody knocking on the door in the middle of a Tuesday. If that is your order, two additions help more than an upgrade would. Put a mobile number for the recipient in the notes so the driver can call from the lobby rather than leave and come back. And write a real message on the card — the handwritten card is free, and a line naming something specific does more than any arrangement in the catalogue.