Birthday flowers in Hasbrouck Heights

Stand on one of the streets near the southern edge of the borough on a weekday afternoon and you will hear the reason the name is literal. Hasbrouck Heights sits on a bluff, and immediately below and south of it is Teterboro Airport — the oldest working airfield in the New York metropolitan area, the place where Anthony Fokker set up his American operation in the 1920s, and today the corporate-jet gateway for Manhattan. Business aircraft on final approach cross the lower end of town at what feels like rooftop height. That single piece of geography explains most of what is odd about delivering here. The borough is tiny — roughly a square mile and a half, around twelve thousand people — but it is hemmed in on the south by an airport, on the east by Route 17, and on the west by the interchange knot where Route 17, Interstate 80 and Route 46 all tangle together at the Lodi line. Inside those walls the streets are a tight grid climbing the hill: the Boulevard along the spine with the shops and the borough offices, Terrace Avenue running parallel on the eastern slope down toward the highway, and cross streets of single-family and two-family houses with deep front steps, hedges and driveways that belong to one half of the house only. A birthday delivery here is almost never a distance problem. It is a question of which set of steps and whether the bell on the side door is the one that works.

Two timing habits are worth copying from the people who order here most. The first is that the flowers and the party are separate errands. A surprise gathering in a house on the hill almost always wants the arrangement delivered the morning of, before the kitchen fills up and while somebody is still able to answer a door — not at six, when there are fourteen coats on the banister and nobody hears the bell. The second is that Saturday is the busiest birthday day in this radius and Saturday afternoon is the worst slot in it, because Route 4 and Route 17 through Paramus fill with shopping traffic and the drive that took twelve minutes on Thursday takes thirty-five. Ask for a Saturday morning window, or move the delivery to Friday and let it be waiting. And if the birthday is for somebody who has lived on these streets for decades, keep the arrangement to counter height; the kitchens in these houses are small, and a piece that has to be moved to make room for a cake ends up on the washing machine.