Birthday flowers in Hicksville

Hicksville is the place the rest of Long Island leaves from, and that single fact governs birthday delivery here. The station on Newbridge Road is the busiest on the Island outside the Manhattan and Brooklyn terminals, and it is the point where the Main Line splits: Ronkonkoma and Port Jefferson trains carry on east, the Oyster Bay branch peels north, and the whole eastern end of the Long Island Rail Road's third-track expansion terminates here. Since Grand Central Madison opened, a Hicksville commuter can also land on the East Side instead of at Penn, which has pushed evening arrivals later and spread them wider. The practical upshot for a birthday order is blunt: the person you are sending to is frequently on a platform at 2:00 in the afternoon, not behind a storm door in 11801. Decide before you order whether you want the workplace, a timed evening window, or a named neighbour, and put that instruction on the order. It matters more than which flowers you pick.

Weekday birthdays in Hicksville are usually solved at work, and the hamlet has more of its own employment than its reputation suggests. The Duffy Avenue blocks south of the tracks hold bank back-office and processing floors; New South Road, Engineers Drive and the streets off West John Street form a light-industrial and warehouse belt that has been there since the aerospace years; PSEG Long Island keeps a large operations site on East Old Country Road; and Broadway Commons, the enclosed centre at Broadway and Old Country Road that opened in 1956 as Mid-Island Plaza and is now anchored in part by IKEA's only Long Island store, employs several hundred people on its own. Write the employer, the building number and the suite on the order, and add whoever sits at the front desk, because a loading bay on Engineers Drive and a processing floor on Duffy Avenue have nothing in common but a postcode. For recipients who commute out rather than in, the two nearest concentrations are the Crossways Park campus in Woodbury, four miles up South Oyster Bay Road, and the Route 110 corridor through Melville, where the drive is short and the walk from visitor parking is not.

Children's birthdays stay close to home. The Hicksville district's front offices hold a delivery at the desk and will not carry it down a corridor mid-period — so send to the office with the student's full name and grade before lunch, or to the house for after three. Milestone parties are a different animal: back yards here are small and basements are finished, so the round-number birthday goes to a hall, and the hall is nearly always west or north. Chateau Briand on Old Country Road in Carle Place. Westbury Manor on Jericho Turnpike. The Carltun in Eisenhower Park. Crest Hollow Country Club, also on Jericho Turnpike in Woodbury. For any of them, name the catering contact, give the surname the booking is under and the hour guests arrive, and ask for a drop that finishes before the room opens. Height is the other thing nobody thinks about: a piece tall enough to hide the person opposite gets relocated to a windowsill before the salad.