Sympathy flowers in Hoboken

A Hoboken funeral is arranged across three addresses, and none of them is a cemetery inside the city, because the square mile does not contain one. Every interment leaves town. That single fact shapes the whole timetable a sympathy order has to fit into. The first address is the chapel. Hoboken's funeral homes occupy rowhouse-scale buildings on residential avenues rather than campuses with parking lots — Failla-McKnight Memorial Home at 533 Willow Avenue and Lawton-Turso Funeral Home at 633 Washington Street are the two names Hoboken families use most, and when a service moves out of town it usually moves to the larger Hudson County homes, such as McLaughlin Funeral Home on Pavonia Avenue in Jersey City. These buildings have front steps, a narrow street frontage and permit parking on both sides. There is no loading dock and no service alley. Standing work comes up the front steps through the same door the family uses, which is why the delivery window matters more here than the arrangement size: flowers should land before a viewing window opens, not while forty people are filling a room built for thirty. The second address is a parish. Our Lady of Grace at 400 Willow Avenue and St. Ann's at 704 Jefferson Street — the church whose July feast still closes those blocks for a procession — carry most Hoboken funeral Masses, with the historic parish buildings on Hudson and Jefferson Streets filling in around them; All Saints Episcopal Parish at 707 Washington Street, St. Matthew Trinity Lutheran at 57 Eighth Street, welcoming Hoboken since 1858, and the United Synagogue of Hoboken at 115 Park Avenue, the Conservative congregation in the 1915 Star of Israel building, serve the city's other congregations. The third address is out of town: Holy Name Cemetery and New York Bay Cemetery on the Jersey City side, the burial grounds strung along Tonnelle Avenue in North Bergen — among them the Hoboken Cemetery at 5500 Tonnelle Avenue, which the City of Hoboken owns but which has always sat outside the city, beside Flower Hill Cemetery — and Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington. The procession climbs out of the city on the Fourteenth Street Viaduct or Paterson Plank Road, or runs south past Jersey Avenue — and the practical consequence for you is that a graveside piece has to be at the chapel the evening before, because once the cars leave Hoboken nothing catches up with them.