Sympathy flowers in Jenkintown

For a place of a few thousand people, the stretch of Old York Road running south out of Jenkintown holds a remarkable concentration of houses of worship, which is why so many sympathy deliveries on this grid travel less than three miles. Beth Sholom Congregation stands at 8231 Old York Road in Elkins Park — the only synagogue Frank Lloyd Wright designed and a National Historic Landmark, a building people drive in from other states to see. Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, one of the oldest congregations of its kind in the country, sits a short way further along the same road. Old York Road Temple–Beth Am is up in Abington. In the borough itself, the Immaculate Conception parish on West Avenue is a few doors from where Rosevelt Florists keeps its shop at 617 West Ave, and Salem Baptist Church of Jenkintown has been part of the borough's life for well over a century. That density changes the logistics of a sympathy order in a specific way: the driver's problem is almost never mileage. It is being at the right door at the right hour, because a chapel that is eight minutes away is still closed at eight in the morning and full at ten.

The burial grounds are closer than in most markets we cover, and several are effectively local landmarks. Montefiore Cemetery on Church Road carries a 19046 address — the same ZIP as the borough — so a shop working this grid reaches the graveside without ever leaving its own postal area, which is rare enough to be worth saying. Holy Sepulchre Cemetery on Cheltenham Avenue is the archdiocesan ground most Catholic families from this corridor use. Hillside Cemetery is in Roslyn on the Abington side, Shalom Memorial Park is out in Huntingdon Valley, Roosevelt Memorial Park sits off Old Lincoln Highway in Trevose near where Trevose Flowers works from 4011 Brownsville Rd., and Ivy Hill is down Easton Road at the city line. Two of the region's great nineteenth-century garden cemeteries are also inside the radius: Laurel Hill on Ridge Avenue above the Schuylkill, which is a National Historic Landmark, and West Laurel Hill on Belmont Avenue in Bala Cynwyd, which is the nearest ground to Rosevelt Flower Philly at 159 Bala Ave. A graveside piece has to be built for weather and for a stand that may be nothing more than grass, so tell us it is going to a graveside and not into a chapel — it is a different construction, not a different flower.

Timing is the whole discipline of sympathy work, and on this grid it comes down to three questions. First, when is the service? A ten o'clock service means the flowers need to be at the chapel by about nine, when the staff is setting the room, not at 9:55 when families are already arriving. Second, is a viewing scheduled for the night before? Where there is one, that is usually the better delivery slot — the piece is standing for both occasions, and nobody is carrying arrangements past a crowded doorway. Third, is the burial happening fast? Some traditions in this corridor bury within a day, which can mean there is no window at all for a chapel piece; in that case the order that actually helps is the one that goes to the family's house for the week that follows. Whatever the answer, four details make the order land cleanly: which chapel or congregation, the street it is on, the hour the service starts, and the deceased's name spelled the way the funeral home spells it — that spelling is what staff match an incoming delivery against. Give us a mobile number for the family only if you want the driver to be able to reach someone; nobody will be called otherwise.