Birthday flowers in Jersey City

A Jersey City birthday is an elevator question before it is a flower question. A large share of the addresses in this city are towers: 99 Hudson Street, the tallest building in New Jersey, sits two blocks from the Exchange Place PATH headhouse; Journal Squared rises straight over the PATH tracks at Journal Square; the Newport high-rises run north along Washington Boulevard; Urby and its neighbors face Marin Boulevard. In all of those buildings the bouquet is handed to a doorman or logged into a package room, the recipient gets a text, and nobody knocks on an apartment door. Then the map flips completely. Cross Kennedy Boulevard into the Heights (07307 — Central Avenue, Palisade Avenue, Ogden Avenue, the blocks around Riverview-Fisk Park and Pershing Field) or drop south into Greenville (07305 — Ocean Avenue, Martin Luther King Drive, Bayside) and Bergen-Lafayette (Communipaw Avenue, Garfield Avenue, the streets ringing Berry Lane Park), and the housing is two- and three-family frame houses: shared vestibule, three bells, no names on any of them. West Side and McGinley Square (07304 — West Side Avenue, Lincoln Park, the blocks around Saint Peter's University) sit between those two worlds. Downtown (07302 — Paulus Hook, Van Vorst Park, Hamilton Park, Harsimus Cove, the Powerhouse Arts District) puts a restored brownstone and a glass tower on the same block, which is why the useful thing to tell us at checkout is not the neighborhood but the building type: doorman, buzzer, or hand-to-recipient. Add the working detail that most Jersey City recipients do not drive — they come home on the PATH from Grove Street or Exchange Place, or up the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail from Danforth Avenue, West Side Avenue or Marin Boulevard — so an early-evening arrival window frequently beats a mid-afternoon one for a surprise that is supposed to be waiting when they walk in.