Sympathy flowers in Oak Park

A mile and a half south-west of the Oak Park centroid, Forest Park gives over a remarkable share of its land to cemeteries, and the people buried there outnumber the living residents many times over. That single geographic fact shapes almost every sympathy order on this grid. Forest Home Cemetery at 863 South Des Plaines Avenue absorbed the old German Waldheim grounds and holds the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument, a National Historic Landmark, along with Emma Goldman's grave. Directly across Des Plaines Avenue, Jewish Waldheim is not one cemetery but a century's worth of congregational and benevolent-society sections behind their own numbered gates, and a graveside delivery there lives or dies on whether the order carries the gate number — without it a driver is circling a wall looking for an entrance that may be a quarter-mile from the grave. Concordia Cemetery on West Madison Street was founded by German Lutherans and still reads that way, and Woodlawn on West Cermak Road holds Showmen's Rest, the plot bought by the Showmen's League after the 1918 Hagenbeck-Wallace circus train wreck, with its row of stone elephants. Four miles further west on Wolf Road in Hillside, Mount Carmel holds the Archdiocese of Chicago's Bishops' Mausoleum and is the best-known Catholic burial ground in the region, with Queen of Heaven immediately beside it; Mount Emblem in Elmhurst, with its restored Dutch windmill, closes the western edge of the radius, and Elmwood Cemetery on Thatcher Avenue in River Grove covers the north.

The chapels and churches come first in the sequence, though, and the timing question is almost always the same: when does the flower need to be standing in the room. Visitation in this part of Cook County usually runs a late-afternoon-to-evening window the day before, with the funeral Mass or service the following morning, which means a piece intended for the visitation has to arrive by early afternoon and a piece for the service has to arrive the evening before or very early the next day. Drechsler, Brown and Williams at 203 South Marion Street has served Oak Park from the middle of the village for generations and is a ten-minute run from either of the two closest benches. Salerno's Galewood Chapels at 1857 North Harlem Avenue sits on the boundary between the village's north end and Chicago's Galewood and Montclare blocks. Hitzeman in Brookfield covers the south-west approach, Conboy-Westchester on Cermak Road in Westchester the Hillside cemetery corridor, and Cumberland Chapels in Norridge the north-west. Services themselves are scattered through the village: Unity Temple at 875 Lake Street, the Frank Lloyd Wright building inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2019, plus First United Church of Oak Park and Calvary Memorial on the same stretch of Lake Street, Grace Episcopal at 924 Lake Street, Pilgrim Congregational at 460 Lake Street, St. Edmund at 188 South Oak Park Avenue, Ascension on South East Avenue, St. Giles on Columbian Avenue, Euclid Avenue United Methodist, and St. Vincent Ferrer just over the line in River Forest. Give us the building and the hour and the studio builds backwards from it.

Three logistics problems account for nearly every sympathy delivery that goes wrong in this corridor, and all three are avoidable. The first is the gate. Jewish Waldheim's sections sit behind separate numbered entrances, and Forest Home, Concordia and Woodlawn each have their own office and their own drive pattern off Des Plaines Avenue, Madison Street or Cermak Road, so a graveside order needs the cemetery name, the section or gate, and the hour of the committal. The second is the interchange. Mount Carmel and Queen of Heaven are both on Wolf Road in Hillside, directly beside the Eisenhower's junction with I-294 and I-88 — the tangle locals have called the Hillside Strangler for decades — and a morning committal there means the driver has to be past that merge before the late-morning crush, not during it. Order the night before for a morning graveside on Wolf Road. The third is the recipient. A chapel will not hold flowers indefinitely and a cemetery will not accept a delivery outside service hours at all, so if you are not sure of the schedule, send to the family's home instead: a home delivery has no window to miss, and in Oak Park it lands on a covered front porch or in a two-flat vestibule, where a neighbor will bring it inside. For a Jewish family, the home is usually the right address in the first place — flowers are not customarily part of the funeral itself, and a plant or a quiet arrangement sent to the house during the week of mourning is the gesture that fits, which is why our benches near Oak Park Temple on North Harlem Avenue and West Suburban Temple Har Zion in River Forest handle far more home addresses than chapel ones.