Flowers for Union Beach, NJ

Union Beach is a small bayfront borough on the Monmouth County side of Raritan Bay, a grid of avenues running from Union Avenue and Poole Avenue down toward Front Street and the water. Chingarora Creek closes the western edge at the Keyport line, Natco Lake sits inland toward the Hazlet border, and nearly everything between them is residential. Memorial School off Florence Avenue anchors the school-day traffic and the borough's high-school students cross the line into Keyport High School, so a Union Beach graduation or teacher gift often means a house here and an event a town over. The blocks nearest the bay were rebuilt after the 2012 storm, many of them on raised foundations, which is the single most practical thing to know about delivering here: the front door is frequently a storey up an exterior stair rather than at street level.

Two things about this address trip senders up. First, 07735 is a Keyport post-office ZIP that Union Beach shares with Keyport, so a label generated from the ZIP alone can read "Keyport" for a house that is firmly in Union Beach — write the street number, the street, and "Union Beach" in the delivery fields and nobody goes hunting on the far side of the creek. Addresses on the Hazlet side of the border carry 07730 and ride the same routes. Second, the raised rebuilds and the narrow numbered avenues off Front Street mean a driver may have to leave the van and climb, so a working phone number is worth more here than any special instruction, and a recipient who cannot come down should be flagged in the note.

Other New Jersey cities.