Anniversary flowers in Union City

Union City was two towns until 1925, when Union Hill at the north end and West Hoboken at the south merged into one city, and the seam still shows in the housing. Both wards filled up with the same thing: narrow two- and three-family frame houses set shoulder to shoulder on numbered streets, built for embroidery workers when this place was calling itself the Embroidery Capital of the United States and the Schiffli lofts ran three shifts. A century later those houses are what most Union City anniversaries are celebrated inside. The pattern is specific and it matters for a delivery: a couple buys the two-family in their thirties, raises children on the second floor, and thirty or forty years later one of those children is living on the first floor with a family of their own. So the fortieth-anniversary bouquet and the grandchildren are at the same street address, and the person who will physically take the delivery is very often not the person it is for. Put both names on the order — the couple on the card, and whoever is home during the day in the delivery note — and give the floor. The other thing the housing dictates is the size of the piece. A railroad flat has a kitchen table, a windowsill facing the street and not much horizontal surface in between; the vase that looks modest in a shop window is exactly right in that room, and something architectural is a problem the recipient has to solve. On the eastern edge of the city, along Palisade Avenue and the cliff-top blocks near Mountain Road, the apartments look straight across the Hudson at midtown, and an arrangement set in that window is competing with one of the better views in the state. Keep it low and let the window win.