Anniversary flowers in Weehawken

Most towns sell their own streets. Weehawken sells the one thing it does not own: the view of Manhattan from the top of the Palisades. That is the reason people get engaged on Boulevard East, the reason wedding parties from three counties drive up for photographs on the overlook and at Hamilton Park, where the bust of Alexander Hamilton looks out over the ledge below the cliff where he and Aaron Burr fired at each other in July of 1804, and the reason an anniversary in this township is usually built around a reservation with a window in it rather than around an evening at home. That gives a flower order a shape it does not have in an ordinary suburb. There is almost always a fixed hour — a table booked for seven-thirty, a room the couple checks into at four, a ferry back from Midtown at six. The delivery has to land against that hour, not against a vague afternoon. Where it lands is the first decision, and Weehawken offers three genuinely different answers. Sending to the home is the most reliable and the least theatrical. If the couple lives on the ridge, that means a low-rise co-op or condominium on or just behind Boulevard East, a vestibule, a bank of bells, a floor and a unit that have to be on the order because there is no porch here and nowhere to leave anything. If they live on the reclaimed flats, it means a tower on the Avenue at Port Imperial or around Lincoln Harbor, a staffed desk that will take the bouquet without argument and then hold it — fine if the flowers are meant to be waiting, wrong if they are meant to be a surprise at the door. Sending to a hotel is the second answer and the one that needs the most care. The Sheraton Lincoln Harbor Hotel at 500 Harbor Boulevard and the EnVue Hotel, Autograph Collection, on the Avenue at Port Imperial both sit on the waterfront with the skyline in front of them, which is exactly why couples book them for an anniversary. Neither address, though, is a receiving procedure. Before you order, confirm the name the reservation is under, ask the property whether it accepts personal flower deliveries for guests, and ask where the guest collects them — some properties hold at a desk, some will place in a room only with the guest's consent, and none of that is visible from a street address. Sending to a restaurant is the third, and it is a conversation with the restaurant rather than with us: the Chart House at Lincoln Harbor on Harbor Boulevard is the best-known of the waterfront tables, and a house that seats a full room at seven-thirty may or may not want a bouquet arriving in the middle of service. Ask the manager what time to send and whose name to put on it, then tell us what they said.