Yonkers celebrates facing west. The city's whole romantic geography is the Hudson and the wall of the Palisades on the far bank: the Recreation Pier downtown with a restaurant out on the end of it, the esplanade and Van der Donck Park where the Saw Mill River was uncovered in 2012 after a century underground, the Main Street row beside it, the Old Croton Aqueduct trail running the length of the city on the bluff, Untermyer Park's walled garden above North Broadway with its columns and its view down the river, and the Hudson River Museum on Warburton Avenue with the Glenview mansion attached to it. That is where anniversaries get marked here, and it produces the single most useful piece of advice on this page: do not send the flowers to the dinner. These are small rooms. A host stand has nowhere to keep a vase, a two-top has no room for one, and the couple ends up carrying water through a parking garage. Aim the delivery at wherever they will be before or after the meal instead, and the gift stops being a logistical problem for them to solve.
In practice that means one of three targets. The house, delivered in the afternoon so it is on the table when they walk in and change for dinner — the most reliable option by a distance. The hotel room, if they are staying over: the Royal Regency on Tuckahoe Road and the hotels around Executive Boulevard and Ridge Hill handle in-city stays, and the rooms Westchester couples actually book for an anniversary are up the river and over the county — the Castle Hotel & Spa on its hill in Tarrytown, Tarrytown House Estate, the Ritz-Carlton New York, Westchester in White Plains and the Hilton Westchester in Rye Brook, all comfortably inside the 18-mile search. Call the hotel, give the reservation name and the check-in date, and ask the front desk or concierge to receive it; most will hold it and place it, but none of them can do that for a guest whose name they cannot find. The third target is a workplace, which works only if the workplace is on this side of the city line — a Yonkers commuter's desk is a half-hour train ride away in another county, which is the reason the house wins so often here.
One more Yonkers-specific case deserves its own paragraph, because this city has a lot of long marriages in it and a lot of them are in their sixth and seventh decades. Anniversaries in the single-family neighborhoods — Crestwood, Colonial Heights, Beech Hill, Homefield, Lawrence Park West, Dunwoodie, Cedar Knolls — are frequently fiftieth or sixtieth anniversaries, and a good share of them are now celebrated with one spouse in a rehabilitation or skilled-nursing campus and the other still at home. Those are excellent deliveries and they need two small adjustments. Keep the arrangement compact and unscented, because a care room has a single small surface and a roommate on the other side of a curtain, and consider a potted plant instead of cut flowers, which staff will water and which is still there at the next visit. Give the resident's full name and their unit or floor, since these campuses route by unit rather than by name. And if the couple are both at home, remember that the afternoon cutoff means an afternoon arrival: put a mobile number on the order so nobody misses the door.