The one piece of local physics worth knowing is how a van actually crosses Yonkers, because it is not the way your phone routes a car. Commercial vehicles are prohibited on New York's parkways, which here means the Saw Mill River, the Bronx River, the Cross County and the Sprain Brook — the four roads that would otherwise carry a driver diagonally across the city in minutes. So a marked delivery van runs surface streets: Central Park Avenue, North and South Broadway, Yonkers Avenue, McLean Avenue, Midland, Nepperhan, Palisade, Tuckahoe Road, or else the Thruway. Add the topography, which is real — this city climbs hard from the Hudson waterfront up through Park Hill and Nodine Hill, and several of those streets are steep, narrow and one-way — and a two-mile Yonkers run is simply not a two-mile flat-grid run. The practical consequence is small but useful: choose the shop nearest the recipient rather than the one with the prettiest photograph, and do not assume a cross-city hop is instant just because the map says it is short.
Who these actually go to, in this city, is a fairly consistent list. Grandparents and parents who have lived on the same block for thirty or forty years, which Yonkers has in abundance — a stable, long-tenured housing stock in Dunwoodie, Colonial Heights, Beech Hill, Homefield, Lawrence Park West, Cedar Knolls and Bryn Mawr where the same families stay put for generations. Teachers, and there are a great many: Yonkers Public Schools is the largest district in Westchester County, with buildings in every neighborhood and staff who almost never get flowers outside of June. The neighbor who took in your packages or shovelled your walk after a nor'easter. The friend who is not sick, not bereaved and not celebrating anything, but is having a bad month — the single best use of a no-occasion delivery, because it arrives without a reason and therefore cannot be read as an obligation. The person coming home from a hospital stay, where flowers to the house on the day after discharge land better than anything sent to a ward. And the everyday thank-yous: a dentist's office, a mechanic, the bakery, the person at the library desk.