Off campus the birthday map is residential and unusually compact. Elm Heights, the older neighborhood immediately south of campus, and Prospect Hill and the Near West Side historic districts west of the square are all porch-drop territory with mature trees, narrow limestone-curbed streets and houses that are usually rented by the room — which means the name on the order often is not the name on the mailbox, and a mobile number matters more than it would in a subdivision. Bryan Park and the blocks around it, Green Acres east of campus, Sherwood Oaks and the south side toward Winslow, and the newer developments out past the SR 45/46 Bypass fill in the rest of 47401 and 47403. Indiana weather is the real constraint on an unattended porch: a sealed bouquet left in full sun during a humid Indiana July afternoon loses a day of vase life, and one left out on a January evening when the temperature drops into the teens can freeze in an hour. Both problems disappear with a phone number, because the studio calls first and times the drop, and for a birthday a call-ahead is usually fine — the surprise is the flowers, not the ring of a doorbell. If nobody will be home at all, a neighbor, a landlord's office or the front desk of an apartment building beats the porch every time.
Workplace birthdays here run through a handful of very specific places. The single largest employer is Indiana University itself, which means the ordinary Bloomington office birthday is a departmental one — a bouquet to a staff desk in Bryan Hall, Hodge Hall at the Kelley School, Luddy Hall, the Herman B Wells Library, the Eskenazi Museum of Art or one of dozens of academic buildings, all of which have building addresses but idiosyncratic interior geography, so a department name is worth as much as a room number. The west side carries the private-sector cluster: Cook Group's headquarters and the Cook Medical operations off Daniels Way and Curry Pike, and the Catalent biologics campus on the same corridor, the former Cook Pharmica plant — both large enough that a delivery goes to a reception or security desk rather than to a person, so name the recipient's department. Downtown adds the Monroe County Courthouse with its copper fish weathervane, the county Justice Building, and City Hall in the old Showers Brothers furniture factory on Morton Street. Ivy Tech's Bloomington campus, the MCCSC schools including Bloomington High School North and South, and Hoosier Energy's headquarters round out the routine list. One honest exception: Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane, about 35 miles southwest, is a secured installation and a florist does not drive a bouquet through that gate — for someone who works at Crane, send it to the house.