Romantic flowers in Cleveland

Romance orders in Cleveland behave differently from anniversary orders, and the studios treat them differently. An anniversary has a date on it. A romance order usually does not — it is a Tuesday in February, a rough week at work, a first month, a reconciliation, a long-distance relationship being maintained across a time zone. That means the delivery address is almost always residential or a workplace rather than a restaurant, and the recipient is usually not expecting anything, which puts all the weight on the handoff. Downtown Cleveland's residential core has grown fast enough that lobby handoff is now the default rather than the exception: the converted towers and new-build apartments around Playhouse Square and East Ninth, The Lumen on Euclid at Playhouse Square, The Beacon at 515 Euclid, the residences inside Terminal Tower on Public Square, Worthington Yards in the Warehouse District, the Flats East Bank buildings on the river, and across the Cuyahoga in Ohio City the Church + State towers in Hingetown, The Quarter and Tappan on West 25th. All of these route deliveries through a front desk, a package room or a concierge, which is good news in a Cleveland January and bad news for surprise timing — the recipient may not see the notification for hours. Outside downtown, the romance route runs to the double-houses and apartment blocks that make up most of the city's near-neighborhood housing stock: Ohio City and Tremont, Detroit-Shoreway and Gordon Square, Battery Park and Edgewater, Old Brooklyn, Larchmere and Shaker Square, Little Italy's Murray Hill walk-ups, the Cedar-Lee and Coventry Village blocks of Cleveland Heights, Lakewood's Detroit and Madison avenue apartment corridor, and the settled streets of Parma, Parma Heights, Euclid and Collinwood.