Birthday flowers in Dubuque

Office birthdays here concentrate in a handful of buildings and one very large gate. John Deere Dubuque Works, out on South John Deere Road, is the biggest single workplace in the county and it is a fenced industrial plant, not a lobby — an arrangement goes to a security or reception point and then travels inward by hand, so the order needs a full name, a department and a shift, and it should land mid-morning rather than at the edge of a shift change. Downtown is the opposite problem and much easier: Cottingham & Butler, one of the largest privately held insurance brokerages in the country, works out of Main Street; Dupaco Community Credit Union and American Trust are both headquartered in town; the Roshek Building at 700 Locust is the tallest thing in Dubuque and holds several floors of tenants behind one elevator bank; the Dubuque County Courthouse on Central Avenue, under its gold-leaf dome, and City Hall on West 13th take the public-sector birthdays. Kendall Hunt Publishing on Westmark Drive and the plants and warehouses of the Dubuque Industrial Center West off Chavenelle and Seippel Road are all a few minutes from the shop's own door. Medical Associates, Hartig Drug, the Port of Dubuque offices, the Grand River Center, Diamond Jo and Q Casino out on Chaplain Schmitt Island round out the list. For a downtown floor, aim for late morning: the person you are surprising will get roughly five hours of everyone walking past their desk, which is the entire point.

Residential Dubuque splits into four delivery personalities and they want different things. Bluff-top addresses — Fenelon Place, Grove Terrace, Southern Avenue, the upper reaches of West Third and Bluff Street — are Victorian houses with thirty to fifty steps between the sidewalk and the front door; the arrangement has to survive being carried up them, and the driver needs a cell number, because knocking on a door that far above the street and getting nothing is a wasted run. The North End and the Washington Neighborhood are narrow streets of two-flats and worker cottages with the real entrance around the back off the alley and, frequently, a shared front door with no working buzzer; a unit number and a phone number decide whether the delivery happens. Downtown and the Historic Millwork District are the keypad problem: converted mill buildings and the apartments over the storefronts, where the street door is locked, the buzzer panel is no substitute for a phone number, and a weekday birthday arrives while the recipient is four blocks away at work. Asbury, the Northwest Arterial subdivisions and Key West are the suburban pattern: long driveways, attached garages, no usable porch, nobody using the front door. There a call-ahead beats a doorbell every time. And out in the county — Sageville, Sherrill, Rickardsville, Graf, Balltown along the Great River Road — the mailbox and the house are not in the same place, so the address needs a landmark with it.