Love Romance flowers in El Segundo

Romance in El Segundo happens on foot, which makes it strange for Los Angeles. This is a three-and-a-half-square-mile city with a single ZIP code, and from a house on Virginia Street a couple can walk to dinner on Main Street, to a drink on Richmond, and then out to the western edge of the grid where the land drops toward the sand — no freeway, no valet, no forty-minute drive to be somewhere nice. The shoreline itself is unlike the rest of the South Bay: there is no pier and no boardwalk here, because the Chevron refinery and the power plant hold most of the frontage along Vista del Mar, so the beach at the bottom of the bluff stays quiet in a way Manhattan and Hermosa never do. The city also faces due west with nothing in front of it, which means that on a clear evening the sun goes down into open water at the end of almost every street, and that a standing Friday-night plan in this town can be as simple as walking eight blocks. Downtown fills in the rest: restaurant blocks on Main Street and Richmond Street, the brewery, the El Segundo Museum of Art's single rotating room, and Old Town Music Hall, where classic and silent films still run with live Mighty Wurlitzer accompaniment and where a lot of second dates in this ZIP have happened. Ten minutes south on Sepulveda is Manhattan Beach's downtown above the pier, which is where couples go when they want the ocean in the window and are willing to fight for parking.

What that geography does to a flower order is mostly good news and one complication. The good news is delivery: west of Sepulveda Boulevard the city is an ungated grid of small-lot single-family blocks — tree-named streets running west toward the bluff, crossed by short north-south ones — with covered porches, service alleys and almost no gate codes. The marine layer that sits over this coast most mornings also keeps temperatures down, so cut flowers left in shade at midday are not cooked by five the way they are inland. The complication is that a romantic delivery is frequently a surprise, and a surprise left on a porch in a town where everyone walks past everyone's porch is a surprise with a short shelf life. Ask for a handoff, not a doorstep drop, and say so in the order notes. The other exception is the east side, where the apartment stock near the Metro C Line platforms at Mariposa, El Segundo and Douglas is mid-rise rental with callboxes, package rooms and no street parking to speak of: a unit number and an entry code turn that into a ten-minute delivery instead of a failed attempt and a phone call.