Homestead is one city with four completely different delivery geographies, and a birthday order succeeds or fails on which of the four the recipient lives in. Historic Downtown, ZIP 33030, is the easy one: a straight grid of Krome Avenue, Washington Avenue, Flagler Avenue, Mowry Drive and Lucy Street, storefronts with apartments over them, the restored Seminole Theatre on North Krome, Losner Park across the street, and Homestead Station a couple of blocks off. Numbered doors, curb parking, a driver in and out in four minutes. East of the Turnpike the geography changes entirely — Keys Gate in 33035 and the Malibu Bay blocks are guardhouse communities wrapped around a golf course, where the same street name curves back on itself three times and the correct instruction is not the street number but the gate, the callbox name and which loop. North along US-1, Leisure City, Naranja and Princeton in 33032 and 33033 are older single-story residential blocks with carports and jalousie windows, plus mobile-home communities where the lot number is the real address and the street number is nearly useless. West, past Krome Avenue, the Redland and Silver Palm in 33031 and 33034 are five-acre and ten-acre parcels of avocado, mango, mamey, lychee and longan, palm and ornamental nurseries, an unpaved drive, a dog, and a mailbox out at the road a long way from anybody who can sign. Tell us which of those four you are sending to and the order stops being a guess.
The desk-drop half of Homestead birthday volume runs through a short list of large employers, and the useful thing to know is which of them a driver can actually walk into. Homestead Hospital — Baptist Health South Florida's campus out on Baptist Way, east of the Turnpike past Campbell Drive — is the city's biggest shift-work employer, and a birthday arrangement for someone on a twelve-hour shift belongs at the department or nurses' station with the recipient's full name and unit on the card, not at a patient room. The College Terrace campus of Miami Dade College, and the front counters at South Dade Senior High and Homestead Senior High, will take in an arrangement for a teacher or staff member, which is how most class-funded and department-funded gifts arrive. The Redland packing houses and nurseries take deliveries all winter, and a bouquet handed over between pallets during the January avocado and vegetable season is an ordinary Homestead scene. Two of the city's most recognizable worksites are the exact opposite: Florida Power and Light's Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station, out past Palm Drive toward Biscayne Bay, and Homestead Air Reserve Base on the east side, home of the 482nd Fighter Wing, are both access-controlled sites where a flower delivery does not clear the gate. For anybody working either one, send to the house. The same is true of Homestead Correctional Institution west of town, which accepts no flower deliveries at all. Homestead-Miami Speedway on Speedway Boulevard is workable on an ordinary week and a different proposition on a race weekend, when the southeast corner of the city fills up and the access roads run one direction.