Birthday flowers in Lafayette

Greater Lafayette is one market cut in half by water, and a birthday order is where that geography shows up most plainly. East of the Wabash, the city climbs away from the levee: Main, Columbia and Ferry Streets rise from the riverfront past the Tippecanoe County Courthouse and its ring of law offices, title companies and county departments, then into the Victorian blocks of Ninth Street Hill and the Centennial neighborhood, then out to the postwar grid of Highland Park, the east side around Creasy Lane and Market Square, and the newer south side along Teal Road and Veterans Memorial Parkway toward McCutcheon. West of the river, West Lafayette is mostly Purdue and the people who work for it — residence halls, the rebuilt State Street corridor and the Third Street academic buildings, the apartment stacks of Chauncey Village and the Levee, and the quieter subdivisions out past Happy Hollow toward Hills and Dales. Three bridges carry the traffic between them: the Main Street Bridge, the Harrison Street Bridge at State Street, and the Sagamore Parkway crossing to the north, plus the John T. Myers Pedestrian Bridge from Riehle Plaza, which is for walkers and not for a van. A designer working a birthday list on a Friday is sequencing river crossings, and class change on State Street is a real constraint on that sequence. Children's birthdays add a third pull, toward Columbian Park on the near-south side — the zoo, the Tropicanoe Cove pool, the rebuilt Loeb Stadium — where a shelter booking and a house address often turn up on the same afternoon, and in July toward the Tippecanoe County Fairgrounds on Teal Road, which absorbs a week of them. None of this is exotic routing. It is a city that sprawls east toward the interstate and keeps half its recipients on the far side of a bridge.