Most of the houses in Mayfield Heights were built in a single generation, in the decade or two after the Second World War, and a striking number of them still hold the couple who bought them. That is the fact that shapes anniversary orders in this city. The largest single category of anniversary delivery on this grid is not a hotel suite or a restaurant table — it is a kitchen or dining-room table in a brick postwar house on a street off Ridgebury Road or between Mayfield and Gates Mills Boulevard, ordered by an adult child who now lives in Columbus, Charlotte or Chicago and who has celebrated a lot of these anniversaries from a distance. Thirty-fifth, fortieth, fiftieth, sixtieth. The second-largest category is the couple in their thirties or forties in the condominium and apartment blocks along Marsol Road and the Mayfield corridor, marking a fifth or a tenth, where the flowers are half of a plan that also involves a dinner reservation somewhere along the way. Both of those orders want different things from a florist, and neither of them wants a boxed shipment that arrives flat with a packet of powder. The point of ordering on a local grid is that a designer eight minutes away builds the thing by hand and a driver puts it in someone's hands the same afternoon.
If there is a dinner attached, the geography around Mayfield Heights is unusually good and worth planning the delivery around. Little Italy sits at the far western end of Mayfield Road in Cleveland, about six miles away — the Murray Hill blocks below Lake View Cemetery where Guarino's has been in the same building since 1918, La Dolce Vita keeps its opera nights, and Presti's and Corbo's bakeries supply the cassata cake that has ended a very large number of east-side anniversaries. Southwest of the city, Beachwood's restaurant row runs along Chagrin Boulevard and Richmond Road, with Giovanni's Ristorante on Chagrin and Red the Steakhouse on Richmond anchoring the special-occasion end. Closer in, Legacy Village on Cedar Road in Lyndhurst and Eton Chagrin Boulevard in Woodmere are the walkable evening options. For a date rather than a dinner, Severance Hall and the Cleveland Orchestra are ten minutes west in University Circle, alongside the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Botanical Garden; Playhouse Square downtown is the country's second-largest performing arts center; and Chagrin Falls, ten miles southeast, is the village with a waterfall in the middle of it where half the couples on this grid have taken an anniversary walk. Squire's Castle in the North Chagrin Reservation and the Holden Arboretum in Kirtland handle the photograph end of the day. Our advice on restaurant delivery is unromantic and correct: send the flowers to the house before dinner rather than to the host stand, so nobody spends the evening guarding a bouquet under a table.