Metairie has no downtown, which is the first thing to understand about sending a birthday bouquet here. There is no city hall to aim at and no central business district — this is unincorporated Jefferson Parish, roughly 140,000 people laid out on a flat grid, and the working hours of the place are split between three separate office clusters. Heritage Plaza rises at 111 Veterans Memorial Boulevard in the middle of the retail spine. The Lakeway Center towers stand on North Causeway Boulevard beside the I-10 interchange, filled with law, insurance, accounting and energy-services floors and fed every morning by the commute over the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. One Galleria Boulevard anchors the third cluster in 70001 with the Sheraton Metairie next door at 4 Galleria Blvd. Add the medical office buildings lining Houma Boulevard by East Jefferson General, the Elmwood offices and warehouses out on Citrus Boulevard, and the retail and management payroll around Lakeside Shopping Center at Veterans and Causeway, and you have the full daytime map. A birthday drop needs the building name, the floor and the suite — not a district, because there isn't one.
The residential half of Metairie birthday volume runs through postwar subdivisions, and the housing stock decides the handoff. This is a suburb of 1950s and 1960s brick ranches with carports rather than the raised porches of Orleans Parish, and the practical destination is a side door or a storm door under the carport roof — which is fine, since a carport is shade. Old Metairie and the oak-lined streets off Metairie Road in 70005 are the oldest and priciest blocks, sitting on the natural ridge that gives the neighbourhood its high ground. Bonnabel Place, Metairie Club Gardens, Bissonet Plaza and Airline Park fill the middle of the parish; Bucktown sits at the lakefront end of the 17th Street Canal where the fishing boats used to tie up; Fat City packs apartments and condos into the blocks behind Veterans near Causeway. For any apartment, condo or a suite address the unit letter matters — the live grid's own Myonly Florist address, 4931 W Esplanade Ave Ste C, is a good reminder of how West Esplanade numbering works. And be precise about the town: an address can read Metairie on the envelope and still sit four ZIPs and several miles from where you pictured it, so send the ZIP with it — house numbers on the western avenues start over once the street has crossed into Kenner.