Birthday flowers in Morgantown

The other half of Morgantown birthday volume is workplace, and the thing to understand is that West Virginia University is not one address. It is three campuses on three separate pieces of ground, and a driver who is given only the department name will pick the wrong one. Downtown campus is the original ground around Woodburn Circle, Stewart Hall and the Mountainlair, walking distance from Coomb's block on High Street. Evansdale is a mile and a half north up the hill — engineering, the Creative Arts Center, agricultural sciences, the Coliseum. Health Sciences is further out on the same ridge, built around the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center and J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital. Those three are connected by a driverless people mover that Morgantown has run since the seventies and that no other American city has, and every so often somebody asks whether the flowers can ride it. They cannot: the PRT is a passenger system, and a birthday bouquet crosses this town on the same clogged two-lane roads as everything else. Give a building name and a street, not a mail stop. The same discipline applies to the federal employers — NIOSH on Willowdale Road and the National Energy Technology Laboratory on Collins Ferry Road are badge-controlled sites where the delivery ends at a screened lobby desk, and the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services complex down toward Clarksburg and Bridgeport, well inside the 60-mile radius, is the strictest version of that rule in the state.

Then there is the porch route, and Morgantown's is a hill route. The town is wedged between the Monongahela on one side and Chestnut Ridge on the other, so it built upward instead of outward: South Park's brick streets and deep Victorian porches on the slope below Walnut, Wiles Hill and Woodburn and First Ward on the grades above downtown, Greenmont along the low ground by Deckers Creek, Jerome Park, then the flatter and newer north side — Suncrest and the Van Voorhis corridor, Star City on the river — and the separate municipalities that a delivery still counts as Morgantown: Westover across the bridge, Granville out by the University Town Centre, Sabraton east on Earl Core Road, and the Cheat Lake shoreline off I-68. Two practical notes. Half of South Park cannot be parked in front of, so a call-ahead is worth more there than anywhere else in the city. And Morgantown winter is not a decorative fact: a bouquet abandoned on a cold step in January has an hour in it at most, so from November through March either ask for the call-ahead or nominate a neighbour who will be in, rather than settling for a doorstep drop.