Anniversary flowers in Naperville

Naperville built its Riverwalk in 1981 for the city's hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, and four decades later that brick path along the DuPage River is where a startling share of this city's marriages were photographed — under the covered bridge, at the fountain, on the steps below Moser Tower with the Millennium Carillon overhead. Which means Naperville anniversaries tend to be observed in the same square mile where they started. A couple married at SS. Peter and Paul downtown will very often mark the date with dinner four blocks away and a walk they have taken every year since. That geography is useful when you are sending flowers from out of town, because it narrows the question to two addresses: the house, or the room downtown where the evening happens. It also sets a trap. Downtown Naperville in June is dense with graduation parties from the high schools and from North Central College, the Riverwalk paths fill on any warm weekend, and the parking decks around Jackson and Chicago Avenue back up from late afternoon. A driver carrying a vase into that on a Saturday at six is going to walk the last two blocks. Morning is the better slot for an anniversary, almost always, and not only for traffic reasons: flowers that are already on the kitchen island when the day starts get looked at for twelve hours instead of two.

The hotel list is short and specific, and each one behaves differently. Hotel Indigo Naperville Riverwalk at 120 Water Street sits inside the Water Street District at the east end of the Riverwalk — the most walkable address in the city and the one most often booked for a local anniversary night, with a front desk that will hold a delivery and place it in the room if housekeeping has already turned it. Hotel Arista at CityGate Centre on the Route 59 side of 60563 is the upscale choice on the western edge, close to the tollway and easy for a driver to reach without touching downtown at all. The Naperville Marriott on North Naper Boulevard and Embassy Suites on Abriter Court both serve the corporate corridor and handle deliveries through a bell desk. The Hilton Lisle/Naperville on Corporate West Drive is a few minutes east. For a milestone weekend, plenty of Naperville couples drive north up the Fox instead — the Herrington Inn in Geneva and Hotel Baker in St. Charles, the 1928 landmark on the river, are the two classic western-suburb anniversary destinations, and a delivery that far north deserves a narrowed window rather than an all-day one. On every hotel order, three fields do the work: the guest surname exactly as the reservation was made, the check-in time, and a phone number. Without a check-in time a front desk will accept the flowers at eleven in the morning and set them behind the counter, and a bouquet that has spent six hours in a lobby is not the gift you paid for.

Restaurants are where anniversary deliveries most often go wrong, so here is the honest version. Naperville's downtown dining is concentrated on Main, Washington and Jackson — Meson Sabika, the tapas house in the old Willoway Manor on Aurora Avenue, Sullivan's Steakhouse on South Main, Hugo's Frog Bar & Fish House, Catch 35 on South Washington — and every one of those rooms is busiest at exactly the hour an anniversary table is booked. A vase arriving mid-service has nowhere to live: it blocks the pass, it gets moved twice, and a host who was not warned will put it in a coat closet. If you want flowers at the table, the arrangement has to be small, it has to arrive before the dinner rush rather than during it, and somebody has to have told the restaurant. The alternative we recommend far more often: deliver to the house that morning, let the bouquet be the first thing in the day, and let the restaurant handle dinner. If the couple lives in 60564 or 60565 and both work, ask for the last window instead — the BNSF crowd is not home before roughly a quarter to seven, and the Route 59 and 75th Street corridors are at their worst in the hour before that.