Birthday flowers in New Orleans

Five of those six benches sit in Jefferson Parish and one sits in Orleans, so a New Orleans birthday delivery is usually a cross-parish run and the route matters. Drivers coming into the city take Jefferson Highway or Airline Drive to Carrollton, the Earhart Expressway into Broadmoor and Uptown, Metairie Road across the 17th Street Canal into Lakeview, or I-10 to the Canal Street and Carrollton exits. Weekday birthday volume concentrates downtown, where the office map is compact enough to walk. Entergy Corporation keeps its headquarters at 639 Loyola Avenue in 70113, a block from the Superdome. The Hancock Whitney Center at 701 Poydras — built as One Shell Square and still the tallest building in Louisiana — anchors the Poydras tower row along with the Pan-American Life Center at 601 Poydras, the Energy Centre at 1100 Poydras, Benson Tower at 1450 Poydras and Place St. Charles at 201 St. Charles Avenue. The city's law firms cluster in the same few lobbies: Jones Walker at 201 St. Charles, Phelps Dunbar in Canal Place at 365 Canal Street, Stone Pigman Walther Wittmann at 909 Poydras, plus Adams and Reese, Liskow & Lewis, Chaffe McCall and Deutsch Kerrigan. The Port of New Orleans administration on Port of New Orleans Place and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on Convention Center Boulevard round out the CBD. Jefferson Parish has its own weekday belt — the Lakeway Center towers and the office row along Causeway Boulevard and Veterans Memorial Boulevard in Metairie, Laitram in Harahan, Zatarain's in Gretna and the Elmwood business park, all closer to five of the six benches than downtown is.

Evenings and weekends the same studios turn residential, and New Orleans housing stock changes how a handoff works. Mid-City, Bayou St. John and Esplanade Ridge (70119) sit on top of the centroid — raised shotguns and camelbacks with real front steps, and a lot of double shotguns where the address ends in A or B. Getting that letter into the order is the difference between a bouquet on the right porch and a bouquet next door. Uptown, the Garden District and the Irish Channel (70115) and Carrollton, Riverbend and the Black Pearl (70118) run the same pattern on bigger lots, often behind a side gate with a latch. Lakeview and Lake Vista (70124), Gentilly, Lake Terrace and Lake Vista's edge (70122), Broadmoor (70125), Algiers Point (70114) and New Orleans East (70126 through 70129) are all standard porch routes. The CBD and Warehouse District (70112, 70130) and the French Quarter, Treme, Marigny and Bywater (70116, 70117) are the hard ones: one-way streets, almost no legal loading, gated carriageways, courtyard apartments whose numbers are not visible from the sidewalk, and buzzer panels with no name on them. Across the parish line, Metairie (70001 through 70006), Old Metairie and Bucktown (70005), Harahan and River Ridge (70123), Kenner (70062, 70065), Gretna and Terrytown (70053, 70056) and Chalmette and Arabi (70043) are all inside the ring. The North Shore is not — Slidell, Mandeville and Covington sit beyond the 18-mile radius across Lake Pontchartrain.