Birthday flowers in Palo Alto

Downtown is the opposite problem. The office stock along University Avenue, Lytton Avenue, Hamilton Avenue, Emerson Street and California Avenue is small-footprint and stacked over ground-floor retail: a venture or design or startup office on the second floor above a restaurant, reached through a street door that may be locked, with a suite number that matters more than the street number. The constraint here is parking rather than access. Downtown runs on two-hour metered blocks and permit-only residential streets immediately behind them, and the garages on High, Bryant, Webster and Lytton fill through the middle of the day, so a driver with six stops is circling. Town & Country Village at 855 El Camino Real and the Stanford Shopping Center off Quarry Road are easier — surface lots, obvious storefronts — and they absorb a lot of the retail-and-salon birthday volume. Worth knowing for timing: the Caltrain corridor cuts the city lengthwise along Alma Street, and the at-grade crossings at Churchill Avenue, Meadow Drive and Charleston Road stop traffic on schedule, which is why the Embarcadero and Oregon underpasses carry the cross-town runs.

Residential Palo Alto rewards one extra line in the delivery note more than almost any city on this network, because a large share of its housing stock was not built to be approached from the sidewalk. The Eichler tracts — Greenmeadow off Alma, Fairmeadow, Green Gables, and the flat-roof blocks around Charleston Meadows and Ventura — put the entrance behind a fence or inside a private atrium, with the visible frontage being a carport and a blank wall. A driver standing in the right driveway cannot always see a door. North of downtown, Old Palo Alto, Crescent Park and Professorville run to deep lots, tall hedges, long driveways and house numbers mounted where a mature magnolia has grown over them; Professorville's streets are named for writers — Emerson, Cowper, Bryant, Waverley, Byron, Channing, Homer, Melville — and a runner one block off is genuinely lost rather than approximately right. College Terrace names its grid for colleges instead, Yale through Oberlin and Amherst and Wellesley, and adds traffic diverters that make a straight approach impossible. In Midtown, Palo Verde, Barron Park and along the El Camino Real and Alma Street apartment corridors, the thing that actually determines success is a call-box name and a unit number.

Stanford birthdays are their own category, and the campus is not addressable the way the city is. A student lives in a residence — Wilbur, Stern, Florence Moore, Branner, Toyon, Roble, the Escondido Village graduate towers, Munger for the law and business students — not at a numbered house on a public street, and the reliable handoff is the residence front desk with the student's full name, not a room number scrawled on a card. The quarter calendar matters too: an undergraduate birthday in late December, most of March, or any time between mid-June and late September may find the dorm closed and the recipient in another state, so confirm they are on campus before sending. Off campus, the teenage birthdays run to Palo Alto High School at 50 Embarcadero Road and Gunn High School at 780 Arastradero Road, where the front office will accept a delivery but will not usually pull a student out of class for it, and Castilleja on Bryant Street. Younger parties gather at Rinconada Park and the Junior Museum and Zoo on Middlefield Road, at Mitchell Park and the Magical Bridge playground, and at the Cubberley Community Center on Middlefield.