Flowers for Providence, RI

Frey Florist Ofri fields a familiar Providence order most weeks: roses to a room at Rhode Island Hospital on the Eddy Street campus, then a birthday hand-tie to a College Hill dorm, then something for a Federal Hill anniversary dinner on Atwells — three neighborhoods, three moods, all inside an afternoon. That is the shape of delivery in the capital. The city stacks its errands close: the Eddy Street medical campus in the south, the Brown and RISD hill in the east, the government and hotel cluster around Kennedy Plaza and the Providence Place mall, and the tight three-decker blocks of Elmhurst, Smith Hill, and the West End radiating out. The hard part is rarely distance; it is the one-way grid downtown, the I-95 interchange that knots up at rush hour, and the WaterFire nights when the basin fills and the side streets clog.

Other Rhode Island cities.