Anniversary flowers in Riverside

Riverside has an unusual advantage for anniversary orders: the city's romantic center of gravity is a single building, and it has been one for well over a century. The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa at 3649 Mission Inn Avenue — a National Historic Landmark that grew out of the Miller family's 1876 Glenwood Cottage, which Frank Miller expanded into the block-swallowing Spanish Mission Revival pile that now defines downtown — is where a large share of this city's anniversaries are marked. Richard Nixon married Pat Ryan there in 1940; Ronald and Nancy Reagan honeymooned there; the St. Francis of Assisi Chapel on the property, with its gold-leaf Mexican altar, has been a Riverside wedding venue for generations, which means a great many Inland Empire couples have an anniversary date tied to that address and come back to it. The hotel's own restaurants, Duane's Prime Steaks & Seafood and the courtyard-side Las Campanas, absorb a lot of the dinner volume that follows. From late November through early January the whole block turns into the Festival of Lights, with the switch-on the evening after Thanksgiving — spectacular, and worth knowing about if your anniversary falls in December, because streets around Mission Inn Avenue and Main get congested or closed and an afternoon delivery window beats an evening one.