Drive west on Marina Boulevard until the retail thins out, the road crosses the freeway and the land flattens into salt grass, and San Leandro ends at the water. That last mile is the part of the city couples keep coming back to: the marina basin at the foot of Monarch Bay Drive, the golf links on Neptune Drive, the Bay Trail running north along the shoreline toward the Oakland Airport runways with the whole San Francisco skyline lying flat across the water. It is not a famous view. It is a local one, and for an anniversary that is usually better — the people getting flowers on this page had their first cheap dinner somewhere along East 14th and have been walking that shoreline path for thirty years since. San Leandro is a city of durable marriages in durable houses. The tract streets of Washington Manor below Marina Boulevard went up after the war, the bungalows of Estudillo Estates and Broadmoor a generation before that, and an unusual share of them are still occupied by the couple who bought them. That shapes the work: a large fraction of anniversary orders here go to a front porch in 94577, 94578 or 94579, at an address the sender has known their whole life, often placed by an adult child from another state for parents celebrating a number that ends in zero.
The rest of the anniversary volume splits between dinner and travel. Downtown San Leandro has become a real evening destination again in the blocks around Parrott Street and Washington Avenue — the Englander has been pouring on Parrott for generations, the Bal Theatre still runs shows on East 14th, and Casa Peralta, the city-owned Spanish-style house and garden on West Estudillo Avenue, hosts weddings and receptions a short walk from all of it. Out at the water, the Marina Inn sits on Monarch Bay Drive. And because the Oakland Airport perimeter is minutes away up Doolittle Drive, a fair number of anniversary deliveries land in the airport-corridor hotels just over the Oakland line, where a couple has taken a room for the night rather than driving home. There is also a whole category of San Leandro anniversary that never touches a restaurant at all. The big round numbers in this city are often celebrated in a hall — a parish room at St. Leander or St. Felicitas, a rented community room, somebody's backyard in Washington Manor with sixty relatives and a folding table of food — and those need a different delivery than a dinner does. For a hall, tell us the event name, the hour the room opens rather than the hour guests arrive, and whether the flowers are meant for a head table, a buffet or the entrance, because a piece that suits one looks wrong at the other two. For a restaurant, the working rule is to send the flowers home, not to the table: a wrapped bouquet is an awkward object at dinner and a great object to walk into afterward. If you do want them at the venue, call ahead yourself, get a name, and give us that name — restaurants accept flowers as a favor, not as a service, and a bouquet with no one expecting it sits behind a host stand.