A birthday order for a Caldwell address resolves to one of three very different doors, and the borough is small enough — a little over a square mile — that a van can reach any of them inside ten minutes of turning off the avenue. The first door is on Bloomfield Avenue itself, Essex County Route 506, the single street carrying the whole commercial life of the borough: storefront after storefront with apartments on the second floor, buzzer panels instead of lobbies, and no doorman anywhere in town. The second is a house on one of the short numbered blocks running off that avenue, where porches sit close to the sidewalk and anything left on one is visible from the street. The third is up the hill into North Caldwell or around the bend of Roseland Avenue into Essex Fells, where the lots get large, the sidewalks stop and a single driveway can run longer than a downtown Caldwell block. Drivers on this side of Essex County navigate by the same marker everyone else does — the Grover Cleveland Birthplace at 207 Bloomfield Avenue, the old Presbyterian manse where the only president born in New Jersey arrived in 1837 while his father held the pulpit next door. It is a working landmark, not a tourist note: tell a shop the address is two blocks past the Birthplace and it lands.
Desk drops here run along two corridors, both minutes from the borough line and neither of them in Caldwell. Eisenhower Parkway in Roseland and Livingston is the white-collar spine of west Essex: Lowenstein Sandler occupies One Lowenstein Drive just off it, the ADP campus sits on ADP Boulevard nearby, and the parkway's low-rise office buildings hold the accounting, insurance and law practices that employ a good share of the Caldwells. Access is from I-280, which means a Friday-afternoon delivery is competing with the same traffic the recipient is about to sit in. The second corridor is Fairfield, where Passaic Avenue, Clinton Road and the Route 46 frontage form one of the larger light-industrial and distribution belts in the county — warehouses and one-story offices with a receiving desk rather than a lobby, and a shipping door that is not the door you want. Caldwell University at 120 Bloomfield Avenue, the Catholic university the Sisters of Saint Dominic of Caldwell founded in 1939, is the borough's own largest employer and sits directly on the main street. Six or seven miles east, the ON3 campus in Nutley and Clifton — the former Hoffmann-La Roche site, now home to the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine and Seton Hall's health sciences campus — is close enough to Apersonaltouch Florist on Franklin Avenue to be an ordinary run. For any of these, give us a floor or suite and a name at the desk; a building number alone stalls at reception.