When the desk is here, it is usually at one of a recognizable set of employers, and these are the drops that go smoothly. Consumer Reports has had its headquarters on Truman Avenue for decades and is one of the few genuinely large white-collar staffs inside the city limits. Kawasaki Rail Car assembles subway cars on Wells Avenue. Greyston Bakery, the open-hiring bakery on Alexander Street, runs production shifts. Yonkers City Hall sits at 40 South Broadway and the municipal offices around Getty Square go with it. The two hospitals — Saint Joseph's Medical Center at 127 South Broadway and St. John's Riverside on North Broadway — are among the largest employers in the city, and a nurse's birthday is a shift-time delivery rather than a nine-to-five one. Yonkers Public Schools is the largest district in Westchester and puts staff in buildings across every neighborhood. Then there is the retail and office belt along Central Park Avenue: Cross County Center at the parkway junction, Ridge Hill up near the Thruway, the Executive Boulevard office park, Stew Leonard's, and MGM Empire City Casino on Yonkers Avenue, where shifts run around the clock and the security desk, not the recipient, takes the handoff.
Two practical warnings come out of that map. First, straight-line distance lies when a river is in the middle of it: the New Jersey shops are nine and twelve miles away on paper and a bridge crossing in reality, which means the George Washington Bridge or a run up to the Mario Cuomo Bridge, and neither is a distance you want inside a same-day window. For a Yonkers birthday, the shops that matter are the ones on this side of the Hudson. Second, the parkways do not help a delivery van. Commercial vehicles are barred from the Bronx River, Saw Mill River, Cross County and Sprain Brook parkways, so a marked van covering this city runs Central Park Avenue, Broadway, Yonkers Avenue, McLean Avenue, Midland and Tuckahoe Road, or else the Thruway — surface roads, in a city built on steep hills between the Hudson and the Bronx River. That is why a two-mile Yonkers delivery and a two-mile flat-grid delivery are not the same errand, and why the shops closest to the recipient are worth choosing on proximity alone.