Thomas A. Edison lived and worked in West Orange from 1887 until his death at Glenmont,his West Orange estate, in 1931. The tranquility he sought when he moved from Menlo Park remains, but West Orange is no longer the center of manufacturing he helped to create.

Still standing on Lakeside Avenue is the 100-year old research building, now a museum, in which the Wizard of Menlo Park invented the phonograph, perfected the motion picture camera and worked through a maze of ideas that resulted in a prodigious 520 patents. Across the street, in a six story reinforced concrete building where the Edison Company once manufactured batteries, a few small companies remain.

West Orange is otherwise almost completely residential, with quick access to Newark, convenient bus transportation to New York, a train station nearby, and a range of housing prices not matched by many suburban communities.

The most unusual neighborhood in West Orange is Llewellyn Park, a 420-acre reserve of suburban charm, with its own front gates and security force. The community was established by Llewellyn S.Haskell, a wealthy importer, in the 1850's and is thought to be one of the nation's first planned residential communities.

It was in Llewellyn Park, just down Main Street from his lab, that Edison bought Glenmont, a 23-room Queen Anne style mansion on 15 acres. The 160 houses in Llewellyn Park carry a range of price tags as varied as in the rest of West Orange.

West Orange is 12 miles from Manhattan and many residents commute to the city. The busses are easily accessible, with a commuting distance of 50 minutes to the Port Authority. While there is no NJ Transit train station in West Orange, stations are not far away, in Orange.and South Orange, Route 280, an interstate spur linking West Orange with the New Jersey Turnpike, the Holland Tunnel and Route 80, cuts through the community.

Although many of its residents are New York-oriented, West Orange maintains its own identity. There are two shopping centers in town, more than 1,000 acres of dedicated woodlands in two large parks, and several first-class restaurants.West Orange is also home to the Turtle Back Zoo, with more than 750 animals, that is open year-round, the South Mountain ice skating arena and the Edison National Historic site.

In all, West Orange provides access to New York while being agreeably removed from urban clamor. This is just what Edison and his family were searching for when they decided to move to Llewellyn 100 years ago.Later in her years Mrs. Edison often told the story of how her husband offered her the chioce in a stone house on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, or Glenmont in West Orange.

"I could have had either one,' she told a reporter in 1947, the year she died. "But knowing his desire to have one of the greatest laboratories in the country and knowing that he would like the country, we came here. And I didn't even go see the stone house in New York City.

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