If you live in Pompton Lakes, you already know the shape of a summer here. Kids on bikes cutting through Hershfield Park, kayaks stacked at the Pompton Lake launch, the smell of somebody's grill drifting across a back fence on Colfax. That part hasn't changed. What has changed, quietly, is the two-block heart of downtown. Wanaque Avenue is being rewired in 2026, one Thursday night and one borough resolution at a time, and most residents haven't stitched the pieces together yet.
This is that stitching. Not a bucket list. A read on what's actually shifting on the avenue you drive down every day.
"Wanaque Avenue is the heart of our downtown and an important gathering place for the community." That's how Mayor Michael Serra framed the borough's newest downtown project back in February. Once you notice the framing, the summer calendar starts to make more sense.
The Thursday nights are the tell
The Pompton Lakes Business Improvement District has been running a Spring & Summer Stroll series on Wanaque Avenue this year, following the Winter Stroll that packed the sidewalks last December. The dates were Thursday, May 21, Thursday, June 18, and the one still on the calendar as of this writing: Thursday, July 16, from 4:00 to 8:00 PM. Free, open, with food vendors, local makers, and music spilling out of the storefronts between the Wanaque and Ringwood intersection and the library.
A stroll series is not, by itself, a big story. Plenty of North Jersey downtowns run them. What matters here is that Pompton Lakes doesn't have a traditional "downtown" in the Ridgewood or Nyack sense. The avenue is a state-route-adjacent commercial spine with 16,000-plus cars a day passing the Towne Square intersection, according to Regency Centers, which owns the shopping center anchoring the south end. Historically that traffic count was the whole business model. What the BID is testing on Thursday nights is whether the same street works as a pedestrian venue for a few hours a week without the cars deciding for it.
If you went in May or June, you already have your answer. If you didn't, July 16 is the last one before Pompton Day season takes over.
Complete Streets is not a slogan this time
The other piece dropped on February 26, 2026, and got buried in the borough news feed. Pompton Lakes was selected, through a competitive application, to participate in the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority's Complete Streets Technical Assistance Program. The scope: a corridor and neighborhood assessment along Wanaque Avenue in the downtown center, looking at walkability, bicycle access, stormwater resilience, and, in the borough's language, overall downtown vitality.
Read that list twice. Stormwater resilience on Wanaque Avenue is not a throwaway phrase in a town where flooding has shaped property decisions for a generation. Passaic County Commissioner John W. Bartlett, quoted in the borough's release, tied the assessment to "safer, healthier and more vibrant downtowns," which is standard commissioner talk, but the mechanism underneath is not standard. NJTPA's technical assistance pays for the engineering and public-engagement work most boroughs can't afford on their own. Whatever comes out of it, curb bump-outs, bike accommodations, drainage retrofits, a redesigned crosswalk at Ringwood Avenue, will be based on documented conditions rather than a council member's hunch.
Here are the four things happening simultaneously on the avenue this summer, in the order a resident notices them:
- ParkMobile is live across more than 200 downtown spaces on Wanaque, Colfax, and Lakeside, so the meter fumble is gone. Coin payment still works at current rates for holdouts.
- The Stroll nights have proven the sidewalks can carry a real crowd between 4 and 8 PM.
- The Complete Streets assessment will document what needs to change to make that a permanent capability instead of a Thursday exception.
- The Pompton Plaza redevelopment is the wild card that will either accelerate or complicate everything above.
Pompton Plaza is smaller than it was, and that matters
The 200 Wanaque Avenue site, known locally as Pompton Plaza, currently houses Escape Room NJ, Rage Room, Hug-a-Mug Café, Cardinal Athletics, and Kids Rule Parties above ground-floor retail. Its redevelopment has been the loudest zoning conversation in the borough for two years running.
The most recent version on the table trims the original ambition significantly. The initial pitch was a roughly $120-million mixed-use complex with 380 apartments. The current proposal is 210 apartments over 50,000 square feet of street-level commercial, with the main residential structure set back about 170 feet from the curb and the overall height reduced by around 30 feet from the earlier 200-foot design, per property owner Vasken Setrakian's statements to the Redevelopment Agency.
Whether you think 210 apartments is too many, too few, or about right, the practical read is this: a smaller footprint, a deeper setback, and a real ground-floor retail plate change what the south end of the avenue would look like from the sidewalk. Combined with a Complete Streets redesign of that same sidewalk, you get a downtown that is planned as a pedestrian environment for the first time since the borough was chartered in 1895.
That is a very different neighborhood story than "Pompton Lakes is a lake town with a Starbucks." It's still both of those things. It's also, as of this summer, a downtown that is being consciously designed instead of inherited.
Where the summer actually lives
None of the above matters if you're just trying to figure out what to do on a Saturday afternoon. The good news is that the avenue works whether or not you care about zoning.
A short walk from any Stroll parking spot:
- Pompton Craft House at 23 Wanaque, with 22 rotating taps and a wall of over 100 whiskeys priced by the taste. It functions as much as a neighborhood living room as a bar, and the outdoor seating is the reason.
- Hug-a-Mug Café inside Pompton Plaza, still the quieter alternative to the Starbucks at 45 Wanaque when you need to actually hear the person across the table.
- Home Towne Pet Shoppe in the Towne Square shopping center, family-owned, staffed by people certified in pet nutrition, which becomes obvious the first time you ask a real question.
- Pompton Lakes Towne Square itself, at 1–55 Wanaque, running since 1963 and quietly the most trafficked corner in the borough.
Off the avenue, the summer routine is the same as it's been. Pompton Lake and the Wanaque and Ramapo Rivers all have public access for shoreline fishing and paddling, and paddleboat, canoe, and kayak rentals are available by the hour on the lake through the warm months. Rotary Park along the lakeshore was redone recently and is the easiest waterfront walk in town. Hershfield Park has the tennis and basketball courts, the dog park, and a playground that a lot of parents rate higher than the fancier options in neighboring towns. The multi-use greenway following the former Morris Canal route connects several of these on foot or bike, and it's the piece the Complete Streets study is most likely to lean on.
The runway to Pompton Day
Every summer in this borough ends the same way, and 2026 will be the 21st edition. Pompton Day in September traditionally opens with a 5K Fun Run and a Fishing Derby, moves into the Plywood Regatta on the lake, a street fair that took over Lakeside Avenue with about 200 food, craft, and art vendors last year, then talent shows, sports competitions, DJs, and the fireworks that close the night. The 20th anniversary drew thousands, per News 12's coverage, and the borough's Recreation Commission is already collecting vendor applications at $70 for a single 10-foot space, $95 for a double, and $125 for food vendors, mailed to 25 Lenox Avenue.
The vendor pricing is not the point. The point is that if you're doing rough mental math on your summer, the Thursday Strolls in May, June, and July hand off to a quieter August, and then the borough goes all-in on Lakeside Avenue for a single day in September. That's the calendar. Everything in between is texture.
What to actually do with this
You don't need to memorize any of it. What's worth walking away with is that the avenue you know is being reshaped on purpose this year, not by accident, and the people making the decisions are asking for public input as part of the Complete Streets process. If you have an opinion on the Ringwood Avenue crosswalk, the drainage at the low points, the width of the sidewalks in front of Towne Square, or the future of the Pompton Plaza site, this is the year to say it out loud rather than at the kitchen table.
And if the avenue's evolution has you starting to think about the house you own on one of the streets that feeds into it, or a home on the other side of the lake you've had one eye on for a while, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches this borough for a living. Anthony Jordan covers Pompton Lakes and the surrounding towns week in and week out. Schedule a consultation or pull a free valuation on your current home when you're ready to talk numbers.
