The American Dream Lawsuit Won't Reopen a Single Store in Paramus on Sunday

Drive through Paramus on a Sunday afternoon and the parking lots tell the story before anything else does. Garden State Plaza sits nearly empty. Paramus Park's nine free lots, usually a scramble by Saturday afternoon, sit mostly open. Bergen Town Center's storefronts are lit but locked. It is the same six days a week: traffic on Route 4 and Route 17, a hunt for parking at IKEA or Nordstrom. Then Sunday arrives and the whole retail corridor, one of the highest-grossing zip codes in the country, goes still.

Meanwhile, a short drive away in East Rutherford, American Dream is doing brisk business selling exactly the kind of merchandise Paramus can't touch on a Sunday. That contradiction has been in the local news for over a year now, ever since Paramus filed suit against the mall's developers, Bergen County, East Rutherford, and the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority. As of the most recent public reporting, the case is still working its way through Bergen County court.

Most people following the story assume it's a referendum on whether Paramus itself might loosen up. It isn't. Win or lose, nothing about a Sunday in Paramus changes. That's the part worth understanding if you live here and have been wondering when, or whether, your town's Sundays will ever look different.

Two rules are doing the work of one

Most residents talk about "the blue laws" as a single thing. It's actually two layers, and the layer that applies inside Paramus borders is the stricter one.

Bergen County's law, which covers every town in the county, blocks the sale of specific merchandise categories on Sundays: clothing, furniture, building and lumber supplies, and household or office appliances. That's why a store like Costco can technically stay open, it just can't ring up a couch.

Paramus went further. Since 1968, the borough's own code has banned nearly all "worldly employment" on Sundays, not just a list of restricted products. The exceptions are narrow:

• Grocery stores
• Gas stations
• Pharmacies
• Hotels
• Restaurants
• Entertainment venues

Everything else on the retail side stays dark. The ordinance's language is broad enough that, read literally, it even prohibits work performed inside your own home on a Sunday. Nobody is enforcing that part. What gets enforced, consistently, is the commercial corridor: the malls, the big boxes, the furniture showrooms that make Paramus one of the densest retail concentrations in the state.

The local rule traces back to the same year Garden State Plaza and the old Bergen Mall went up, in 1957, when officials worried the two new shopping centers would turn Route 4 and Route 17 into a permanent traffic jam. Voters have had multiple chances to undo it since then and haven't. County-wide repeal votes failed in 1980 and again in 1993, the second time by a 2-to-1 margin.

What's actually open, and what only looks open

Here's what a Sunday drive through the retail corridor looks like right now, business by business:

Even the biggest names in the corridor comply without exception. IKEA, a chain built around Sunday furniture shopping in most of the country, closes its Paramus doors every week. Nordstrom does the same. There's no gray area for the malls themselves.

BJ's is the interesting middle case. When the wholesale club opened at the Routes 4/17 junction, its Sunday hours raised the same question American Dream is now facing in court: can a big-box retailer that sells both food and non-food items stay open? The answer, worked out years ago, was yes, with conditions. BJ's is permitted to open on Sundays but only to sell food and basic necessities, and the store is physically laid out to block customer access to the merchandise categories that remain off-limits. If you've shopped there on a Sunday and noticed certain aisles taped off or gated, that's not a stocking issue. That's the blue law, built into the floor plan.

Why the lawsuit changes nothing here

American Dream's position in the lawsuit is that Bergen County's blue laws don't apply to it at all, because the mall sits on land owned by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, not on land governed by county or borough zoning. Paramus disagrees, and its complaint accuses American Dream and its tenants of violating the law hundreds if not thousands of times since the mall started opening retail stores on Sundays in early 2024.

Mayor Chris DiPiazza has been direct about what's actually at stake for the borough:

"This puts our shopping centers, our malls, our retailers at a disadvantage."

Bergen County Executive Jim Tedesco has made a similar point publicly, framing it as a fairness question rather than a push to change the underlying rule:

"Why should they be able to open, and nobody else can open?"

Neither official is arguing that Paramus's own Sunday closures should end. The entire case is about closing a loophole for a mall in a different town, not about opening one for Paramus. If Paramus wins, American Dream has to close on Sundays like everyone else in the county already does. If Paramus loses, the borough's own ordinance stays exactly as written, because the borough's ordinance was never the thing on trial. Either outcome leaves Garden State Plaza, Paramus Park, and Bergen Town Center exactly where they are every Sunday: dark.

The workaround residents already use

None of this is new information to anyone who has actually needed a couch, a pair of jeans, or a new appliance on a Sunday in Paramus. The practical options haven't changed in years:

1. Cross a county or state line. Passaic County has no Sunday retail restrictions, and Palisades Center across the New York border in West Nyack is open all seven days, about 20 minutes from Paramus.
2. Order online. E-commerce isn't touched by a county ordinance written before it existed.
3. Stick to what's already open. Restaurants, pharmacies, gas stations, and grocery stores in Paramus run a normal Sunday schedule, and entertainment venues are exempt too.
4. Wait until Monday. For a lot of households, that's simply the trade they've made for a quieter Sunday.

That last option is the one that tends to get lost in coverage of the lawsuit. The traffic argument that justified the 1957 ordinance is still the argument residents make today, and it's the reason repeal efforts have failed twice at the ballot box. A closed Sunday in a town with three of Bergen County's five major malls means one day a week without gridlock on Route 4 and Route 17. That's a trade-off some households value and others resent, but it's a trade-off Paramus has voted to keep, not one that's being imposed on it from outside.

The takeaway for anyone living here

The American Dream case will eventually resolve one way or another, and it's worth watching if you're curious how a state-land exemption argument plays out in New Jersey courts. But it's not a bellwether for what Sunday looks like inside Paramus. That question was settled by voters decades ago and reaffirmed every time a repeal effort has come up since. The corridor will keep closing on Sundays regardless of what happens in East Rutherford, and the workarounds residents already use, the county line, the online order, the Monday errand run, will keep being the workarounds.

If you're weighing a move within Bergen County, or just trying to understand how a town's local ordinances shape daily life here in ways a listing sheet never will, Derik Palmieri can walk you through what makes Paramus, and the towns around it, actually function day to day. Schedule a Free Market Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.