What's Actually Happening in Paramus This Summer
July 9, 2026
July 9, 2026
Drive Route 17 on a Tuesday afternoon and Paramus looks like what outsiders think it is: a corridor of parking lots, a place people come to buy things and leave. Come back on a Friday night in July and the town runs on a different clock. The retail traffic thins out around eight, the zoo lights dim, and a few hundred residents settle onto blankets at Van Saun County Park with folding chairs and a cooler.
The interesting shift this year is that the mall everyone else uses as a waypoint is turning into an evening address, and the county park most families think of as a weekend obligation has a dated summer schedule worth putting on the fridge. Here is what the next two months in Paramus actually look like if you already live here.
Bergen County brought back its Movies & Music in the Park series for 2026, and Van Saun County Park at 216 Forest Avenue is carrying most of the lineup. Of the 25 screenings and concerts spread across four county parks this summer, eleven film nights are landing at Van Saun.
The Van Saun schedule, per the Bergen County Executive's office:
| Date | Film | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Fri, Jul 10 | Miracle | PG |
| Fri, Jul 17 | Sketch | PG |
| Fri, Jul 24 | Goat | PG |
| Fri, Jul 29 | Tron: Ares | PG |
| Wed, Aug 5 | Superman | PG-13 |
| Fri, Aug 7 | The SpongeBob Movie: Search for the SquarePants | PG |
Admission is zero. Parking is free in the park lots. The practical thing to know if you have not gone before: the good grass real estate on the small slope facing the screen fills in by about a half hour before dusk, and the splash pad closes at 6:30 PM, so if you are bringing kids the cleanest routine is splash pad, dinner packed in a cooler, movie.
That splash pad, by the way, is running 10 AM to 6:30 PM straight through the summer heat according to the Bergen County Parks page, and it is one of the few free water-play options in this stretch of Bergen without a membership gate.
The tenant announcements out of Urban Edge in late April were the kind of update most residents would miss unless they follow trade press. The mall added six new signings, and the mix says something about where the property is heading.
Reporting from ROI-NJ and NJBIZ noted that most of these are expected to open by the end of 2026, with Tatte the notable outlier a year further out.
Look at that list against the anchors it will sit next to at Bergen Town Center: Whole Foods, Target, Nordstrom Rack, Cava, Ruth's Chris. The property already generates more than 11 million visits a year per Urban Edge's own figures cited in NJBIZ. What the new leases add is a specific category of tenant, boutique fitness plus small-format bakery and coffee, that pulls visitors before and after retail hours rather than during them. This is why the mall parking lots stay busier past nine now than they did five years ago.
For a resident, the more useful read is this: two of these six are second locations for regional operators, not corporate rollouts. Nail Art Spa's Hackensack owners chose Paramus for their expansion. That is a small but real signal about who is betting on this specific piece of ground.
If you have driven past the former Paramus Lighting Company site next to the shuttered Bahama Breeze at Bergen Town Center and wondered what was going in, the answer is a 15,000-square-foot Tommy's Tavern + Tap with a covered rooftop, more than 400 seats, three bars, and a 2,000-square-foot ground-level outdoor area with firepits and lounge seating. Triple T Hospitality CEO Tim Selcov confirmed those specs to Daily Voice after the project cleared full planning board approval in December.
The timeline: groundbreaking late spring 2026, opening early spring 2027. So if you are looking at that lot this July and August, you are looking at the last months of it as a construction fence rather than a rooftop bar. Worth knowing if you were counting on it as a summer plan.
The second big off-in-the-distance opening is Restaurant Depot's 91,135-square-foot lease at 577 Winters Avenue, off Route 17. This is a members-only wholesale food supplier, not a restaurant, so it will not change where you eat. It will change something else: the small independent restaurant operators in Bergen who currently drive to South Hackensack for wholesale product will have a much shorter run once it opens in late 2026, per Real Estate NJ. Backfilling an existing big box, as the Catalyst Real Estate Partners brokers noted, gets it open faster than ground-up construction would have.
That has second-order effects on the small food businesses inside a ten-minute drive of Winters Avenue, which is a longer list in Paramus than most people realize.
For families with kids not yet school-age, the summer default in Paramus keeps being Van Saun, and it is worth naming why.
The park is 130-plus acres. Inside it: the Bergen County Zoo, which charges admission May through October and holds the summer educational programs like Zoo Kids and Zoo Babies that residents book out weeks ahead; a working carousel; the Safari Express miniature train; pony rides; the splash pad already mentioned; and enough shaded picnic tables that you can arrive without a reservation on a Saturday and still find one at the north end. Ride pricing is on the order of $2 for the carousel and train and $3 for pony rides, from resident reports.
The park's operational quirks are worth learning:
The carousel and train close by about 4:30 PM most days, well before park closing. Plan those rides for the front of your visit, not the back.
If you have out-of-town family visiting between now and August, the tight itinerary that has always worked is zoo in the morning, carousel and train before mid-afternoon, splash pad in the last hour before dinner, movie under the sky on the right Friday. Nothing about that routine requires driving out of town.
Put the pieces together. Paramus in the summer of 2026 has a free, dated public program running out of its largest county park, a mall that is adding small-format food and fitness tenants at a faster clip than it has in years, a signature restaurant-and-rooftop project a year from opening, and a wholesale food supply operation about to shorten the supply chain for every independent kitchen in Bergen. Two of those four are visible on the street this month. Two are still fenced off.
For residents, that means the version of Paramus that shows up on a first-time visitor's list, the highway shopping stop, is not the version you are living in this summer. The evening version is denser, more programmed, and more local than the reputation suggests. Learn the movie schedule, learn which of the new tenants are second locations for people you already recognize, and you have a better answer than most of your neighbors when someone visiting from the city asks what there is to do here on a Friday night.
If you are thinking about how the neighborhood changes are shaping the value of a home you own here, or you have been keeping an eye on Paramus from the outside and want a straight read on where the market sits against these developments, Palmieri Properties is available for a free market consultation. Schedule a conversation and get the version of the local picture that does not come from a search result.
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