Montvale's Summer Weekend Now Runs On A Craig Road / Chestnut Ridge / Market Street Triangle

Last August, the DePiero farm stand shut its doors after 101 years, and for a few weeks it looked like Montvale had lost its Saturday anchor. That reading turned out to be wrong. What actually happened is that the borough absorbed the farm, the Chestnut Ridge Shopping Center filed for a full retenanting, and the Shoppes at DePiero Farm kept adding upscale tenants. Nine months later, the summer weekend has quietly reorganized itself around three addresses that most residents still treat as separate errands.

The shift I'm watching this July is that all three sit inside a ten-minute drive of each other and now function as one loop. The Craig Road farm is the morning stop. Chestnut Ridge is the mid-day stop, even though it is mid-renovation. Market Street handles dinner. If you run them as a triangle instead of three independent trips, the summer feels different than it did in 2024.

Craig Road Is Effectively A New Place

The 8.4 acres the DePiero family sold to the borough for $5.15 million are back in operation, but the operator and the program are new. On October 28, 2025, the Borough Council voted unanimously to award a 20-year lease to D'Agostino Landscaping & Irrigation of West Nyack at $43,200 annually with a 2% yearly escalator, well above the two competing bids of $12,000 each from Demarest Farms and a private bidder. The lease took effect January 1, 2026, so this is the first full summer under the new arrangement.

Three things are worth knowing before you drive over:

• The greenhouses and farm stand are back in use under D'Agostino, which sits about seven miles away and has been vetted for agricultural operations under the lease terms.
• Roughly one acre has been carved out for a community garden with 4-by-8-foot plots, aimed at townhouse residents who don't have yard space of their own.
• Town-sponsored programming runs on the property. The inaugural Town Day at the Farm drew an estimated 1,500 residents on October 18, 2025, and the borough spent about $10,000 of a $30,000 capital appropriation supporting it.

The practical read for a summer Saturday morning: the site works as a produce-and-flowers stop plus a walk-around, not just a drive-by. It also means the DePiero name on the shopping plaza at 210 Market Street and the working farm on Craig Road are now two different operations under two different owners, a distinction most residents still collapse in conversation.

Chestnut Ridge Is A Construction-Phase Destination

The 1–30 Chestnut Ridge Road center is the address in the most visible flux. UB Chestnut LLC's variance application went to the Planning Board on December 2, 2025, and the hearing continued into the January 20, 2026 session, where testimony focused on redesigning the driveway to handle Trader Joe's tractor-trailers, which the Fresh Market layout could not accommodate. The public transcript sits on the borough's own site if you want to see the traffic engineer's numbers on Woodmont Drive.

The proposed tenant mix that generated the hearing:

None of these were open on July 4. That is the useful piece of information, because it means the corridor is currently operating in a strange in-between state where the existing Fresh Market is still running while its replacement moves through site-plan review, and the fast-casual pad hasn't broken ground. If you have been avoiding the plaza because you assumed it was already torn up, it isn't. And if you have been waiting for the CAVA and Shake Shack to open before you go back, you will be waiting past this summer.

The reason Chestnut Ridge belongs in a summer post rather than a coming-soon roundup is that this is the last summer it will look the way it does now. Drop Fitness, the existing eateries, and Fresh Market are the current draw. By next July the pad site and the grocery renovation will have changed the pedestrian pattern inside the parking field.

Market Street Handles The Evening

The Shoppes at DePiero Farm, anchored by Bergen County's first Wegmans, is the mature leg of the triangle and the piece that hasn't changed much. What did change is that Fleming's Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar opened at 210 Market Street in May 2025, giving the plaza a full-service dinner option at a price point the center did not previously carry. Fleming's sits near the Market Street and Philips Parkway intersection, a short walk from the train station and roughly a mile from both Craig Road and Chestnut Ridge Road.

The tenant mix at the Shoppes already covers Starbucks, Chipotle, Orangetheory, CycleBar, AT&T, Ulta, Lululemon, and CityMD. What Fleming's added is a reason to end a Saturday there rather than drive out to Park Ridge or Woodcliff Lake for a proper dinner. Reservations are running tight on weekends this summer, which is the tell.

One Loop, Not Three Errands

Here is what the triangle looks like if you actually run it as a loop:

• Morning, Craig Road. Farm stand, greenhouses, community-garden walkthrough. Free.
• Late morning, Chestnut Ridge Road. Existing Fresh Market for anything the farm stand didn't cover, plus whichever of the current eateries you like. Last summer to see it in this configuration.
• Evening, 210 Market Street. Wegmans if you're stocking up, Fleming's if you're eating out.

The reason this matters as a resident is that Paragon Drive already ran the counter-example on June 14, 2026, when the 16th Annual Chamber of Commerce Street Fair drew more than 20,000 attendees to a single stretch for the day. That event is the borough proving it can concentrate a crowd on one corridor. The rest of the summer works the opposite way, spread across three anchors, and residents who plan around one address at a time end up making the same trip twice.

The other reason to think about it as a loop is that the borough's own signals point that way. Mayor Mike Ghassali has framed the DePiero purchase as the counterweight to state housing pressure, calling it a "Fair Share Farming Center" in response to the Fair Share Housing Center mandates. Whether or not you agree with the framing, the practical outcome is that the town is investing in Craig Road as programmable public space, which means Town Day at the Farm was the first of a recurring calendar rather than a one-off. Concurrently, the Planning Board is entertaining a national-brand retenanting of Chestnut Ridge that will pull traffic from Rockland County across the New York border less than two miles north. Those two moves reinforce each other. The farm gives residents a reason to stay local on a Saturday morning; the corridor gives them a reason to spend a Saturday afternoon in the borough rather than driving to Paramus or Nanuet.

If you have lived in Montvale for more than five years, the map you carry in your head probably still routes Saturday around the old DePiero farm stand as the fixed point. That map is out of date by about eleven months. The fixed point moved half a mile down Craig Road and doubled in program. The variable points on Chestnut Ridge Road are in a one-summer window before they change again. Market Street quietly became the dinner answer while nobody was watching.

I write about this stuff because knowing which corner of town is in which phase of transition is what makes living here feel intentional rather than reactive. If you're thinking about the next move within Bergen County, or you want a sharper read on how these corridor changes are reshaping resale patterns block by block, Chris Crawford Homes is here when you're ready. Request your free market consultation and we'll walk through what the summer is actually telling us.