Wyckoff Built A Year Of Parties For Its Centennial. The Finale Is A Cemetery Walk.

How do you close out a hundred-year birthday party in a town of about 16,000 people? If you're Wyckoff, you don't throw a bigger one. You end the year at the two oldest pieces of ground in town, walking past headstones that were already worn smooth before anyone had heard the name "Wyckoff" at all.

That's not a downbeat ending. It's the whole point, and once you see the shape of the calendar, it's hard to read the year any other way.

A Gala, A Street Fair, And Then Silence On Purpose

Wyckoff's centennial marks something specific: on November 2, 1926, voters changed the name of what had been Franklin Township to the Township of Wyckoff. The township's own centennial materials lay out why that vote mattered so much. Franklin Township used to be a much bigger place. Piece by piece, it had already given up land to become its own set of towns: Ho-Ho-Kus broke off in 1849, Ridgewood in 1876, Midland Park in 1894, Oakland in 1902, and Franklin Lakes in 1922. By the time residents voted in 1926, what remained of Franklin Township was, in practice, already the area everyone called Wyckoff. The vote just made it official.

That backstory reframes the whole centennial. This isn't a hundred years since the town was settled. It's a hundred years since the last name change on a much older piece of land, the leftover corner of a township that spent two centuries shrinking into its current borders.

The township built three signature events around that anniversary, and the calendar reads like a volume dial:

• March 21 — a formal Centennial Gala at The Brick House, the Godwin Avenue steakhouse that's been running under chef-owner Aldo Cascio for fifty years
• June 27 — a Main Street block party and Centennial Day Street Fair, with fireworks at Memorial Field that evening
• October 24 — a historic cemetery tour

The street fair was the loud middle of that sequence. Mayor Roger Lane, sworn in at the start of the centennial year, put it plainly ahead of the event: "Looking forward to an awesome Street Fair Centennial Day celebration this coming Saturday." The day delivered on that. The fair opened on Main Street at 11 a.m., with PETA's dairy-free ice cream truck rolling in as the gates opened to hand out free scoops and a shuttle running attendees from parking at Pulis Field to Wyckoff Avenue. When the Main Street portion wound down, the action moved to Memorial Field on Woodland Avenue at 6 p.m. for evening entertainment and fireworks.

U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer showed up for the celebration too, alongside Assemblyman Chris DePhillips and the Township Committee. In his own recap of the day, Gottheimer's office noted that Wyckoff is home to more than 16,000 residents and over 250 small businesses, a detail that says something about how much day-to-day commerce this centennial calendar is actually running through.

So that's the arc so far: formal dinner, then a street party big enough to need a shuttle bus. The obvious move for October would be another version of the same thing, maybe a bigger concert or a second round of fireworks. Instead, the calendar goes quiet.

Why The Quiet Ending Isn't A Downgrade

The October 24 cemetery tour doesn't have the production value of fireworks over Memorial Field, and that's exactly why it works as a closer. Wyckoff has two candidates for the kind of historic burial ground a tour like this would visit, and both make the same point in different ways.

Union Cemetery, on Franklin Avenue, predates the Township of Wyckoff by more than 160 years. It started sometime in the first half of the 1700s, when a local landowner named Johannes Van Blarcom set aside part of his property as a family burial ground. The earliest legible headstone on the site is dated 1764, and by tradition it marks the grave of a young enslaved girl, identified by no surname, a stark reminder of who else lived and worked this land in that era. The Wyckoff Historical Society has maintained the cemetery for years, including a 2018 clearing of dead trees, underbrush, and poison ivy from the grounds, and the group has previously led public walking tours of the cemetery in the fall, drawing visitors of all ages to see the Van Blarcom plots and the resting place of Revolutionary War veteran John Van Blarcom.

The other candidate, the Wyckoff Reformed Church Cemetery on Wyckoff Avenue, tells a similar story on a slightly later timeline. It grew out of the church itself, which traces back to the very first years of the 1800s, with the cemetery organized as a formal extension around 1806. The eight-acre grounds have taken in burials since the 1820s and now hold Revolutionary War, Civil War, World War I and II, Korean War, and Vietnam War veterans, all under the care of a volunteer association made up of church members.

Either site, or both, puts the same fact in front of anyone who shows up on October 24: the ground under Wyckoff was doing something long before 1926. A hundred years of the name "Wyckoff" is a comparatively short chapter sitting on top of a much longer one. Ending the centennial there isn't an afterthought tacked onto three planned events. It's the moment the celebration stops pointing at itself and points at what it's actually built on.

The Rest Of The Year Didn't Slow Down Either

None of this happened in a town that was otherwise quiet. The centennial's three headline events sat inside a calendar that's been full all year, which is worth knowing if you live here and have been wondering why every weekend seems to have something on it.

The Wyckoff Family YMCA ran its Band on the Sand outdoor concert series at Spring Lake Park through the summer, pulling in tribute acts and local bands for evening shows that have become a fixture of the season. On the dining side, the strip along Franklin and Godwin Avenues has been reshuffling in real time. Willow & Whisk opened its breakfast-and-lunch concept in the Boulder Run Shopping Center, the 1965-era retail center at Franklin and Godwin that's been filling back in with restaurants and services since a 2010 renovation. Wyckoff Tavern took over a spot on Franklin Avenue with a menu built around burgers, wings, and handcrafted cocktails. La Cambusa brought its Southern Italian menu to town after more than twenty-five years running locations in Fair Lawn, Ridgewood, and Garfield. Farm & Flour has been drawing a regular breakfast crowd for its organic-ingredient approach to the morning menu.

None of that is centennial programming. It's just what a town's ordinary calendar looks like when a hundredth-anniversary year happens to land on top of it. That contrast is part of what makes the October 24 tour land the way it does. The town has spent the year proving it can throw a good party on demand, from a formal gala to a street fair that needed its own shuttle system. Choosing to end that run at a pair of eighteenth and nineteenth century cemeteries isn't a lack of ideas. It's a deliberate decision to let the oldest part of Wyckoff have the last word.

If you've lived here for any stretch of time, you've probably driven past Union Cemetery on Franklin Avenue more times than you can count without ever walking it. The centennial gives you an actual reason to stop.

I've spent years working in towns across Bergen County, and the ones that hold up best over time are usually the ones that know their own history well enough to let it speak without dressing it up. Wyckoff just spent a year proving it can do both, the fireworks and the quiet, in the same twelve months. If you're curious about what makes a town like this one worth putting down roots in, or you're weighing Wyckoff against a few other options in the area, I'm happy to walk through what I know. Reach out to Chris Crawford Homes and request your free market consultation.