"Looking forward to an awesome Street Fair Centennial Day celebration this coming Saturday," Mayor Roger Lane said back in late June, and the day delivered on it. Main Street filled from late morning into the evening. A shuttle ran overflow parking from Pulis Field down to Wyckoff Avenue. PETA parked a truck handing out free dairy-free ice cream to anyone who wanted it. At 6 p.m. the crowd walked over to Memorial Field on Woodland Avenue for fireworks. That was Wyckoff's 100th birthday party, and it already happened, on June 27.
So if you've been waiting for the street fair to show up this month the way it usually does, stop waiting. The township's own recreation calendar lists that fair as a September fixture in an ordinary year. For the centennial, the date got pulled forward three months so one Saturday could do both jobs at once. This September is just September, no vendor tents on Franklin Avenue, no closed streets, nothing on the calendar that wasn't already going to be there.
That's an odd thing to do to a schedule, and it says something about how this town handles its own history. Wyckoff didn't build a museum exhibit for its hundred years or lay out a plaque walk downtown. It borrowed a Saturday that already existed and asked it to carry double weight. If you want to see what a hundred years actually looks like here, the parade already came and went. Franklin Avenue, the older commercial stretch to the west of Boulder Run, makes the better case anyway, and it's making it right now, this week, whether or not anyone's throwing a fair for it.
The Newest Restaurant in Town Isn't Really New
Walk that stretch and the freshest storefront belongs to Wyckoff Tavern, which opened at 315 Franklin Avenue in the fall of 2025 in the space that had been Cafe Amici for 23 years. That's a long run for any restaurant, long enough that plenty of regulars had stopped opening the menu. When word came in late June 2025 that the space was changing hands, it read like the kind of news that reshuffles a block.
It didn't, not really. Wyckoff Tavern is owned and run by the same team that ran Cafe Amici, with chef Arthur Toufayan at the stove, a cook who spent more than 40 years across kitchens that included Union Square Café, the Waldorf Astoria, Aureole, and Mondrian before the last 23 of those years belonged to Cafe Amici alone. The old name closed on June 30, 2025. The new one opened in the same address that September, after a renovation that expanded the room to roughly 3,000 square feet with about 50 seats inside, a 12-seat bar, and patio space for 20 more. The menu shifted from farm-to-table breakfast plates toward a fuller lunch, brunch, and dinner list, fresh fish and oysters rotating next to burgers and steak and eggs, with Sunday brunch starting at 10 a.m.
The address changed hands in name only. The person cooking dinner tonight is the same person who was cooking it in 2024, in 2015, in 2002.
The Rest of the Block Didn't Move at All
A few doors and a few blocks over, nothing changed even in name. Three businesses on this same stretch of town count their anniversaries in decades, not months, and each one predates the restaurant that just reopened by a wide margin.
- The Brick House, on Godwin Avenue, has run as a Bergen County steakhouse for 50 years under chef-owner Aldo Cascio, out of a building that dates to 1851 and stands as one of the county's few remaining examples of a Federal Greek Revival farmhouse.
- Willow & Whisk, the breakfast and brunch spot on Franklin Avenue, has been voted Best of Bergen every year from 2021 through 2026, six straight titles for the same menu of brioche French toast and cacio e pepe scrambled eggs.
- Abma's Farm, on Lawlins Road, is a fourth-generation operation whose family has worked that land for more than 90 years, selling produce and eggs out of a Dutch-style barn that's over 200 years old, one of the last of its kind still standing anywhere in the country.
None of these are new stories, and that's the point. A town that just spent half a year building up to a hundredth anniversary has a downtown where the newest arrival is a rebrand and the oldest business on the list has been in the same family since before most of Franklin Avenue's current buildings were standing.
Not every tradition got folded into the centennial, either. The township's spring litter cleanup, Team Up to Tidy Up, still ran on its usual April date, with recent editions pulling in as many as 187 volunteers clearing over 100 bags of trash and recyclables from town streets. Most of the calendar didn't need adjusting to justify the anniversary. Only the one Saturday that was already the biggest public gathering of the year got asked to do extra work.
What the Centennial Actually Measures
The township's own history notes that on November 2, 1926, 243 of the 337 voters who turned out chose to rename Franklin Township as Wyckoff, a change first proposed by the local Chamber of Commerce. A hundred years and roughly 17,000 residents later, the town marked that vote with fireworks and an ice cream truck, then went back to a September with no fair in it.
What that leaves behind isn't nostalgia. It's a pattern worth noticing if you already live here: turnover on this part of town rarely means a stranger taking over a lease. More often it means the same name, or the same family, deciding to call the place something else while everything behind the counter stays put. The plaque-worthy version of Wyckoff's hundred years is a vote count from 1926. The lived version is a chef who's been cooking on the same block since 2002 and just changed the sign out front, three doors down from a steakhouse that hasn't changed its sign in 50 years.
If that's the kind of detail that makes a town feel less like an address and more like a place you actually know, that's the read My Bergen House tries to bring to every corner of northwest Bergen County, whether you're weighing a move or just wondering what happened to the restaurant on the corner. If a Wyckoff conversation is ever useful, we're an easy one to start.
