Pompton Avenue Is Turning Into Two Different Streets at Once

Drive the length of Pompton Avenue this month and you will notice two things that seem to contradict each other. The old animal hospital that used to sit at 370 Pompton has been dark for a while now, and so has the garden center that used to anchor a wide stretch of frontage further down the road. At the same time, there is finally a reason to slow down and park: a small storefront that sat empty for months now has a line for brunch on Saturday mornings.

Both things are true, and neither explains the other. Cedar Grove residents who assume the avenue is either dying or coming back are both half right, because two separate processes are running at the same time on the same road, and they are pulling in opposite directions.

The Small Addresses Are Filling Back In

Start with the good news, because it is the part most people already sense. At 509 Pompton Avenue, a storefront that had been vacant is now Gigi's Cafe, a family-run spot serving Dominican and Venezuelan-inspired food. Owner Liliana Lora, who grew up in a Dominican household where her grandmother ran the kitchen like a restaurant, opened the cafe in April 2025 with her husband, Juan Marte, after a leasing process that reportedly took months longer than expected. The menu leans into empanadas, bowls, tacos, cold-pressed juices, and a house-made dessert program, with pistachio worked into several dishes as a signature touch. The town's mayor, Melissa Skabich, attended the ribbon-cutting, which is the kind of detail that tells you the opening registered as a real event, not just another tenant sign change.

Gigi's joins a small but established food scene that already gives Cedar Grove residents reasons to eat close to home. Lu Nello, an upscale Italian restaurant on Stevens Avenue with private dining rooms named the Thema Room, the Wine Cellar, and the Atrium, has been a special-occasion fixture for years. Laboratorio Kitchen, run by chef-owner James DeSisto, serves a seasonal, BYOB menu built around fresh seafood and pasta, with a weekly chef's special pulling ingredients from around the region. Dervish Turkish Restaurant rounds out the higher end of the dining options in town. None of these are new discoveries for longtime residents, but the addition of Gigi's at a walkable, small-format address is the first sign in a while that Pompton Avenue's storefront character is actually adding a business rather than just replacing one.

The Large Parcels Are Leaving Retail Entirely

Now the part that looks like decline but is not quite that either. Two of the avenue's largest and oldest sites are not reopening as anything a passerby would shop at.

At 370 Pompton Avenue, the former home of Cedar Grove Animal Hospital, the township council voted to accept the planning board's designation of the site as an area in need of non-condemnation redevelopment. That vote does not put a building on the lot. What it does is open the door to a formal redevelopment plan, the legal and procedural first step before anyone can propose what actually goes there. For a property that sat as a standalone veterinary building on its own lot, this is a meaningful change in status, even if the storefront itself stays boarded for a while longer.

Further down the avenue, the change is already visible in steel and dirt. Benchmark Senior Living, in partnership with Claremont Development and March Development, has broken ground on a 138-unit senior housing community at 1201 Pompton Avenue, the former site of Cedar Grove Garden Center. The project sits on 5.5 acres and will include independent living, assisted living, and memory care units when it opens, with completion expected in 2027. IMC Construction is the general contractor and Huntington National Bank is financing the project. A 5.5-acre garden center was never really a retail storefront in the way Gigi's Cafe is. It was a large single-use parcel that needed acreage, and acreage like that does not sit empty for long once it goes on the market. It gets converted into whatever the next large single-use need happens to be, and right now in Cedar Grove, that need is senior housing.

The same pattern is visible beyond the avenue itself. On Cliffside Drive, David's Cookies opened a 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in the summer of 2025, representing a $25 million investment and part of a plan to create more than 1,000 jobs across the company's three New Jersey locations. The company started in Fairfield in 1989 with an 8,000-square-foot facility and now operates 360,000 square feet of manufacturing space statewide. The Cedar Grove opening drew Lt. Governor Tahesha Way and Mayor Skabich for remarks, which signals this was treated as an economic development win for the township, not a routine industrial lease. It is not a downtown story. It is a jobs and tax-base story, and it belongs to the same broader shift as the animal hospital and the garden center: large parcels in Cedar Grove are increasingly being used for something other than retail.

What's Actually Happening on Each Address

Laid out this way, the pattern is hard to miss. The small parcel got a small business. The large parcels got large, single-purpose institutions. Nobody is proposing a new strip of retail on the old garden center site, and nobody expects the animal hospital lot to become another standalone veterinary practice. The avenue is not one story of decline or one story of revival. It is two stories, sorted by lot size.

Why the Distinction Matters If You Live Here

If you have watched the animal hospital sit dark and assumed the avenue was struggling, the redevelopment designation is your answer: something is coming, it just takes longer to arrive on paper than a new cafe takes to arrive on a storefront. If you have watched bulldozers on the garden center site and wondered whether Pompton Avenue was losing its commercial character, the answer is closer to the opposite. The avenue's walkable core is quietly gaining tenants even as its largest parcels convert to housing and industry that were probably never coming back as retail anyway.

For residents planning a Saturday, that means the actual walkable food and dining options in town are Gigi's Cafe, Lu Nello, Laboratorio Kitchen, and Dervish Turkish, with more likely to fill in as the smaller storefronts along the corridor keep turning over. For residents who track the town's bigger changes, the senior living project and the redevelopment designation at 370 Pompton are the two to watch, since they will shape traffic patterns and the visual character of those specific blocks well before anything changes at street level near the cafe.

None of this shows up if you only track one half of the avenue. The town's summer also gave residents plenty of reasons to be out and about closer to the center of things, from the Essex County Free Summer Music Concert Series at Cedar Grove Park, which pushed through a stretch of rain delays to keep its schedule intact, to Rock Voices, the area's only community rock choir, which closed its season with a "Music from the Movies" concert at Cedar Grove High School. Small, recurring community moments like these are part of what keeps a town feeling occupied even while its bigger parcels are mid-transition.

Pompton Avenue is not one trend. It is two trends running in parallel, and the only way to read either one correctly is to stop trying to average them into a single verdict on the street.

If you're weighing what any of this means for your own move in Cedar Grove, whether that's buying near a corridor in transition or figuring out timing around a sale, Susan Kruger has been tracking North Jersey's suburban markets for more than 15 years and is happy to talk through what you're seeing on the ground. Let's Connect.