A Wyckoff Weekend in the Centennial Summer: Three Anchors on the Same Three Miles
Wyckoff turns one hundred this year. The borough was incorporated in 1926, and the anniversary has given a lot of otherwise ordinary summer weekends a slightly ceremonial edge. It has also, quietly, done something more useful for the people who actually live here: it has surfaced a fact that most residents feel but rarely say out loud.
Late August in Wyckoff no longer requires leaving Wyckoff. A day-to-night weekend now sits inside a three-mile radius, on three properties that have each been through a meaningful change in the last twelve months.
The anchors are close enough to walk between two of them and drive to the third in under ten minutes. Start at 700 Lawlins Road. Move to Spring Lake Park on Wyckoff Avenue by early evening. Finish at 315 Franklin Avenue.
None of these three is new to the map. What is new is that all three have recently changed in a way that rewards a return visit from someone who thought they already knew them.
Abma's Farm is a fourth-generation, family-run farm on 32 scenic acres at 700 Lawlins Road, and it has been part of the local landscape for more than 90 years. The number that matters in August is a different one: the Dutch-style barn at the center of the property is over 200 years old and one of the last of its kind in the country, and that barn is where the market runs.
August is the window when the CSA and the walk-up market overlap most usefully. The farm wholesales corn, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, eggplant, peppers, kale, and garlic from June through September, which means the shelf you walk past on a Saturday in mid-August is the same crop leaving the fields that morning. The scratch bakery inside the barn runs on the same rhythm.
Two details that separate a first visit from a fourth. First, the Tomasello Winery tasting room is tucked inside the Farm Market, a family-run South Jersey winery pouring in a rustic space, which is not something most people notice on a produce run. Second, CornFest is the summer signature at the Wyckoff location, a corn-centered day held in late July, and even if you missed it, the residual menu items and popcorn stock linger into August. The farm also runs weekly children's programs; this year's summer camp calendar wrapped its final week August 10 through 14, so the property tends to be calmer by mid-to-late August than it was a month earlier.
The Wyckoff Family YMCA's outdoor concert series at Spring Lake Park is the town's most consistent summer institution. It has been running long enough to have gone through several naming conventions. The current run is called Band on the Sand, with recent bills including Long Road Home, Simmerr, Reminisce, and Spare Roots.
The Centennial gave the series a specific moment this year. A Centennial Day street fair and fireworks ran on Saturday, June 27, 2026 along Main Street, and Long Road Home played a Wyckoff Centennial Celebration set that same night with a Wyckoff Tavern after-party. The takeaway for residents is that the Y's concerts and the new tavern are now, quite literally, on the same evening itinerary.
The pricing model is the reason the Band on the Sand nights fill in. Historically the series has run tickets at a small member discount with children under twelve free, which turns it into the rare summer event a family of five can decide on the same afternoon.
For twenty-three years, 315 Franklin Avenue was Cafe Amici. Cafe Amici announced its transition on June 28th, 2025 via Instagram, closed on June 30th, and immediately began the transformation into a new concept under the same ownership. That last clause is the one most residents missed. The team did not leave. They rebuilt.
The 315 Franklin Avenue space officially transitioned into Wyckoff Tavern under the same owners. The menu is broader than Amici's Italian-inflected American: lunch, brunch, and dinner, with chicken dumplings, a variety of pizzas, fettuccine with fresh rock shrimp in a white wine sauce, burgers, steak and eggs, and salads, with Sunday brunch at 10 AM including $12 mimosas and Bloody Marys. The drink menu includes eight beers on tap, specialty cocktails, signature whiskey cocktails, seasonal cocktails, and wine.
The context worth carrying is that Wyckoff's Franklin Avenue corridor rarely sees a full concept swap on this scale. Down the road at 179 Godwin Avenue, The Brick House operates in a building that dates back to 1851, one of Bergen County's only examples of a Federal Greek Revival farmhouse, and it has been Aldo Cascio's for decades. Between Brick House on one end and Tavern on the other, the culinary spine of the town now runs from a 175-year-old farmhouse to a room that reopened last fall, with La Cambusa's Amalfi-Coast BYO menu and Willow & Whisk's breakfast-and-lunch program filling in between.
Look at the three anchors on a timeline and something clicks into place. The barn at Abma's is two centuries old. The Brick House building is 175 years old. Cafe Amici ran for 23 years before becoming Wyckoff Tavern. The borough itself is 100 years incorporated this summer. Wyckoff's late-summer weekend is not a rotation of new openings; it is a rotation of long-tenured places that have each done something recent enough to justify a fresh look.
That is a specific market fact, not a sentiment. In towns where the summer calendar is dominated by pop-ups and one-year restaurant runs, an August built around institutions with this much runway behind them behaves differently. The concerts happen on schedule. The corn shows up when the calendar says it should. The tavern's kitchen is being run by the same family that ran the last one.
Sunday flips the script cleanly: brunch at Wyckoff Tavern at 10 AM, then back to Abma's in the afternoon for U-Pick or a slower market walk. Two full days, one town, three properties.
Every neighborhood has a summer story it tells itself. Wyckoff's, in 2026, is that its longest-standing institutions are all still standing, and several of them chose this year to change. For homeowners already here, that is a comfort. For anyone weighing the borough against neighboring towns, it is a data point worth logging: Wyckoff is a place where a restaurant's twenty-three-year run ends with the same owners opening the next thing in the same room, and where the town's biggest summer night is a fireworks show on Main Street with a local band playing the after-party.
If you are thinking about what your own Wyckoff home might be worth in a market where those anchors are still holding, Keren Abraham knows this borough street by street. Let's make it happen. Get your free home valuation.
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