Rindlaub Park Is Becoming Two Different Parks This Year
Walk toward the Walsh Family Pedestrian Bridge at Rindlaub Park this fall and a leashed dog will get you turned around before you cross it. Keep walking the other direction, past the ball fields, and you will find a construction fence around what used to be open lawn, with a rubber path base going in and, improbably, a 1,000 square foot artificial putting green taking shape next to it. Same park, same year, two entirely different signals about what this ground is for.
That split is not an accident of scheduling. It is the result of two separate decisions the borough made almost simultaneously, and together they say more about how Saddle River actually governs its own six or so acres of shared green space than any single ribbon-cutting would.
Rindlaub Park sits behind the municipal building on East Saddle River Road, and it has always been the town's working park: baseball fields, tennis courts, a jogging trail, an amphitheater, a playground. This year it is also a job site. In January, the borough released bid documents for what the contract calls the Multi-Purpose Path Expansion at Rindlaub Park, with proposals opened at Borough Hall in early February. The scope covers installation of a multi-purpose rubber path, tree and stump clearing, new landscaping, and that putting green, all administered through the borough engineer's office at Spence Engineering.
A capital ordinance tied to the project, numbered 26-1113-M, appropriated $284,000 for the work, financed with a $90,000 grant from the Bergen County Open Space, Floodplain Protection, Recreation and Historic Preservation Trust Fund and $194,000 from the borough's own Capital Improvement Fund. The ordinance labels the work Phase IV, meaning this is at least the fourth round of capital investment the borough has made in this same stretch of ground. As of this month, the borough's own website lists Rindlaub Park as closed for the upgrade, which tells you the work is active rather than theoretical.
Read against three prior phases, this reads less like a one-off amenity add and more like a park the borough keeps deciding is worth reinvesting in, year after year, out of its own capital fund and county grant dollars both.
Cross to the western edge of the same park, where a footbridge leads into what the borough calls the Tricker Pond Annex, and the direction reverses. Municipal code lists a specific set of things you cannot do there or on the Walsh Family Pedestrian Bridge that leads to it: no motorized or nonmotorized vehicles, including bicycles and scooters, no food or alcohol, no fishing, and no dogs, leashed or unleashed, anywhere on the bridge or west of it.
That rule did not appear all at once. The borough first adopted it in September 2023, then tightened it again in June 2025, and tightened it a third time this past October, all under the same parks and recreation chapter of borough code. Three amendments in roughly three years, with the most recent one landing less than a year before this piece was written, is not a park quietly aging into stricter rules. It is a governing body that keeps deciding the pond side of Rindlaub Park needs more protection than it had the year before.
It helps to know who is actually making these calls. Rindlaub Park answers to a seven-member Board of Park and Recreation Commissioners, appointed by the mayor with council consent, with room for one council member to sit alongside them. Under Chapter 154 of the borough code, that same small board has to sign off before any group can hold an organized gathering there, before amplified sound gets used, before alcohol gets served. It is about as hyperlocal a level of park governance as exists in Bergen County, and this year that board is visibly pulling the park in two directions: invest and open up the active side, restrict and quiet down the passive side.
That instinct is not isolated to one park. Saddle River is also one of the few Bergen County towns that maintains a standing Equestrian Committee at the municipal level, a level of attention to bridle paths and horse traffic that most neighboring boroughs simply fold into a general parks department. A town willing to run a committee dedicated to horses is a town that treats granular land use questions as worth a formal seat at the table, and Rindlaub Park's split personality this year fits that same pattern.
Here is the detail that trips people up. Saddle River County Park, the roughly 590 acre linear park with the six mile paved path that county residents drive to for a long walk, does not run through Saddle River borough at all. The path threads through Ridgewood, Glen Rock, Fair Lawn, Paramus, Saddle Brook, and Rochelle Park, following the actual Saddle River downstream well past this town's borders. Its dog-friendly stretch near Wild Duck Pond in Ridgewood, its waterfall and historic Easton Tower at Dunkerhook in Paramus and Fair Lawn, its softball fields at the Rochelle Park end, all of that belongs to Bergen County's park system, governed under an entirely different set of rules than anything on East Saddle River Road.
So if the new restrictions at Tricker Pond Annex mean your dog needs somewhere else to walk, the six mile county path is the practical answer, but it is worth knowing you are leaving the borough to get there. Inside Saddle River's own lines, Rindlaub Park is the one piece of ground the local commission actually controls end to end, which is exactly why its two halves can move in opposite directions this sharply. Nobody at the county level had a say in either decision.
The kind of evening that starts with a loop around Rindlaub Park tends to end a few minutes away, at one of two restaurants run by the same chef. Jamie Knott's Saddle River Inn sits in a restored barn along the river, a French American fine-dining room with a menu that changes twice a season and uses dry-aged beef and sustainably sourced seafood. It shows up on Best of NJ's list of romantic restaurants for the cuisine and setting, and OpenTable's Top 100 list this year carries it too, with a 4.9 rating attached.
A short walk from there, Knott also runs Saddle River Cafe, the more casual sibling, built around farm-fresh eggs, pressed juices, and grain bowls, and it now serves dinner in addition to its original daytime menu. Two restaurants from the same kitchen, one dressed up and one dressed down, sitting close enough together that a resident can walk from the park to either one without getting back in a car.
That is the same pattern showing up again, just in a different register. This is a small enough town that local decisions can shape a resident's Saturday, from which side of a footbridge a dog is allowed to cross to which restaurant gets the reservation.
If you want the read on what is actually changing in this borough before it shows up anywhere else, that is the kind of local detail Keren Abraham tracks closely, whether the conversation is about a park ordinance or a property on the same street. Reach out anytime you want the ground-level version of what is happening in Saddle River.
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