Sofra Caffe opened at 631 Anderson Avenue this year. Walk a few storefronts in either direction and you land on a business that has held the same spot since before television existed. D'Amore Jewelers has operated continuously from 731 Anderson Avenue since 1917, making it the oldest family owned business still running in Cliffside Park. Miller's Bakery has occupied 716 Anderson Avenue since 1947. Between them, and around them, a run of newer names has moved onto the Avenue over the past couple of years without pushing any of the old ones out.
That is the actual story of Anderson Avenue this September. It is not a strip in transition. It is a strip where the arithmetic of a very dense, very narrow borough keeps producing the same outcome: new businesses fill whatever gap opens, old businesses keep their spots, and almost nobody has to move.
Why the Avenue Doesn't Turn Over
Cliffside Park packs roughly 25,000 residents into about one square mile, making it one of the most densely populated municipalities in New Jersey. Anderson Avenue, known locally as simply "the Avenue," is the ground floor retail spine running through nearly all of it, lined with apartment buildings that have had the same footprint for decades. There is no vacant lot waiting for a strip mall and no spare width to carve out new outdoor seating that isn't already claimed. When a business wants in, it takes whatever storefront comes open. When nothing comes open, it waits, or it lands two doors down from wherever a century old jeweler already sits.
That scarcity is why the Avenue reads less like a trend line and more like a layer cake. You can pass a business that opened this year and one that opened during the Wilson administration on the same block, and neither one is the anomaly.
What Actually Opened This Year
Sofra Caffe's arrival at 631 Anderson Avenue drew local attention because it filled a specific gap: a sit down coffee spot built for lingering, not the grab and go format that defines most new café openings. It joined a corridor that already had Güllüoglu Cafe nearby, a Turkish coffee and pastry shop built on strong coffee, baklava, and an owner who still works the counter himself.
The bigger arrival of the past couple of years sits a few doors down at 711 Anderson Avenue: Compton's Sandwich Shop, the first New Jersey location for a chain that started in Astoria, Queens. Alex Compton opened the original shop there in 2018 and grew it to three locations across the city before choosing Anderson Avenue, not a waterfront address in Edgewater or a mall storefront, for his first move across the river. The spot sits close to the Centre at 1 Towne Center and the municipal parking lot, where the fifty cent hourly rate matters more than it sounds like it should on a street where curb space is the scarcest thing in town.
A short walk down the Avenue right now gets you:
- Sofra Caffe (631 Anderson Avenue), a newer café built for sitting and staying
- Compton's Sandwich Shop (711 Anderson Avenue), the chain's first New Jersey outpost
- Güllüoglu Cafe, Turkish coffee and pastry a few doors over
- Beyoglu Grill and Dayi'nin Yeri, two of the Avenue's standing Turkish kitchens
- Miller's Bakery (716 Anderson Avenue), open since 1947
- D'Amore Jewelers (731 Anderson Avenue), open since 1917
- Sedona Tap House, inside the Centre at 1 Towne Center, alongside Anytime Fitness and The Lash Lounge
That is not a best of list. It is what is actually standing, in actual proximity, right now, which is the more useful thing to know if you live two blocks over and are deciding where to eat tonight.
The Turkish Anchor Nobody Advertises
Most Bergen County boroughs run the standard main street rotation: a pizza place, a nail salon, a bank branch. Anderson Avenue has that too, but its real identity runs through a Turkish food and grocery presence built over a couple of decades, and it is still the thing locals mention first when explaining what separates the Avenue from Palisades Park or Fort Lee's Main Street. Güllüoglu Cafe, Beyoglu Grill, and Dayi'nin Yeri did not open this year. They are the fixed point everything else orbits, which means a new café choosing 631 Anderson Avenue is choosing a specific food identity, not a blank commercial corridor.
The Money Is Going a Mile Away, Not Onto the Avenue
While the Avenue holds steady, the borough's real construction dollars are landing somewhere else entirely: Edgewater Road, where Cliffside Park is finally consolidating its library, its recreation programming, and a new parking structure into one combined building. The project has moved in real, traceable steps.
- In 2024, the state budget included a $15 million appropriation, sponsored by State Sen. Paul Sarlo and local Assembly members, toward a combined recreation and library building at 207 Edgewater Road.
- By January 2026, the borough announced it had secured $18 million in grants toward the project, alongside separate infrastructure awards for things like new tennis courts at West Grantwood Playground and elevator and HVAC replacements at Borough Hall.
- This summer, the Borough Council approved the formal contract award to a design-build firm, clearing the last major procedural hurdle before construction can begin.
- The next visible milestone is the release of schematic designs. No groundbreaking date has been announced, and Mayor Thomas Calabrese, who has pushed this project for years, hasn't set one yet.
The complex is also meant to relieve something that has nothing to do with recreation: the school district has leaned on more than twenty modular classrooms at two borough schools for years because of overcrowding, and part of the new building's library and program space is intended to ease that pressure.
Here is the part that matters if you actually live near Anderson Avenue and have circled the block twice looking for a spot near Compton's: the new parking the borough is building lives at 207 Edgewater Road, not on the Avenue itself. It is a genuine fix for a genuine borough-wide problem, since Cliffside Park sits close enough to the George Washington Bridge and the Edgewater waterfront that on-street parking stays chronically tight. But it doesn't put a single new spot on Anderson Avenue. If you're hoping for curb relief specifically in front of Sofra Caffe or D'Amore Jewelers, this project was never built to deliver that.
Sunday Still Belongs to Brinkerhoff Avenue
The one weekly fixture that hasn't shifted at all this year sits a few blocks off the Avenue. The Sunday Farmers' Market at Brinkerhoff Avenue is running its normal schedule through October, the same rhythm it keeps every year regardless of what's opening on Anderson Avenue or moving through design review on Edgewater Road. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that tells you the borough's daily pattern is intact even while its bigger civic project inches through contract awards and schematic drawings.
What This Actually Means
Put the two stories side by side and the shape of Cliffside Park this September becomes clear. Anderson Avenue isn't being remade. It's absorbing new tenants the way a full bookshelf absorbs one more book, by making room at the margins while the spine stays exactly where it was. The borough's real transformation, the parking, the library expansion, the classroom relief, is happening a mile away and on a much slower clock, one contract award and one schematic design at a time. Both things are true at once, and neither one is waiting on the other.
If you're weighing a move to a street like this one, that kind of stability is worth understanding on its own terms, not as a footnote buried in a listing sheet. Scott Selleck and The Selleck Group have spent decades reading exactly this kind of neighborhood texture across Bergen and Hudson County, and if you want a clearer read on how a specific block or building here actually fits your plans, Selleck Sells NJ is the place to start that conversation.
