Saddle River is a two-acre-minimum town without a public library and without much of a downtown. The borough's charm has always been what you cannot see from the road: long drives, mature canopy, the private half-mile between one front door and the next. So it is a small surprise, and worth noticing, that two of the more interesting things to do here this fall involve walking onto property that used to be effectively off-limits.
The thesis of this post is narrow. In a borough that has spent seventy years perfecting privacy, the calendar year between fall 2024 and fall 2025 quietly added two public-facing landscapes on the same stretch of East Allendale Road. Neither is marketed. Neither shows up on the tourism circuit. Both are worth an early Saturday.
The bridge that reopens ten acres
Behind Borough Hall at 100 East Allendale, Rindlaub Park has sat on roughly 23 acres since the early 1960s, when the land was set aside as passive open space. For six decades, another parcel across the Saddle River sat right next to it and stayed unreachable. No footbridge, no easement, no way in.
That changed on October 14, 2025. The borough dedicated the Walsh Family Bridge, an 80-foot red-timbered covered bridge modeled on New England precedents, in front of about 150 residents and officials. Saddle River dedicated the bridge as the first covered bridge built in New Jersey in over a century, connecting Rindlaub Park to 10 acres of newly preserved wetlands. The 80-foot structure was built in Texas and shipped in pieces to Saddle River to minimize the environmental impact on the nature reserve, a detail that matters more than it sounds like it should — the point of the wetland is that it has never been driven on.
A red covered bridge is a New England idea, not a Bergen County one. Its arrival here is the first physical clue that the borough is beginning to treat some of its open space as something to be walked into rather than looked at from the road.
Funding is worth reading closely if you care about how these things get built in a town of roughly 3,150 people. The project came through pandemic delays, rising costs, and material shortages, and was ultimately realized through a matching grant from the Bergen County Open Space Trust Fund and the extraordinary generosity of the Walsh family. The plan across the bridge is not a park in the manicured sense. In partnership with the Bergen County Audubon Society, Saddle River plans to develop the surrounding wetlands into an Audubon-certified bird sanctuary, with sculpture by Carolyn Palmer and student work from Wandell Elementary staged along the approach.
For residents, the practical effect is a new loop. From the Borough Hall lot you can now walk Rindlaub's existing pond path, cross the covered bridge, and spend twenty quiet minutes in ten acres of wet woods that most of your neighbors have never set foot on. In October, when the sugar maples turn along the Saddle River, that walk will do more for a Sunday morning than any drive on Route 17.
America's first water lily farm, reopened around the corner
Half a mile east on the same road, another door has quietly reopened. Waterford Gardens at 74 East Allendale is one of those addresses that residents know as a landmark they never quite entered. It sat in decline for years. It is now open again under new ownership.
The history is not local color, it is the reason to visit. Originally founded in 1895 by William Tricker, Waterford Gardens is recognized as one of the first water lily farms in America, and the Fitz's Fish Ponds team worked to preserve that legacy while modernizing the facilities. Fitz's Fish Ponds acquired the property in November 2024 from the Meeks family, describing the step as a commitment to preserving and revitalizing a location steeped in history and significance in the water garden industry. A soft ribbon-cutting followed on May 3 and 4, 2025, at the East Allendale address.
What you actually find on the property is more interesting than the store-behind-it category suggests. The restoration has revived the property's Dutch-framed greenhouses and lily tanks, along with the natural ponds in the front yard, the formal pond in the back, and the tanks and ponds once known as Kodama Koi Gardens. In early fall the outdoor lilies are still holding, the koi ponds are at their busiest before winter prep, and the greenhouse light through those Dutch frames is the kind of thing a lot of Saddle River homes are, in their own way, trying to imitate.
A note on why this matters for the neighborhood
Two-acre zoning has kept the borough green in ways most Bergen County towns cannot claim, but it has also made the private landscape the only landscape. Waterford Gardens under Fitz's is a rare piece of horticultural infrastructure inside the borough that a resident can actually walk into, ask a question at, and leave with a plant. The old ownership held the door half-open. The new ownership put it back on its hinges.
Building a Saturday around it
Because both stops sit on the same road, an early-fall morning strings together without a car move between the two main anchors. A workable route:
- Start at Rindlaub Park behind Borough Hall, 100 East Allendale Road. Park in the municipal lot. Take the existing pond path to the covered bridge, cross into the wetland preserve, loop back.
- Drive or walk half a mile east to Fitz's Fish Ponds at 74 East Allendale Road. Give yourself thirty to forty-five minutes for the greenhouses and the outdoor tanks. This is a browse, not an errand.
- Add a farm stand stop before the ride home. Abma's Farm in Wyckoff, Secor Farms in Mahwah, and Demarest Farm in Hillsdale are all within a fifteen-minute drive and hit their apple-cider and pumpkin cadence between late September and early November.
- If you want dinner on the way back, the Saddle River Inn at 2 Barnstable Court has anchored the borough's fine-dining reputation for decades and is one of the few restaurants actually inside the borough line.
That is a morning and an early evening entirely inside a five-mile radius. Nothing about it depends on knowing anyone. Nothing about it requires leaving the immediate area.
What the two openings say about the borough
It is easy to read the Walsh Family Bridge and the revived Waterford Gardens as unrelated. One is a municipal project with a private donor. The other is a family-owned specialty retailer. But the pattern underneath them is the same: land that had been private, semi-private, or functionally inaccessible has been reopened to residents on foot, and both openings happened inside a twelve-month window on the same road.
For homeowners, the read-through is subtle and mostly positive. The bridge adds a piece of active civic infrastructure to a borough that historically undersupplies it. The wetland preserve behind the bridge is now protected as passive open space, which means the parcel is out of the redevelopment conversation permanently. Waterford Gardens, restored rather than subdivided, keeps a century-old horticultural address on the tax roll as something other than a teardown. None of that changes what Saddle River is. It quietly reinforces it.
For residents who have lived here long enough to remember when Rindlaub Park was the extent of the walkable public space in town, this fall is the first meaningful update to that map in years. Worth the walk. Worth going before the leaves are down.
If you own in Saddle River and are thinking about how the borough's evolving public spaces, open-space commitments, and reinvestment in landmark properties shape long-term value on your own street, Christian Di Stasio advises Bergen County homeowners on exactly those questions. Schedule a white-glove consultation to talk through your property in the context of the neighborhood you actually live in.
