This Wednesday, August 26, the Bergen County Zoo stays open later than its regular daily hours for the last time this year. Wednesday Late Nights have run all July and August, an extended-hours stretch tucked into the zoo's regular season, and Van Saun County Park has quietly built its whole calendar around windows like this one closing and new ones opening right behind them.
If you live within walking distance of the park on Forest Avenue, you already know the rhythm without thinking about it much. Summer means the splash pad and the longer Wednesday hours. What comes next, starting in October and running through Halloween weekend, is a stretch of programming that outlasts the zoo's own summer schedule by a wide margin, and most of it isn't actually run by the county.
What's on the books between now and Halloween
Three fixtures anchor the fall calendar at Van Saun Park, and they're worth knowing about before ticket windows open and sell out, which they tend to do.
- Zoo Boo, a three-day fundraiser the zoo runs in mid-October. Last year it landed October 17 through 19, with a "Friendly Train Ride" running daytime hours for younger kids and a separately ticketed "Eerie Express," a nighttime run with actors staged along the route, aimed at older kids and adults who want a scare with their train ride. Zoo admission and train tickets go online-only, no day-of sales at the gate, while carousel tickets are sold in person during the event itself.
- Art in the Park, a juried outdoor art show held every October with cash awards for exhibiting artists, followed by a concert on the grounds.
- The Metro Basset Hound Club's Howl-O-Ween Bassett Bash, a costumed trick-or-treat gathering for basset hounds and their owners, timed to the same October window.
The mechanics matter if you're planning around any of this. Last year, presale tickets for Friends of the Bergen County Zoo members ran through September 28, with general admission opening to the public on October 1. Buy early. The event has a track record of selling out its time slots, and the zoo does not sell zoo or train tickets at the gate on the day of the event.
The oldest tradition here isn't the county's
Here's the part that doesn't show up on the zoo's official calendar page, and it's the reason this fall lineup is worth understanding rather than just skimming. Van Saun Park's marquee fall events run on two entirely different institutional tracks, and the older one has nothing to do with the county at all.
Zoo Boo, Winter Wonderland, and the holiday lantern display called Let It Glow are all run through Friends of the Bergen County Zoo, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit set up specifically to raise money for the zoo. That's a fairly typical arrangement for a small municipal zoo: the county keeps the lights on and the animals fed, and a nonprofit friends group runs the ticketed events that bring in extra revenue.
The Basset Hound Bash runs on a completely different track. It's organized entirely by the Metro Basset Hound Club, separate from the Friends of the Bergen County Zoo fundraising apparatus that runs the zoo's other headline events, and it has happened every October since 1997. That's older than the park's carousel, which Bergen County didn't install until 2000. It's older than the dog park that opened at Van Saun in 2013. It's a volunteer dog club's costume party that has now outlasted three decades of zoo leadership, multiple rounds of exhibit updates, and a long-discussed zoo expansion plan first floated back in 2016.
Bergen County's own parks communications coordinator, Mark Rotundo, described Van Saun as "one of the finest jewels" in the county's park system when talking to a regional outlet last summer. He wasn't wrong, but the jewel's most durable piece of programming was never something the county built. It's something a group of basset hound owners decided to keep doing, year after year, long enough that most residents now assume it's always been part of the park's official rhythm.
What that says about how this town actually runs
None of this changes anything about property values or school boundaries, and that's the point. This is the kind of detail that only surfaces if you've actually paid attention to a place across a few full calendar cycles rather than skimming a visitor guide once. Paramus gets talked about almost exclusively in terms of retail square footage, the malls along Route 4 and Route 17, the traffic that comes with them. What that framing misses is a roughly 130-acre park in the same town where a dog club's Halloween party is still going strong years after both of the borough's mall carousels shut down, the Golden Horse Carousel at Paramus Park in 2013 and the Venetian Carousel at Garden State Plaza in 2016. Van Saun's own carousel, installed in 2000, is now the last one still operating anywhere in the borough.
That kind of layered, overlapping civic life, part county institution, part nonprofit fundraiser, part hobbyist tradition nobody officially sanctioned, is closer to what daily life in Paramus is actually built on than any single retail statistic. It's also the kind of thing you only learn by asking around, not by pulling up a listing.
If you're weighing a move to a town where the neighborhood park runs on institutional memory this deep, that's worth factoring in alongside square footage and commute times. It's the difference between a town with a park and a town where the park has traditions older than a lot of the houses around it.
Whether you're a longtime Van Saun regular or you're evaluating Paramus from the outside and want a resident's read on what daily life here actually looks like, Christian Di Stasio can walk you through it street by street. Schedule a white-glove consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
