Drive along Route 22 through Mountainside and you will pass Prince's Farm Stand before you ever reach anything resembling a town square. Tomatoes stacked in wooden crates, a hand-lettered sign, Vine Republic next door, and across four lanes of highway traffic, Echo Lake Park. That is not an approach to downtown. That is downtown, or the closest thing this town has to one.
Most of the towns around Union County built their identity on a walkable strip: a Broad Street, a Springfield Avenue, a cluster of storefronts you can stroll between on a Saturday morning. Mountainside skipped that step. Its commercial spine runs along a state highway, its produce comes from a stand that never closes for the week, and its shared public space is a 139-acre park that does the job of several smaller ones. None of this is new to anyone who already lives here. What's worth laying out is how deliberately these pieces fit together, and what's shifting in each of them this year.
A Town Organized Around a Highway, Not a Grid
Search "farmers market near Mountainside" and every result sends you somewhere else. Westfield's market, Summit's, Scotch Plains's, even Madison's and Millburn's show up before anything inside Mountainside's own borders does. That's because Mountainside never built a municipal Saturday market. What it built instead is Prince's Farm Stand at 1123 Mountain Avenue, open Monday through Saturday from 9am to 6pm and Sunday from 9am to 5pm, sitting off Route 22 East directly across from Echo Lake Park. There is no single market day here. There's a farm stand that's open six and a half days a week, which means produce shopping in Mountainside gets folded into a Tuesday errand run instead of built around a weekend ritual.
Compare that to Summit, where the farmers market runs exclusively on Sundays from 8am to 1pm, April through December. Or Scotch Plains, whose market keeps the same one-day-a-week rhythm on Saturdays. Those towns organized a weekly event around produce. Mountainside just kept a stand open.
One Park Doing the Work of Several
Echo Lake Park covers 139 acres with two lakes, which sounds modest until you set it against Union County's full park system: 36 parks spread across roughly 6,200 acres. Echo Lake is a sliver of that total, yet it's carrying fishing, ice skating, pedal boats, a fenced dog park, lighted ball fields, a playground, and the county's memorial to September 11, 2001, all inside one property that also happens to run parallel to Route 22.
The dog park alone covers just under three acres with separate sections for large and small breeds, reachable from either Mountain Avenue or Springfield Avenue. Behind Borough Hall, the park's fitness trail stretches nine-tenths of a mile on a resurfaced "warning track mix," a softer composite than asphalt that the borough specifically installed to be easier on knees and joints. None of these features exist in isolation somewhere else in town. They're stacked into one property because Mountainside doesn't have the acreage, or the downtown grid, to spread them across separate blocks the way a bigger commercial district might.
Three Projects Finishing This Year
Underneath the everyday version of the town, a few civic upgrades are moving at the same time this summer. None of them changes the shape of daily life on its own, but together they explain why 2026 feels like a year Mountainside is quietly reinvesting in the spaces residents already use.
| Project | What's changing | Where things stand |
|---|---|---|
| Tennis courts at Deerfield and Borough Hall | Resurfacing of the borough's lighted courts | Work is underway now, moved up after the contractor's schedule opened earlier than expected |
| Watchung Stable, Summit Lane | A $5.5 million Union County Improvement Authority upgrade adding adaptive horseback riding for veterans, people with PTSD, and people with disabilities | Renovation in progress as part of the county's broader park bond program |
| Trailside Nature & Science Center, 452 New Providence Road | Sensory Friendly Summer Camp for Union County teens 12-16 and young adults 17-21 with documented disabilities | Running August 17 through August 21, 2026, 9am to 2pm daily |
The stable project is the one worth sitting with. Turning a riding facility into a resource for veterans and people managing PTSD is a specific, deliberate use of county bond money, not a routine facility refresh. It signals that the county sees Mountainside's recreational footprint as infrastructure worth expanding, not just maintaining.
Who Keeps the Shared Spaces Running
A town without a downtown business district doesn't have a chamber of commerce raising money to plant flowers or repaint benches. In Mountainside, that work tends to fall to volunteers. Beautiful Mountainside, a nonprofit that's been active for roughly a decade, organizes residents around town upkeep and beautification projects. The Mountainside Restoration Committee runs an annual Spring Plant Sale each April to support preservation work around town. Neither group is glamorous, and neither shows up in a highlight reel of things to do this weekend, but they're the reason the shared spaces here get tended at all. When your commercial corridor is a highway instead of a walkable street, the civic energy that would normally go toward downtown beautification gets redirected into parks, trails, and borough-owned facilities instead.
Where Dinner Actually Happens
The restaurant lineup along Route 22 has settled into a recognizable rotation. Stage House Tavern, at 1099 US-22, opened in March 2017 and has built a reputation for its Sunday brunch, patio seating, and private event space for up to 100 people, with kitchen hours running until 10pm on weeknights and 11pm on Fridays and Saturdays. A few minutes down the highway sits Spanish Tavern of Mountainside, and the current rotation also includes Publick House, Black Sheep Bar and Provisions, 387 Oyster House & Bar, and Jessica's, a family-run spot known locally for its BYOB policy and made-to-order specials.
None of these restaurants sit within walking distance of each other the way a Main Street cluster would. You drive between them, park, and drive to the next one, and that's simply how dinner works here. It's not a compromise on what a "real" downtown should look like. It's the version of a dining scene that fits a town whose commercial identity was always built around a highway corridor rather than a pedestrian grid.
What This Adds Up To
None of these pieces on their own would explain much about Mountainside. A farm stand with long hours, a park that's doing five jobs at once, a stable getting a county-funded overhaul, a nature center's summer camp, and a string of restaurants along a highway: taken separately, they're just a list of things that exist here. Taken together, they describe a town that decided early on not to build a conventional downtown and has spent every year since making the substitutes work harder. The highway carries the restaurants. The park carries the recreation. The farm stand carries the produce economy. And the volunteers carry the upkeep that a business improvement district would normally fund somewhere else.
If you're the kind of resident who already knows every one of these names by heart, this is just Tuesday. If you're weighing whether Mountainside's version of daily life would suit you, or you're a longtime resident curious about what the county's investment in places like Watchung Stable might mean down the line, Meagan Beriont has spent her career tracking exactly this kind of local detail across Union County. Let's Connect.
