Most Thursday evenings from July into August, Berry Lane Park fills up for JC Summerfest, the free concert series the Jersey City Office of Cultural Affairs runs on the park's lawn between Garfield Avenue and Woodward Street. The crowd that shows up says more about the neighborhood than the band does. Some people walk over from the apartment towers on Monitor Street, still in the clothes they wore to the PATH that morning. Others come from the rowhouses off Communipaw Avenue, the ones that have been there since before any of this was called Bergen-Lafayette. Kids run between them still wet from the splash pad. Someone is working through a to-go order from Bergen Hall two blocks over.
That mix is the actual story. Bergen-Lafayette isn't building one restaurant scene right now. It's building two, on two different blocks, under two different sets of rules, and for a couple of hours each Thursday night this summer, Berry Lane Park is the one place both crowds reliably end up in the same field.
Monitor Street Runs on a Leasing Timeline
Walk Monitor Street and you're walking through a single development plan. Starling, Atlas, and The Hazel are three of the buildings in what Alpine Residential and Fields Grade call The Bergen Lafayette Collection, a set of properties expected to add close to 1,000 apartments to the neighborhood. The restaurants inside them aren't independent bets on the block. They're ground-floor retail chosen to round out a leasing pitch.
The Roxy opened at Starling, 66 Monitor Street, in spring 2024, a venture from the same team behind Corto in Jersey City Heights, with a menu built around dishes like a mizuna salad and seared scallops. Mochi Dough and Bober Tea followed into the same building, the brand's first New Jersey location after opening outposts in eight other states. Around the corner at The Hazel, 89 Monitor Street, Cheeky's Sandwiches brought New Orleans-style po' boys and biscuits from Din Yates, a chef who established the original Cheeky's in Manhattan's Lower East Side in 2009, in partnership with Israel Jiles, one of the owners of Ani Ramen.
If you live in one of these buildings, the restaurant on your ground floor arrived on the developer's schedule, not the neighborhood's.
Communipaw and Johnston Filled In One Storefront at a Time
A few blocks away, the pattern reverses. Harry's Daughter, at 339 Communipaw Avenue, is a Caribbean gastropub built around owner Ria Ramkissoon's Trinidadian family recipes, roti flatbread stuffed with cheddar and pineapple, nachos with a scotch bonnet kick. It didn't come bundled with a lease upstairs. Neither did Torico, the downtown Jersey City ice cream shop that opened its Bergen-Lafayette outpost at 1041 Garfield Avenue after first announcing plans back in 2021.
Ghost Truck Kitchen, founded by longtime Jersey City resident Andrew Martino in 2019, relaunched at 295 Johnston Avenue and then opened a full sit-down companion, Bergen Hall, next door at 58 Maple Street. Pinwheel Garden Dumpling & Noodle Bar has been serving a plant-focused menu, bacon-veggie dumplings and Indian-spiced coconut curry, since brothers Steve and Albert Tseng opened it in 2018, well before the Collection's towers broke ground. Cornerstone Pilates opened a reformer studio at 344 Communipaw Avenue this spring. The Factory, on the corner of Communipaw near the park itself, has built its own following with Paint and Sip nights and Sunday brunches with live music.
None of these businesses needed a developer's five-building plan to justify their rent. They needed a landlord willing to sign a lease and a neighborhood willing to walk in.
One Chef Working Both Sides of the Street
The two corridors aren't sealed off from each other, and the clearest evidence is Israel Jiles. He's a partner on Cheeky's at The Hazel, the developer-leased side of Monitor Street. In December 2025, he also opened Po Boy Riche, his own New Orleans-style spot on the independent side of the neighborhood, serving beignets, jambalaya, and dirty rice under his own name rather than a building's brand.
That's a useful detail for anyone trying to read this neighborhood correctly. The same operators are betting on both models at once, which means the split between "collection retail" and "independent storefront" is a structural fact about how the real estate here works, not a judgment about which side has better food.
Why the Park Sits in the Middle of Both Stories
Berry Lane Park is the literal midpoint. It sits on 17.5 acres between Garfield Avenue and Woodward Street, next to the Garfield Avenue light rail station, a short walk from Torico and The Factory on one side and from the Collection buildings on Monitor and Maple on the other. According to its history on Wikipedia, the park cost $38 million to build on a former brownfield and opened in June 2016, with two basketball courts, two tennis courts, a baseball field, a soccer field, a playground, and a splash pad. A skate park followed in August 2020 after a grant from the Tony Hawk Foundation.
Growth keeps circling it. In April 2026, Jersey City's Planning Board approved a 170-unit residential building at 87 Van Horne Street, a parcel that directly abuts the park, according to Jersey Digs. The site had sat vacant since a previous proposal collapsed when COVID hit in 2020. That approval is a small but telling signal: when developers pick a site in Bergen-Lafayette right now, proximity to Berry Lane Park is still part of the pitch, on both the Monitor Street side of the ledger and the Communipaw side.
The Concerts Wind Down. The Real Test Starts Now.
By this point in August, JC Summerfest's run at Berry Lane Park is winding down for the year, the way it typically does once the calendar turns toward September. For a few Thursdays each summer, the park gives both corridors a shared reason to show up in the same place at the same time without anyone having to decide whose block they're visiting. That weekly excuse fades until next summer. What happens the rest of the year is the more interesting question.
Nothing forces a Starling resident to walk past the light rail tracks to Harry's Daughter, and nothing forces a longtime Communipaw Avenue neighbor to try the mizuna salad at The Roxy. Through the fall, the crossover Israel Jiles represents with Cheeky's and Po Boy Riche becomes less of a curiosity and more of a real question: do enough people move between these two restaurant geographies on their own, or does Bergen-Lafayette settle back into two adjacent but separate neighborhoods until Berry Lane Park gives everyone another reason to cross Garfield Avenue together.
If you're already living here, that's worth watching over the next few months, not because it changes your rent or your commute, but because it's the difference between a neighborhood with one identity and a neighborhood that's really two, sharing a park.
If you're curious about what this kind of growth means for property values on either side of that line, we've written separately about buying in Bergen-Lafayette, and you can browse the full Bergen-Lafayette neighborhood guide any time. For everything else, from a walk-through of a specific block to a straight answer about what a listing is actually worth in this market, Hudson Realty Group is here. Contact us.
