"We have now 11 barbershops in town." That's Joan Groome, who runs the Ridgewood Chamber of Commerce, describing her own downtown to a national radio audience this August. She wasn't complaining. She was doing math out loud, standing on the block of East Ridgewood Avenue where, by her own count, three ice cream cafés have opened with a fourth on the way.
If you live here, you already knew something was different. Maybe you noticed it at Kilwins, or at Häagen-Dazs on East Ridgewood Avenue, or when Maroons Creamery took over a storefront at 57 East Ridgewood a couple of years back and the line still hasn't shortened. What you might not have known is that your Main Street became the case study. NPR built a national story about the American downtown around this specific stretch of pavement, because the numbers here happen to match a shift that real estate data firm CoStar says is happening to Main Streets everywhere.
One Block, Four Ice Cream Counters, and a Sushi Bar Where the Ski Shop Used to Be
Start with what's arriving. MilkShake Factory, a fourth-generation Pittsburgh chocolate and milkshake business that traces its name back to 1914, is opening its first Bergen County location at 63 East Ridgewood Avenue. The grand opening is set for Thursday, October 10, run locally by franchisees Penn and Tara Miller-Jones, whose interest in the brand reportedly started when their son went to college in Pittsburgh and they visited the original shop on Forbes Avenue.
That storefront doesn't open into a vacuum. It joins a block that NPR's reporting already flagged as unusually dense with dessert shops, alongside Maroons Creamery and Hey Yogurt. Widen the lens past sugar and the same swap shows up in what used to be retail:
- Joan Groome's old ski shop, once located above a family gift-and-art store, is now a sushi spot.
- The bank building where she used to walk past a teller window is now an Italian-inspired restaurant, vault and deposit boxes still intact, with a rooftop bar on top of them.
- Tatte Bakery & Café, a regional chain, opened across the street from Bookends, the independent bookstore that has held its spot since the 1980s.
- Downtown as a whole now counts 11 barbershops, dozens of coffee shops, and more than a hundred restaurants, according to the same reporting.
None of that reads like a downtown running out of ideas. It reads like a downtown running out of things that can be shipped to your door in two days, and filling the gap with things that can't.
The Trend Has a Name, and Last Year It Crossed the Halfway Mark
Here's the part that isn't a Ridgewood story at all. CoStar's data, cited in that same NPR piece, shows that last year marked the first time a majority of U.S. retail space nationwide was leased to tenants selling services rather than goods. Not a plurality. A majority, for the first time on record. Analysts at Coresight Research, also quoted in the reporting, describe it as a long-run shift in where people put their spending, one they expect to keep going rather than reverse.
That reframes what's happening on East Ridgewood Avenue. A downtown that swaps a stationery store and a family pharmacy for a stretching studio and a sushi bar isn't necessarily losing retail health. It's converging on the same allocation showing up in the 20 biggest U.S. metro areas, where CoStar's numbers show goods-selling retail tenants declining for a third straight year while personal services and entertainment concepts, from medical spas to virtual golf, keep expanding into the space left behind.
Ridgewood isn't an outlier in this pattern. It's close to the median case, which is exactly why a national outlet picked this specific block to illustrate it.
Two Views From Behind the Counter
Not everyone downtown reads the shift the same way. A few doors from where Groome was counting barbershops, Gina Jeon runs Hot Jewelry Box, custom-making pieces by hand and rearranging her displays daily to give people a reason to come back. Asked about the direction of change, she put it plainly: she wonders whether more restaurants "enriches the value of the town or takes away from it." Her read is that beautiful shops pull people in to browse again and again, and that restaurants don't work the same way.
Down the block, Bookends manager David Logan sees it differently, at least for his own storefront. He says the new bakery that opened across the street has brought him new business rather than competing for the same foot traffic.
Both are describing the same block. Neither is wrong. A dessert-and-service-heavy downtown changes who walks past your door and how often, and whether that helps or hurts depends on what you're selling and how much your business depends on repeat, in-person visits versus one-time browsing.
Why Ridgewood Just Created a New Downtown Manager
The retail-to-service shift isn't just a storefront story. It's a management problem, and the Village just built new infrastructure to handle it. In September, Ridgewood formally launched the Ridgewood Business Alliance, one of Bergen County's newest Special Improvement Districts. The idea had been in motion since 2023, when the Village commissioned a feasibility study on whether a SID made sense here; the Village Council reviewed that study in 2025 before the RBA took shape this year under its first executive director, Steve Grillo.
A Special Improvement District exists to do something a volunteer chamber structure struggles to do at scale: dedicated funding, coordinated marketing, and direct involvement in the specifics that change when a downtown's tenant mix shifts, things like parking demand, signage rules, and which businesses get recruited into open storefronts next. Deputy Mayor Pamela Perron, who sits on the RBA board, called Ridgewood "a marquee community and shopping destination in North Jersey" that needed the structure of a SID to carry it forward.
Read next to the CoStar numbers, the timing isn't a coincidence. A downtown where the majority of new leases go to a stretching studio instead of a stationery store needs different things from its management organization than a downtown of standalone retailers did a decade ago. Parking that used to turn over in twenty minutes for a purchase now sits for an hour over dinner. Storefront design rules built around window displays matter less when the tenant is a barbershop with frosted glass. Ridgewood didn't form a SID because downtown is failing. It formed one because downtown changed shape, and the old tools weren't built for the new one.
Walk East Ridgewood Avenue this fall and you'll pass MilkShake Factory's October 10 opening, the sushi bar that used to be a ski shop, and a jeweler and a bookseller who've each drawn their own conclusions about what it all means. None of them are describing decline. They're describing the same national reshuffling that CoStar has been tracking in the biggest cities in the country, playing out storefront by storefront on a two-block stretch of Bergen County.
If you're the kind of person who notices these shifts before they show up in a headline, you already have a good eye for how a neighborhood is actually changing, not just how it looks on paper. That's the same instinct Monica Capellan brings to reading Bergen County block by block, for anyone who wants a second opinion on what a particular street's changes might mean down the line.
