East Ridgewood Avenue will close to traffic for one day this September, and in its place will come roughly 200 independent artists and craftspeople, a food court built around Van Neste Square Memorial Park, and the kind of downtown takeover that has made the Ridgewood Fall Art & Craft Street Fair a recurring highlight on Bergen County’s fall calendar for years. The 2026 edition is set for Sunday, September 20, running from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and stretching the full length of East Ridgewood Avenue, the town’s main commercial corridor, for the day.
The fair has picked up multiple “Best of Bergen” honors from local voters over the years, and the reason isn’t hard to find once you walk the length of it. Ridgewood’s downtown, ordinarily a stretch of shops and restaurants serving a single suburban town, gets converted for a single Sunday into a sprawling open-air marketplace that pulls exhibitors from well beyond New Jersey’s borders and draws crowds well beyond the town’s own population.
An Artisan Marketplace With Real Standards
What sets this fair apart from a lot of the street festivals that pop up around New Jersey each fall is a strict rule about what’s actually allowed to be sold. Organizers explicitly bar generic buy-and-sell commercial merchandise, the kind of mass-produced goods that show up at plenty of other town fairs dressed up as artisan products. Every vendor at Ridgewood’s fair is required to sell handcrafted work, and the roughly 200 exhibitors who set up along East Ridgewood Avenue this year are traveling in from four different states to do exactly that.
Walking the fair means browsing pottery thrown and glazed by the person standing behind the table, stained glass pieces built by hand, custom jewelry, woodwork, photography, apparel, and mixed-media art that spans everything in between. That level of curation is part of why the fair has built such a loyal following. It isn’t a flea market wearing a craft fair’s name. It’s an actual juried marketplace where every booth represents someone’s individual work, not a wholesale supply chain.
Food, Music, and a Kids’ Zone Built Into the Layout
The shopping is only part of the draw. A full food court assembles in front of Van Neste Square Memorial Park, staffed by food trucks and local vendors serving the kind of festival lineup that turns browsing into an all-day outing rather than a quick errand: sausage and peppers, empanadas, gyros, steak sandwiches, kebobs, zeppoles, and fresh seafood all make an appearance, giving fairgoers plenty of reason to linger near the park even after they’ve made their way through the artisan booths.
Families attending with kids get their own dedicated space, set up primarily along Walnut Street and inside the park itself, with interactive games, face painting, and a rotation of large inflatables designed to keep younger attendees entertained while the adults browse. Live music runs near the park entrance for the entire afternoon, with local bands and musicians providing a running soundtrack for the shopping and dining crowd, the kind of ambient entertainment that turns a street fair from a simple market into a genuine community event.
The Logistics Are About as Simple as It Gets
For anyone weighing whether to make the trip, the practical details are about as low-friction as a fall festival gets. Admission is completely free, the event runs rain or shine regardless of what the forecast looks like that Sunday, and the whole operation is organized through a partnership between Ridgewood Parks & Recreation and PJ’s Promotions, the event management company that handles the logistics of pulling together 200 exhibitors, a full food court, a children’s entertainment zone, and a day of live music into a single coordinated street closure.
For Bergen County residents who have made the fair a fall tradition, and for anyone from farther out weighing a day trip to downtown Ridgewood, September 20 offers a straightforward pitch: a genuinely curated artisan marketplace, a food court worth the trip on its own, and a full day of programming built around one of North Jersey’s most walkable downtown strips, all without spending a dime just to get in the door.
