Ridgefield Park, N.J.: A 21st-Century Mayberry

At this spring’s Earth Day celebration in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, a bluegrass guitarist strummed the theme from “The Andy Griffith Show” — a fitting anthem for a Bergen County community easily compared to the fictional Mayberry.

The trappings of small-town life are evident in working-class Ridgefield Park, one of four official villages in New Jersey. Front porches and fluttering flags abound on cozy, tree-canopied streets, many one-way. The elaborate Fourth of July parade, first staged in 1894, is the state’s oldest. The supermarket, with four aisles and a painted tin ceiling punctuated by spinning fans, is more like the grocery where Aunt Bee shopped.

Even Ridgefield Park’s most famous native — strait-laced Ozzie Nelson, from another black-and-white TV classic, “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” — underscores the suburb’s old-fashioned, unhip, Starbucks-free image.

“It’s like living in the ‘50s here,” said Karen Purpura, a 69-year-old flutist who moved to Ridgefield Park with her partner, Tom Olcott, from nearby Englewood last year after inheriting a house from a friend. “People look out for each other; the neighbors even snow-blow our property. It’s a family town. You feel grounded.”

The couple’s rambling 1908 colonial, with its wraparound porch, is representative of the housing stock, 60 percent of which is at least a century old. Purpura said she and Olcott, a 66-year-old musicians’ union official, put more than $100,000 into repairs and upgrades.

“We retained the integrity of the house, restoring it back to the original wood floors,” she said. “We’re not looking to live any other place. This is our home, where the grandkids come. We love the house and we love the neighborhood.”

Beyond ambience, homebuyers have pragmatic reasons for choosing Ridgefield Park, which has 13,000 residents in less than two square miles. Located at the nexus of highways, the village offers a short commute to New York, just five miles from the George Washington Bridge and 11 miles from the Lincoln Tunnel. And home prices are markedly lower than in other Bergen County towns like Ridgewood, with which Ridgefield Park shares village status and an inventory of turn-of-the-century houses.

Ayse and Firat Okcu paid $400,000 for a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath colonial in Ridgefield Park in 2016 after considering two towns farther north in Bergen County, Emerson and Oradell, for their strong school systems. But accessibility won over the couple, parents of a 1-year-old. Firat, 41, has a 35-minute early-morning bus ride to Manhattan, where he works at a Times Square hotel, and his wife, 37, has a reasonable drive to the Weehawken hotel where she works.

“Plus, the type of house we bought would have cost $50,000 to $100,000 more” in the other towns, said Ayse, who described Ridgefield Park as friendly and secure.

Janice Cima, a broker associate with Keller Williams Village Square Realty in Ridgewood, grew up in Ridgefield Park and said locals have long invoked Sheriff Andy Taylor’s idyllic hometown when describing their own. “Ridgefield Park is similar to Mayberry in that it’s picturesque and tight-knit,” she said. “People move here and stay through multiple generations. You can’t say that about many towns.”

While many prize Ridgefield Park for its proximity to Manhattan, Cima said, the vintage homes — the oldest of which was raided by the British during the Revolution — are also a draw.

Situated just north of the Meadowlands, Ridgefield Park occupies a peninsula bordered by the Hackensack River to the west and Overpeck Creek to the east. Interstate 80 is the northern border, with Teaneck and Bogota on the other side; Route 46 slices through the village’s southern flank.

The New Jersey Turnpike parallels Overpeck Creek and separates Ridgefield Park’s residential portion from Overpeck County Park and the Overpeck Centre complex, which includes the Samsung Electronics America headquarters, a hotel and a 12-screen movie theater.

A larger mixed-use project is expected to be built over the coming years on vacant land south of Overpeck Centre, where the turnpike and Route 46 converge. The $1 billion SkyMark Center would comprise 1,500 rental apartments in a “town center” configuration and a high-rise — millennial commuters are the target audience — as well as 212,000 square feet of open-air retail and two hotels. All permits have been obtained, and a spokesman for the developer, Eagle Nest Development Urban Renewal, said financing is being finalized and ground could be broken in six months.

Mayor George Fosdick described his town as “ever-changing, yet eternally the same,” and said commercial development east of the turnpike keeps things that way. Homeowners benefit, he added, because “our future, in terms of economic development, lies in the area of Ridgefield Park where people don’t live,” ensuring that the village proper maintains its traditional appearance.

On June 28, the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service website showed 28 properties for sale, all but four priced under $400,000. At the high end, listed at $535,000, was an early 20th-century brick center-hall colonial on Euclid Avenue, with annual property taxes of $14,147. Nine single-family houses and two condos were listed for between $300,000 and $400,000, with property taxes of $7,500 to $12,000. Five co-ops were listed for less than $100,000.

Between June 1, 2017, and May 31, 2018, 70 single-family houses sold at a median price of $324,500, up from $310,000 during the previous 12-month period, according to the listing service. The median price of a co-op was $83,500, and that of a condominium or town house, $184,950.

The timeworn Main Street business district takes all of four minutes to walk and has a variety of tenants, including a bakery specializing in wedding cakes, a bicycle shop, the village hall, a stationery store, a dollar store and restaurants serving Greek, Peruvian and Thai fare, among others. The anchor is the quaint Village IGA grocery, where village officials dart in for lunch at the deli counter and flyers announcing pancake breakfast fundraisers and missing pets are taped to the entrance glass.

Volunteer organizations, from the fire department and ambulance corps to the Masons, Lions, Elks and Knights of Columbus help keep the townspeople connected, as does a popular Facebook group, Ridgefield Park Moms. In April, the village rallied to support a family who had lost their home to fire. “Instantly there were efforts by many of our organizations to raise money for clothing for the family,” Fosdick said. “There’s a tradition here of helping friends, neighbors and strangers.”

Stephen Quinn, a wildlife artist and member of the local Environmental Commission, lives in a circa-1921 house built by his great-grandfather. Several years ago, he bought the adjacent property, knocked down the house and created a pocket-size wildlife sanctuary. A better-known natural landmark is the protected nest of a pair of avian celebrities, bald eagles Al and Alice.

“Ridgefield Park has always had a countrified air about it,” Quinn said. “Compared to other places, we’ve maintained our small-town character.”

Students in kindergarten through sixth grade attend one of three neighborhood elementary schools: Grant, Lincoln or Roosevelt. Ridgefield Park Junior-Senior High School enrolls 1,240 in grades seven through 12. Average SAT scores for 2016-17 were 515 in reading and writing and 511 in math, compared with 551 and 552 statewide. Sixty-nine percent of the class of 2017 went on to college, versus 71 percent statewide.

Mark Hayes, the interim superintendent, said the school district is “turning a corner” three years after a $2.5 million budget shortfall necessitated the appointment of a state fiscal monitor.

There is no train station in Ridgefield Park; most commuters take the bus instead. From the principal thoroughfares of Main Street and Teaneck Road, New Jersey Transit buses reach the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan in less than 45 minutes; the fare is $4.50 one way or $148 monthly.

Decades before Ozzie Nelson presided over his clean-cut family on television, he was the pride of Ridgefield Park: an Eagle Scout at 13 and, at Ridgefield Park High, a star quarterback who led the football team to an undefeated 1922 season. The road looping around the current high school was named Ozzie Nelson Drive in 1992, 17 years after the entertainer’s death.