Drive down Route 17 on a Sunday afternoon and something feels off before you can name it. The parking lots at Garden State Plaza sit half full. Paramus Park's storefronts are dark behind the glass. It's the one day the borough's three shopping malls stop pulling traffic through town, and if you've lived here more than a year, you've stopped noticing it as strange. You just know Sunday is different.
What you may not know is that this particular kind of different is currently sitting in front of a Bergen County Superior Court judge, and the two malls that aren't Garden State Plaza have already told the borough, in writing, that they won't keep holding the line much longer.
That's the part of this story that never makes it into the generic "why is everything closed in Bergen County" explainer. The blue laws themselves are old news. What's new, and what actually affects whether your Sunday keeps feeling the way it feels now, is a lawsuit that's been quietly working through the courts since last August, and a private admission buried in a legal filing that the town's own malls are watching the outcome as their cue.
How Paramus ended up the last holdout
New Jersey let counties vote their way out of Sunday retail bans back in 1959. Every county eventually did, except one. Bergen County residents were asked twice whether they wanted to keep the closing laws, once in 1980 and again in 1993, and both times they said yes. The 1993 vote wasn't close. It went 2-to-1 in favor of keeping Sundays closed.
Paramus took it further than the county requirement. The borough's own ordinance bans nearly all commercial activity on Sundays, with carve-outs for grocery stores, gas stations, pharmacies, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues. So while your neighbor in Wayne can buy a couch on a Sunday at Willowbrook Mall, a short drive over in Passaic County, you can't do the same thing at Bergen Town Center. That's not an accident of geography. It's the specific outcome of a vote residents here made on purpose, twice, and never revisited.
The mall that decided the rules didn't apply
American Dream, the 3-million-square-foot entertainment and retail complex in East Rutherford, opened in 2019 and started running its retail stores on Sundays in 2024. Its argument for why it's allowed to do this is straightforward: the complex sits on land owned by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which is state property, and state property isn't bound by a county-level closing law. It's the same legal logic that lets fans buy a Giants jersey inside MetLife Stadium on a Sunday afternoon, also technically state land, also technically in Bergen County.
Paramus didn't buy it. In August 2025, the borough filed a four-count lawsuit in Bergen County Superior Court against American Dream's developer, Ameream, along with Bergen County, East Rutherford, and the NJSEA itself. The complaint doesn't hedge. It states that more than 120 stores inside American Dream had been operating on Sundays for at least a year at that point, and that the mall's ownership had violated the closing law "hundreds if not thousands of times." Paramus wants a judge to declare those Sunday retail hours a public nuisance and order them shut down, on top of escalating fines that start at $250 for a first violation and climb to $5,000 for every offense after the third.
The case had its most substantial hearing so far in early June 2026, in Hackensack. American Dream's attorney, Angelo Genova, argued that Paramus has no legal standing to enforce a local closing law against a mall sitting in a different township on state-owned land, calling the borough's approach an attempt to act as "private attorney general" for a statute it doesn't have the authority to police outside its own borders. Paramus's attorney, Leonard Seaman, pushed back that the law is clear regardless of who owns the land, asking why shoplifting statutes get enforced at American Dream but the closing law somehow doesn't. Judge Gregg Padovano reserved judgment on the request to dismiss the case outright and told both sides he'd have an opinion out shortly. As of this writing, no ruling has been made public.
What Paramus's own malls already told the borough
Here's the detail that changes what this case actually means for your Sunday. It's not really about American Dream at all. It's about whether Paramus's own malls keep behaving the way they've always behaved.
In a March 2026 legal brief, Paramus Borough Administrator Hector Olmo disclosed that the managers of the borough's own three malls had approached him directly. Their message: if American Dream is allowed to keep ignoring the closing law, they won't be the ones left following it while a competitor down the highway takes their Sunday business.
"During those discussions the managers of the Paramus malls have advised me that they view the Sunday operations of the American Dream mall as a major threat to their operations."
Only one of the three has said publicly what it plans to do either way. A representative for Westfield Garden State Plaza told reporters the mall would keep observing the closing law "regardless of the hours observed by other shopping centers in the area." Bergen Town Center declined to confirm or deny the borough's account. Paramus Park didn't respond to requests for comment at all.
So the honest version of the situation is this: the quiet Sunday you've gotten used to in Paramus isn't guaranteed by three malls agreeing to stay closed. It's guaranteed by one mall's public commitment, and two malls' silence, sitting on top of a court case that hasn't been decided yet.
What's actually open right now, while all of this plays out
None of this touches the businesses that were always allowed to run on Sundays. Paramus's own ordinance exempts restaurants and entertainment venues, and that side of town hasn't changed regardless of what happens in Hackensack. If you're looking for a way to spend the one day a week the parking lots thin out, the options already sitting inside your own zip code include:
- Tom Sawyer Diner, open around the clock since 1974, serving the kind of comfort food and Italian and Greek dishes that make it a genuine Sunday morning fixture rather than a novelty stop.
- Turning Point, running breakfast, brunch, and lunch seven days a week from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., no exception carved out for Sundays.
- Fogo de Chão and Grand Lux Cafe, both operating inside Garden State Plaza itself, proof that the mall's dining wing runs on its own schedule even while the retail corridors around it stay dark.
- Van Saun County Park, open every day regardless of the closing law, since it was never a retail question to begin with.
- Pinstripes, the newer bowling, bocce, and dining concept that's landed in town and runs on the same seven-day schedule as any other restaurant.
The pattern holds across all of them. Retail closes. Food, entertainment, and the county park don't. That split has been true in Paramus for decades and it's the one part of this story that isn't waiting on a judge.
What actually changes if the ruling goes against Paramus
If Judge Padovano sides with American Dream, or dismisses the case on standing grounds, the practical effect isn't confined to East Rutherford. Two of Paramus's three malls have already signaled they're prepared to follow. That would mean Sunday retail hours arriving inside Paramus itself, not just at a competitor across the county line, and it would mean the traffic pattern locals have built their weekends around for years starts to look more like every other day of the week.
If the case goes the other way and American Dream is ordered to close its retail wing on Sundays, the quiet stays exactly as it's been. No new referendum required, no new ordinance to pass. Just a continuation of the same arrangement Bergen County voters chose twice, decades apart, and never asked to change.
Either way, the decision that actually reshapes a Paramus Sunday isn't going to come from a town hall meeting or a ballot measure. It's going to come from a courtroom in Hackensack, on a timeline nobody involved is willing to commit to publicly.
If you're weighing what a home in Paramus is worth right now, factors like this, the ones that shape daily life rather than showing up in a listing description, are exactly the kind of local detail that gets missed by anyone working from spreadsheets alone. Joseph Aziz Real Estate tracks these details because they're the ones that actually affect how a property feels to live in day to day. If you want a read on what your home is worth with that context built in, request a free home valuation and get an answer grounded in the town as it actually operates, not just the town as it appears on paper.
