Where did you buy groceries five years ago if you lived near Brick Church Station? If the honest answer involves a drive to Clifton, Livingston, or even just across the Newark line, you were living out a pattern the city's own planners had already put a number on. An analysis by East Orange's Office of Policy, Planning & Development found that the city was losing more than $1.4 billion in local consumer spending to surrounding regions because there simply wasn't enough retail to keep it here. That figure sat behind the redevelopment plan for the ten acres around the train station, and this summer is the first stretch where residents can actually watch it play out on the ground, while a few blocks away, Elmwood Park has been running its fullest festival calendar in years without waiting on any of it.
The Number the City Put On Itself
It's one thing to sense that a town is under-retailed. It's another for the town to formally measure the leak and use it to justify a rebuild. That's what happened at what's now called The Crossings at Brick Church Station, the roughly ten-acre site next to the train tracks that had sat mostly as an aging shopping plaza and its parking lots for decades. The $1.4 billion figure became the case for demolishing and rebuilding rather than patching what was there, and it's why the project scope grew to include several new retailers rather than a single supermarket swap.
What's Actually Open Now
The anchor of that project, a new ShopRite at 533 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, opened to customers on May 27, 2026. It replaced a 55,000-square-foot store that had served that stretch of the boulevard for 67 years, and the new building is 80,000 square feet, with a sushi bar, a fish fry station, a soup bar, an expanded bakery, and a full produce department that the old layout couldn't fit. The old store's roughly 187 associates moved to the new location, and Village Super Market says the finished store will employ well over 250 workers once fully staffed.
The rest of the plaza is filling in around it. Confirmed tenants at The Crossings at Brick Church Station include:
- Burlington
- Five Below
- Dunkin' Donuts
- Rita's Italian Ice
Two additional spaces, one at 1,600 square feet and one at 4,000 square feet, were still being marketed for restaurant use as of early June, so the tenant list may not be final yet. A grand opening celebration for the ShopRite itself was still pending as of that same update. Village Super Market said it was holding off until the new parking garage is finished and the old store, still standing next door, is demolished. In the meantime, the store has been running on temporary hours of 6 a.m. to midnight instead of its planned 24-hour schedule, with two hours of free parking for customers in the on-site garage.
Why the Empty Lot Next Door Matters as Much as the Full Shelves Inside
The detail easiest to skip past is that the old store is still sitting there. For a redevelopment framed around fixing a $1.4 billion gap, an unfinished construction site next to the new anchor is a reminder that this is a project still in motion, not a ribbon-cutting that already happened. The 67-year run of the previous store also puts the current moment in perspective. Whatever building stood on that spot before was serving Brick Church long enough that most current residents have never shopped anywhere else nearby. That kind of tenure explains why a new grocery store, a new discount retailer, and a new sneaker-and-snack stop registered as more than routine turnover. It's the first real refresh this particular block has had in most people's adult lives.
Elmwood Park Didn't Wait on Any of This
While Brick Church Station was mid-construction, East Orange's cultural calendar kept running on its own schedule a short drive away. Elmwood Park, which borders Elmwood Avenue, Rhode Island Avenue, Freeman Avenue, and Oak Street in the city's Third Ward, has been the site of most of the city's major music festivals for years, well before any of the retail news broke. This year's slate has been especially dense.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| July 27 | 2nd Annual RnB in the City Festival, presented by Mayor Ted R. Green and East Orange City Council along with the Department of Recreation & Cultural Affairs, the Department of Health & Human Services, and NJ Soup LLC |
| August 2 | Praise in the Park 2026 |
| August 23 | 11th Annual East Orange Summer Jam House Music Festival, hosted by Mayor Green and Third and Fourth Ward Councilmembers Quilla Talmadge, Bergson Leneus, Casim Gomez, and Tameika Garett-Ward |
All three are free and open to the public. As of today, the first two have already come and gone, and the Summer Jam closeout is still ahead. That festival in particular has an eleven-year run behind it, which means it predates every part of the current retail buildout by a wide margin. The park's swimming pool, seven tennis courts, walking track, baseball and softball fields, and fieldhouse have hosted little league, soccer, and summer basketball all season alongside the festival schedule, so the calendar above sits on top of programming that was already dense to begin with.
The Thursday Habit Nobody Had To Plan For
Not every draw in East Orange is an annual event with a mayor's office behind it. A recurring Thursday night gathering at 382 Main Street has become enough of a fixture that it shows up on local event listings simply as Thirsty Thursday, a weekly rather than seasonal pull. It's a small detail next to a $1.4 billion planning figure or an 80,000-square-foot supermarket, but weekly habits are usually a better read on a neighborhood's actual rhythm than any single festival weekend. Big one-off events tell you the city can draw a crowd. A standing Thursday night tells you people already had somewhere to go before anyone built anything new.
What This Actually Changes If You Already Live Here
The two threads in this story, one about retail and one about public gathering space, didn't happen because of each other. Elmwood Park's festival calendar would exist with or without a new ShopRite next door, and the retail buildout at Brick Church Station was planned around a spending leak that had nothing to do with concert programming. But they landed in the same summer, and for someone who already lives in East Orange, that timing is the actual story. Fewer of the routine trips, whether that's a grocery run or a Saturday out, need to end with a drive to another town. The $1.4 billion figure was never really about the number itself. It was a measure of how often residents were leaving to spend money and time somewhere else. This summer is the first one where the answer to both questions increasingly starts with staying put.
None of this changes overnight, and the unfinished lot next to the new ShopRite is proof that the work is still underway. But if you're weighing what a neighborhood is actually like day to day rather than what a listing page says about it, a summer like this one, with a supermarket rebuild finally finished, three more retailers signed, and a festival calendar running eleven years deep at Elmwood Park, tells you more than most statistics can.
If you're thinking about what a move into East Orange or a nearby Essex County community would actually look like, or you're trying to figure out what your own property here is worth in a market that's visibly changing block by block, Cooper McKelvey knows this area from the ground up. Let's Connect.
