Overpeck Park Has Two Entrances, and This Fall Decides Which One You Use
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Most people who live near Overpeck County Park know it as the place with the running path and the fireworks in July, and not much else. Fewer know that the park has two functioning front doors, that they lead to different parts of the same 805 acres, and that on certain fall weekends only one of them stays open to regular traffic. If you've ever driven toward Challenger Road on a Saturday afternoon and found it blocked with no obvious explanation, you've already met this problem without knowing its name.
The park is also, in a literal sense, something Palisades Park helped build. More than 50 years ago, five Bergen County municipalities, including Palisades Park, along with Englewood, Leonia, Ridgefield Park, and Teaneck, donated hundreds of acres of land around Overpeck Creek to the county, some of it former landfill, to create what is now Bergen County's largest recreational park. That history matters for a practical reason: it explains why the park feels like it belongs to several towns at once rather than one, and why its access points are scattered across borough lines instead of concentrated at a single gate.
The address most people use to find Overpeck County Park is 199 Challenger Road in Ridgefield Park. That's the entrance closest to the grass amphitheater, the athletic fields, and the largest parking areas, and it's the one used for the county's biggest programmed events.
But it isn't the only way in. Event logistics for this summer's Star-Spangled Spectacular fireworks show identified a second access point on the Leonia side, off Overpeck Park Driveway, known as the Henry Hoebel Area. During that event, Challenger Road was closed to through traffic, with access reserved for ticketed event parking only, while the Henry Hoebel Area and other portions of the park on the Leonia side were opened up as free, first-come viewing spots for anyone who didn't want to enter the amphitheater itself.
That split isn't unique to fireworks night. It's the general shape of how the park works. Challenger Road is the programmed side: amphitheater, big lawns, the address you'd give a rideshare driver. The Leonia side is the quieter, walk-up side, closer to the parts of the park built for daily use rather than staged events. If your normal routine is the 1.25-mile figure-eight bike and pedestrian path that loops beside the lake, or the canoe and kayak launch into Overpeck Creek, you're almost certainly already using the quieter side without thinking of it as a separate entrance. The distinction only becomes useful information on the handful of weekends each year when the county programs something big enough to change how the main entrance functions.
It's worth being specific about what the park offers, because "Overpeck Park" gets used as shorthand for the running path and not much else. The county's own list of amenities is longer:
Most of that list is available on any ordinary day with no schedule to check. The exceptions are the amphitheater and the athletic fields, both of which are booked out for organized use, and both of which sit closer to the Challenger Road side.
Two events this year illustrate how the calendar changes the geography. The first already happened. Bergen County's third annual Star-Spangled Spectacular was originally planned as a full afternoon-into-evening program on July 4, but the county moved the start time to 6 p.m. because of forecast extreme heat and afternoon thunderstorms, cutting the daytime portion while keeping the evening performances and fireworks intact. Shuttle service ran continuously from 6 to 8 p.m. from three designated lots, including one at the Henry Hoebel Area itself, which tells you how central that Leonia-side space is to how the county handles overflow.
The second is still ahead. The Bergen County Fall Harvest Festival returns to the park for a three-day run, with the vendor pop-up and craft fair on the weekend and a Friday evening opening for rides and food vendors. Multiple event listings place it on the weekend of September 18 through 20, with a giant carnival open all three days, a farmers market, a petting zoo, and 4-H and Master Gardener exhibits, all with free admission and parking. As one county representative put it in remarks reported by TAPinto, the festival promises:
"the best of autumn with music, food, and fun activities for all ages."
The festival is staged on the Challenger Road side, the same footprint used for the fireworks show. If your plan for that weekend is the ordinary version of the park, the bike loop, the kayak launch, a quiet walk with the dog, the Leonia entrance and the paths near the Henry Hoebel Area are the more predictable choice. If your plan is the festival itself, arriving expecting free parking near the amphitheater on a Saturday afternoon is realistic, since admission and parking are both advertised as free for the event, but expect the crowd and carnival noise that comes with it.
Not every part of the park is built for foot traffic and events. The Teaneck Creek section, roughly 46 acres within the larger park, has a stranger history: it was disturbed for over 300 years, considered as a landfill site in the early 1900s, lined with a clay base that was never removed even after the landfill was never built, and left with disrupted natural hydrology that let invasive plants take over. In 2020, the county's parks department began a 20-acre wetland restoration effort there, work that continues today alongside conceptual planning for accessible trails and outdoor classrooms in that section. It's a reminder that not everything inside those 805 acres is programmed for a Saturday outing. Some of it is still being repaired.
None of this requires a special trip to figure out. It just requires treating Overpeck Park the way you'd treat any shared, multi-town resource: check which entrance you're actually headed toward, and check whether the county has something scheduled on the Challenger Road side that weekend. Skip that step, as plenty of people do every July and September, and you end up circling a closed road wondering what happened to your usual route in. Do that step once, and the park stops being a mystery with two moods and starts being a place you can plan a weekend around on purpose.
That kind of local read, knowing which entrance leads where and which weekends change the rules, is the same instinct we bring to reading a block, a building, or a listing in Fort Lee, Edgewater, Englewood Cliffs, and Palisades Park. If you're thinking about what comes next for your home in this corner of Bergen County, Sara Shin Select would love to connect.
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