The Detour Every Edgewater Walker Knows Just Got Its First Real Update in Years
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
If you've walked the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway on a Saturday morning this summer, you already know the annoying part. The path is flat and wide and mostly uninterrupted along the water, until it isn't. Past the Mitsuwa Marketplace, walkers get pushed off the riverfront and onto the River Road sidewalk for a stretch before the path picks back up. It's the kind of thing that never makes it into a trail description. You just learn to expect the detour, take it, and keep walking.
This year's version of that same walk includes some new stops. COV, the seafood and raw bar restaurant from the team behind Weehawken's Blu on the Hudson, opened July 19 on the former Pier 115 site at 115 River Road, one of the most recognizable restaurant footprints on this stretch of the river. A few blocks inland off Route 5, a sourdough pizza shop called Uncle Al's opened back in March, a very different kind of new business, less about the skyline and more about a Tuesday night dinner.
But the more useful news this year isn't a restaurant. It's what just happened, and didn't happen, to two vacant lots sitting inside two of the walkway's last real gaps.
The Hudson River Waterfront Walkway is usually described as 18.6 miles of continuous shoreline path running from the Bayonne Bridge up through nine municipalities to the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee. What that number leaves out is that the walkway isn't one piece of public infrastructure. It's a chain of segments, each built and maintained by whoever owns the land underneath it. When a parcel sits vacant or a redevelopment plan stalls, the walkway stalls with it. Edgewater has two visible examples of this on River Road right now, and this spring they moved in opposite directions.
At 163 River Road, a site tied up for years in a plan for four high-rise towers and a connecting walkway segment, the applicant withdrew the proposal in March 2026. That filing had gone in the previous September. Its withdrawal means the gap it would have closed is, for now, still a gap.
A few blocks north at 615 River Road, the old Hess Oil tank farm site moved the other direction. A permit application to build a ferry dock and a compliant section of walkway was deemed "administratively complete" by the DEP on March 31, 2026, which starts a 90-day clock for the state to act. The Hudson River Waterfront Conservancy, the nonprofit that reviews these filings and pushes for public access, has already responded in support, noting the project would close one of the walkway's remaining gaps and add ferry access to Manhattan from Edgewater.
Neither project is built yet. But the contrast is the point. One gap moved this year because a modest, specific proposal, a dock and a path segment, cleared a procedural hurdle. The other stayed open because a much larger proposal, four towers, didn't survive the permitting process. That's the actual mechanism behind why the walkway feels finished in front of one building and dumps you onto a sidewalk two blocks later. Nobody is building this thing on a single timeline. It gets assembled one landowner, one permit, and one withdrawal at a time.
COV fills a space that had sat mostly dormant since Pier 115 closed. The restaurant is owned by Michael Giannopoulos, whose family also runs Blu on the Hudson in Weehawken, and it leans hard into the site's biggest asset: a multi-level building with outdoor decks and an unobstructed run of river and Manhattan skyline. Culinary Director Juan Carlos "JC" Ortega, who spent years at Blu on the Hudson before this, is running a raw bar built around East Coast oysters, scallops dressed in soy, yuzu, and wasabi, and snapper ceviche. The owners describe the concept as "designed as the ultimate setting for leisurely lunches and golden hour aperitivos," which is a fair description of what a River Road restaurant with this view is actually for on an August evening. COV is open Wednesday through Sunday, 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., with a midnight close Friday and Saturday.
Uncle Al's, over on NJ-5, is a smaller story but a telling one. The owners opened in March with a specific complaint driving the menu: they felt there was no true sourdough pizza spot in the area and built the shop around a slower fermented dough instead of the heavier styles more common locally. It's a reminder that Edgewater's dining news this year isn't only the glossy waterfront concepts. Some of it is happening a few blocks off the river, aimed at a weeknight crowd rather than a view.
Away from restaurant openings and permit filings, the weekly pattern that actually defines an Edgewater summer hasn't changed much, which is its own kind of news:
The season's capstone event is still ahead. The Hudson River Waterfront Walkway 10K Race and 2K Run/Walk is set for Sunday, October 4, 2026, starting at Edgewater Marina on River Road with free parking at Veterans Field. The course finishes in Weehawken, and NY Waterway ferries runners back to Edgewater for the awards ceremony, a logistical detail that only makes sense once you've walked this stretch of shoreline yourself and understood why a point-to-point course along the river needs a boat to get everyone home.
It would be easy to write this up as a simple roundup: a new restaurant, a pizza shop, a race in the fall. But the detour near Mitsuwa and the two permits on River Road tell you something more useful about how this town actually works. The waterfront that makes Edgewater feel finished, the paved path, the skyline view from a restaurant deck, the dog park a few blocks from a Hudson-facing building, is still being assembled piece by piece, permit by permit, on a schedule that has nothing to do with a master plan and everything to do with which landowner is ready to build next.
That's not a complaint. It's just the shape of this stretch of the Gold Coast, and it's worth knowing the next time you hit that sidewalk detour and wonder when it's finally going to close.
Sara Shin Select works this exact stretch of River Road and the towns around it every day. If you're curious about a building along this walk, or just want to talk through what's changing on the waterfront, let's connect.
Whether it’s a home, warehouse, or medical building, Sara knows how to showcase properties at their highest value.