A Guide to Montclair’s First Ward: Upper Montclair, Uptown… You Know, Up North.

Montclair has two maps. One is the neighborhoods people actually use: Uptown, the South End, the Estate Section, names with no official boundary but total buy-in from everyone who lives here. The other is wards: the four voting districts that elect the Township Council, redrawn after every census to keep populations even. This guide follows the second map, but it’s built to be useful on the first one too, using the actual streets, schools, parks and restaurants that make Ward 1 the place people mean when they say “Uptown.”

Ward 1 at a Glance

Not sure which ward your address falls in? Use the township’s interactive ward viewer for a direct answer.

Where Does Ward 1 Start and End?

Ward 1 covers most of what people call Upper Montclair, plus the North End, the stretch that runs up to the Cedar Grove and Little Falls town lines and is largely served by the 07043 ZIP code. The township’s official legal description draws the line along Bradford Avenue and Normal Avenue at the northern edge, then east along the Cedar Grove and Little Falls borders, crossing Upper Mountain Avenue and the Montclair-Boonton rail line before turning south along the Clifton and Bloomfield town lines, crossing Valley Road, Grove Street and Alexander Avenue. The southern edge is the least intuitive part: rather than a straight line along Watchung Avenue, it jogs north through a sequence of side streets (Chester Road, Carolin Road, North Fullerton Avenue, Gordonhurst Avenue and Park Street) before finally meeting Watchung Avenue, running the rail line north, and closing back up near Bellevue Avenue and Upper Mountain Avenue. In practice, that jog means Ward 1 holds onto a strip of territory east toward Brookdale Park that a simple “everything north of Watchung” description would leave out.

Three schools sit inside those lines, and one of the largest land areas of any ward in town: Upper Montclair’s own boundary alone runs close to 40 percent of the township’s total land.

Who Represents Ward 1 on the Township Council?

Erik D’Amato has held the First Ward seat since taking office in 2024, after founding Vote Montclair, the group behind the 2021 referendum that gave the town its first elected school board. His stated priorities have included flood mitigation on Windermere Road, expanded weekend NJ Transit service, and townwide initiatives including turning Church Street into a weekend pedestrian plaza. Montclair’s municipal elections are non-partisan, so candidates run without party labels.

Schools in Ward 1

Bradford Elementary, Northeast Elementary and Buzz Aldrin Middle School (renamed in 2016 for the astronaut, at 173 Bellevue Avenue, after Aldrin himself returned to the school he’d attended as Mount Hebron Middle School) all sit inside Ward 1’s lines.

Don’t read that as a feeder pattern, though. Montclair runs a district-wide magnet system with no zoned neighborhood schools: families rank themed schools (STEM, Montessori, Visual and Performing Arts) through the central office, and a district-wide balancing process assigns seats. Your address inside Ward 1 doesn’t determine which school your kid attends. (The Pod’s full explainer on how, and why, that system works, including the 1933 redistricting plan that shaped it: Montclair’s Magnet Schools at a Crossroads.)

The Library

Upper Montclair has had its own library branch since 1899, when it started as a single rented room in a real estate office on Bellevue Avenue near the train station. The current building at 185 Bellevue Avenue went up in 1914, designed by architect Francis A. Nelson in Classical Revival style, and is listed on both the National and New Jersey Registers of Historic Places. One tradeoff of the historic building: it isn’t wheelchair accessible. Hours run 10 a.m.–8 p.m. Monday and Thursday, 2–6 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, closed Sunday.

Public Safety: Fire Station #2

Ward 1’s firehouse is Fire Station #2 at 588 Valley Road, built in 1901 as the home of the Cliffside Hose Company No. 4, which had previously operated out of a station on Bellevue Avenue near the rail crossing. It’s still an active, career-staffed firehouse, one of three in the township alongside headquarters on Pine Street and Station #3 on Harrison Avenue, and remains on the township’s capital repair list, with $75,000 budgeted for repairs to the building in the 2025 spending plan.

Parks and Green Spaces

Ward 1 holds some of the best-known parkland in town, all part of the Pod’s full guide to Montclair’s 23 parks:

• Anderson Park: 14.85 acres at Bellevue and North Mountain avenues, beside the Upper Montclair train station. Designed by John Charles Olmsted and donated to Essex County by resident Charles W. Anderson in 1902, it still functions as Upper Montclair’s village green, largely because Friends of Anderson Park has run programming here since 2006, Music Under the June Moon each spring and a Fine Arts and Crafts Fair every September. The park’s roughly 250-year-old Olmsted Oak came down in 2024; part of it now lives on as the counter inside Farmhouse Fried Chicken, a few blocks away on Bellevue.
• Mills Reservation: 157.15 acres along Normal Avenue, straddling the Montclair/Cedar Grove line. No restrooms, but four trails and a stretch of the Lenape Trail, plus the spring hawk count and the unexplained concrete platform at Quarry Point known as Searchlight No. 13.
• Presby Memorial Iris Gardens: 474 Upper Mountain Avenue, at the base of Mountainside Park. Established in 1927 in memory of Montclair resident and American Iris Society founder Frank Presby, with more than 10,000 irises blooming from mid-May through the first week of June.
• Mountainside Park: 33.19 acres, with one of the township’s three public pools, tennis courts, a nature trail and a coasting hill for sledding.
• Brookdale Park (partial): the county’s third-largest park, bordered by Watchung Avenue, Grove Street and Bellevue Avenue, with Ward 1’s boundary running through its northwestern edge.

Public Amenities: Pools, Permits and What Changed for 2026

Mountainside’s pool is one of three township pools (with Nishuane and Essex elsewhere in town), open noon–8 p.m. weekdays and 11 a.m.–8 p.m. weekends. A few things changed for the 2026 season worth knowing before a summer trip: all three pools are now cashless, and, after a state Green Acres compliance letter found the town’s resident-only policy violated the terms of the funding that built these pools, nonresidents can now buy day passes for the first time, at $30 for an adult. Resident day passes run $15. Tennis at Mountainside’s courts now requires a free township permit, registered through the township’s Pools & Tennis Courts page.

Restaurants and Cafes

Start at the corner of Valley Road and Bellevue Avenue. The Montclair Diner, 613 Valley Road, has anchored this stretch since 1923, when George Louvis, a Greek immigrant who’d arrived in the U.S. in 1909, opened it as a candy store and ice cream parlor. It’s the oldest continuously running food establishment in town. (More: The Oldest Restaurants in Montclair.)

A few doors down, Clementina brought chef Michele Rocchi’s Adriatic-coast cooking to 627 Valley Road in June 2026, in the space that spent 131 years as Saunders Hardware. Farnoosh’s take after visiting: “It’s on another level.” (Full review: Clementina Montclair Has Pasta You’ve Never Tasted.)

Turtle & the Wolf at 622 Valley Road runs a backyard patio and a fried chicken offering with its own devoted following, Mike included. Jackie’s, the two-decade Montclair institution formerly known as Jackie’s Grillette, moved next door from 614 to 612 Valley Road in June 2026, dropping “Grillette” from the name. (Backstory: A Taste of Home.)

Across on Bellevue Avenue, Dan & Day’s Burger Place (598 Valley Road) and its newer sibling Farmhouse Fried Chicken (223 Bellevue Avenue) are both run by Dan Campeas and Dayanna Ordonez, the couple behind Uptown Sound. Campeas told the Pod the fried chicken spot’s real name barely gets used: “We joke that we should’ve just named it The Chicken Place.” (Full conversation: There Is a New Fried Chicken Restaurant Coming to Montclair.)

Bars, Wine Shops, and Who Actually Has a Liquor License

Montclair has roughly 300 restaurants and only about 13 full liquor licenses, capped by a 1947 New Jersey law that limits towns to one plenary retail consumption license per 3,000 residents, a formula that hasn’t changed in nearly 80 years and has turned Montclair’s licenses into a private market where they’ve sold for as much as $1.25 million. That’s why so much of the town, Ward 1 included, runs BYOB. (Full breakdown: Montclair Liquor Licenses Explained.)

Ward 1’s exception is De Novo European Pub, 275 Bellevue Avenue, which pours a full bar out of the borough’s renovated old train station building. It’s able to do that because bars and restaurants that sit on state or NJ Transit property fall outside the town’s license cap entirely: a structural quirk, not a lottery win. For wine and spirits to take home, Angelbeck’s Fine Wines, Spirits & Beer at 621 Valley Road has served the neighborhood since 1933, currently run by the von Hoffmann family into its third generation.

Getting Around: Trains, Buses and the Drive Into the City

Ward 1 is unusually well served for train access: three stations on the Montclair-Boonton Line fall inside its boundary, all offering weekday Midtown Direct service to Hoboken and New York Penn Station without a transfer:

• Upper Montclair: 275 Bellevue Avenue, the ward’s main stop, a block from Anderson Park and the Valley Road business district. Built in 1892, on the National Register of Historic Places.
• Mountain Avenue: 14 Laurel Place, at the crossing near Upper Mountain Avenue. The 1893 station house is partly leased out as a private residence, with one ground-floor room still open as a public waiting area.
• Montclair Heights: at the Normal Avenue grade crossing, right at Ward 1’s northern edge near the Cedar Grove line, and the closest stop to Montclair State University.

NJ Transit bus routes 28, 101, 191 and 705 run through the ward along Valley Road, Upper Mountain Avenue and Normal Avenue. One thing worth knowing if you’re new to town: DeCamp Bus Lines, which ran commuter coaches directly into the Port Authority Bus Terminal for decades, ended that service in April 2023. NJ Transit stood up replacement routes at the time, but if an old neighbor tells you to just “take the DeCamp,” it hasn’t run in three years. By car, it’s about 17 miles and 25–30 minutes to Midtown Manhattan outside of rush hour.

What Is Upper Montclair Known For?

The commercial heart of the ward sits at Valley Road and Bellevue Avenue, a Tudor-style business district lined with independent restaurants, cafés and boutiques that has drawn New York City transplants for decades, plenty of them arriving from the Upper West Side or Park Slope. Just south of the train station, Anderson Park serves as the neighborhood’s village green. (For more, check out our coverage of Montclair’s real estate market.)

Unlike Montclair Center, Upper Montclair has never been the town’s main destination for large public events. That’s starting to change. What began as Dan Campeas and Dayanna Ordonez’s Dan & Day’s Music Festival has grown into Uptown Sound, a community festival now working toward nonprofit status. It lands at Anderson Park on September 26 (rain date October 3), with Radio Free Montclair backing a run of free Friday-night warm-up shows all summer, and the Pod as the festival’s Premiere Media Partner.

How Much Does It Cost to Live in Upper Montclair?

Home prices in Upper Montclair run at a premium to the rest of the township, though the exact spread shifts month to month, since the neighborhood sells far fewer homes than the township overall, so a handful of high-end deals closing late or falling through can swing the median hard in either direction. 

The housing stock splits into a few distinct pockets. Yantacaw, east of Valley Road and north of Bellevue, sits on a former golf course and runs mostly to mid-century ranches and split-levels. Fairway, just south, leans older, mostly Tudors from the 1920s and 1930s on tighter lots. The blocks closest to the village center fall inside the Upper Montclair Historic District, meaning a town commission has to sign off on certain exterior renovations before permits get issued.

Find Your Ward

Whether you’re house hunting, figuring out which train station is a shorter walk, or trying to reach the right council member, knowing your ward is more useful than most residents realize. The township’s interactive ward viewer takes an address and gives a direct answer in seconds.