Bernardsville, NJ

A Legacy of Community in 2025

Embracing Progress While Staying True to Its Roots

Nestled in the rolling hills of Somerset County, New Jersey, Bernardsville has always felt a little like a secret. Tree-lined streets wind past stone walls and century-old estates, the kind of place where commuters step off the Midtown Direct train and immediately exhale. In 2025, with a population just shy of 8,000, the borough is writing a new chapter—one that honors its Gilded Age bones while quietly, deliberately becoming one of the most livable small towns in the state.

In February 2025, after three years of applications, site walks, public meetings, and revisions, Bernardsville became the 37th Transit Village in New Jersey. The designation from the Department of Transportation is more than a plaque: it unlocks priority scoring for grants, streamlined permitting for pedestrian and bicycle projects, and technical assistance most small towns can only dream of.

“It was a long haul,” admits Mayor Mary Jane Canose, who has lived in Bernardsville since 1972 and has served as mayor since 2019. “But every minute was worth it. This is about walkability, bikeability, and finally having the resources to make our downtown feel like the true heart of the community it already is.”

The train station—built in 1872 when the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad first put Bernardsville on the map—remains the geographic and emotional center of town. Wealthy New Yorkers discovered the area in the late 19th century, building grand “summer cottages” that still stand along places like Ballantine Road and Childs Road. Today the station’s copper-roofed canopy shelters commuters bound for Hoboken or Penn Station New York in under an hour, but it also serves as the borough’s front porch.

The Transit Village framework is already delivering visible change: new wayfinding signs, improved sidewalks, and the first plantings of a streetscape plan that will stretch from the station all the way to Olcott Square.

Perhaps the most symbolic project is a stairway—still in final design—that will climb the steep embankment south of the tracks, directly linking neighborhoods that have historically been cut off from downtown. For decades, residents in the Bernards Avenue, Boylan Terrace, and Ambar Place areas—many of them Latino and Eastern European families who work as painters, landscapers, masons, and caregivers—have faced either a treacherous hillside scramble or a mile-long detour by car. The new stairway, paired with the nearly complete Boylan Terrace Walkway, will put them a five-minute stroll from the train platform, grocery shopping, and Saturday coffee on Quimby Square.

“These families are the backbone of our town,” Mayor Canose says simply. “It’s time the town was truly walkable for them, too.”

Growth, when it comes, is measured in decades rather than boom cycles. After years of negotiation and redesign, final approval was granted in August of 2025 for a mixed-use project on the corner of Route 202 and Mount Airy Road. When construction begins in 2026, the development will deliver 67 upscale apartments,  ground-floor retail—restaurants, cafés, and shops that borough officials believe will finally “anchor” downtown the way residents have always wanted. “We didn’t want another surface parking lot,” the mayor says. “We wanted something that feels like it’s always belonged here.”

Housing diversity is moving forward on parallel tracks. Three 100% affordable projects broke ground this summer, a direct response to New Jersey’s Mount Laurel obligations but executed with Bernardsville’s characteristic attention to detail. One building, reserved exclusively for seniors, will offer walkability to downtown shopping. “These are empty-nesters who raised their families here and want to stay,” Mayor Canose explains. “They sell the five-bedroom house, give up one car, and walk to dinner at David Burke’s or a film at the cinema. That’s the lifestyle people tell us they want.”

Downtown itself has become an unlikely culinary destination. The Bernards Inn, a 1907 landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places, hums nightly under the direction of celebrity chef David Burke, who took over the kitchen in 2022 and promptly earned fresh accolades for inventive dishes served beneath original Tiffany stained-glass skylights. Across the street, a former 19th-century stable and later brewery now houses Ristorante MV, a critically acclaimed restaurant run by a Brooklyn transplant who fell in love with the building’s exposed beams. Walk a block in any direction and you’ll pass wood-fired pizza, handmade pasta, sushi, and  Mexican cuisine.

“People plan their weekends around coming here to eat,” the mayor laughs. “We never expected that, but we’re not complaining.”

To keep the momentum going, Bernardsville’s Business Improvement District and Main Street program have partnered with the New Jersey Economic Development Authority to shower small businesses with grants. Façade-improvement awards of $2,000 each have already transformed half a dozen storefronts; one recipient commissioned a vibrant mural that has become the borough’s most Instagrammed backdrop. Larger grants help owners upgrade point-of-sale systems, launch e-commerce sites, and hire local teens for weekend shifts.

History is never far away. Ten significant sites within a five-minute walk of the train station now carry discreet  plaques with QR codes. Scan one and an app—developed with the local historical society and hosted by Main Street Bernardsville—narrates the story of the building, from the 18th-century Olcott gristmill to the bank that survived the 1930s by hiding cash in the basement.

Younger residents haven’t been forgotten. While the borough dreams of one day adding an old-fashioned arcade, the Bearded Dragon board-game café has become the de facto teen and twenty-something hangout, packed on weekend nights with groups battling over Settlers of Catan or painting Warhammer figurines. The independent Bernardsville Cinema—one of the last downtown theaters in New Jersey—continues to show first-run films on its massive curved screen while hosting an increasingly popular classic-film series. The theater survived the pandemic by renting the auditorium to individual families; today it thrives under new management that understands its role as a community living room.

. New pocket parks are in the works—one planned for Church Street, another tucked beside the train station., and the borough’s tree commission has planted dozens of native oaks and redbuds that will shade sidewalks for the next century.

Through every grant application, every zoning meeting, every ribbon-cutting, one guiding principle remains unchanged: Bernardsville will grow, but it will never grow up into something it isn’t. “We have to evolve,” Mayor Canose says, standing outside the train station as another train glides in. “But we have the oppotunity to decide what that evolution looks like. And so far, I like what I see.”

In 2025, with new stairways rising, historic buildings glowing under fresh paint, and tables spilling onto sidewalks every night, Bernardsville feels exactly like what it has always been: a small town that somehow keeps getting better at being itself.

AT A GLANCE

Who: Bernardsville, New Jersey

What: A thriving and economically diverse municipality with projects that signal growth

Where: New Jersey, USA

Website: www.bernardsville.gov