Two things happened in Ridgewood within 48 hours of each other this past week, and only one of them surprised anyone. On Wednesday, August 26, a Netflix production crew took over a stretch of East Ridgewood Avenue to film scenes for "Grown Ups 3," with fans lining the sidewalks for photos and handshakes while Adam Sandler stopped into a downtown bakery between takes. By Friday, the village was dealing with a very different kind of closure: Stadium Field and Stevens Field at Ridgewood High School had failed mandatory safety testing after flood damage, shutting both down indefinitely just as fall sports were supposed to start.
One of those stories is a novelty. The other is a pattern the town has seen before, more than once, on the same two fields.
The Sidewalk That Absorbed A Film Shoot Without A Ripple
If you were grabbing coffee on East Ridgewood Avenue last Wednesday, there was a decent chance you walked into a movie set. Ridgewood's own village spokeswoman, Carol Bialkowski, confirmed to reporters that filming for "Grown Ups 3" took place that day in the Central Business District, with production crews using Bareburger as a staging hub for equipment. Sandler stopped into Pierre & Michel Authentic French Bakery, where the owners later thanked him on Facebook for the visit. A local financial advisor, Peter Petronzio, said the crew set up shop directly outside his office, turning what he expected to be a normal Wednesday into one he wouldn't forget.
Village Manager Keith Kazmark's comment on the whole thing was telling in how unbothered it was: "Ridgewood has become an attractive location for filming. The charm and location of the community make it a great place to do this work." That's not the language of a town caught off guard. It's the language of a town that has done this before and expects to do it again.
It has. This is the same production company, Happy Madison, that filmed the Netflix movie "Don't Say Good Luck" at Benjamin Franklin Middle School the previous summer. Ridgewood also recently hosted William H. Macy and Susan Sarandon for a separate film called "Exit Right." A downtown that can host a Hollywood crew, a school building, and a coffee shop's worth of extras without any real disruption to daily life is a downtown with enough infrastructure, foot traffic, and civic cooperation to absorb the unexpected. That's worth noticing, because it's the exact opposite of what happened to the ball fields two days later.
The Fields That Have Failed This Same Test Before
Here's what the village didn't get ahead of: Stadium Field and Stevens Field, the two athletic surfaces that sit behind Ridgewood High School, failed mandatory shock-absorption testing after flood damage and were shut down with no timeline for reopening. The mechanism is straightforward and, according to Superintendent Dr. Mark Schwarz, a familiar one. When floodwater from the Ho-Ho-Kus Brook washes over the fields, it brings silt and debris with it. Over time that silt hardens into the turf, and the surface stops absorbing impact the way it's supposed to. A senior on the football team, Thomas Bryan, put the loss in plain terms to a local news crew: no more home games under the lights his senior year, no more of what he called an "iconic experience" for Ridgewood football.
What makes this story different from a one-off storm is that it isn't the first time. Both fields sit in a designated flood zone along the Ho-Ho-Kus Brook, and they've failed this exact test before:
| Year | What happened | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Storms Henri and Ida flooded RHS Stadium and Stevens Field | Roughly $260,000 in repair costs, about $160,000 covered by insurance; a joint Village Council and Board of Education task force was formed to find a permanent fix |
| 2023 | Turf flood damage forced a field closure mid-season | A home football game was relocated to Paterson's Hinchliffe Stadium |
| 2026 | Both fields failed shock-absorption testing after flooding | Indefinite closure of Stadium Field and Stevens Field, announced just days before the fall sports season |
That 2021 task force was supposed to solve this. Five years and two more flood-related closures later, the same two fields are down again, and the timing could not be worse. Ridgewood Public Schools opens for the new academic year on Tuesday, September 1, which means the district is trying to figure out where its football, soccer, and marching band programs will actually operate in the same week families are settling back into school routines. Kazmark's statement on the closure promised that the village will "continue to work closely with school officials to support and accommodate our many student athletes," which is the same kind of cooperative language that followed the 2021 flooding. Whether it produces a different outcome this time is the open question hanging over the fall sports calendar.
What's Actually New Downtown
None of this is happening in a downtown that's standing still. If anything, the same stretch of blocks that absorbed a film crew without blinking is in the middle of its busiest stretch of restaurant openings in recent memory. A short list of what's arrived or is about to:
- Morsetto Italian Kitchen, 29 Chestnut Street, opened this spring under Chef Francesco Curci, who spent years cooking in Ridgewood before opening Apulia in Hoboken and has now returned with a menu built around Puglia and Roman-style cooking, including a wood-fired Margherita made with San Marzano tomatoes.
- Grill & Greens, a health-focused fast-casual concept that started in Bloomfield, is preparing to open at 36 Prospect Street, bringing a lower-key, faster dining option into a downtown that's otherwise leaned toward full-service Italian and French kitchens.
- Café 37, at the corner of Broad and Hudson, is a newer BYOB spot serving modern American seafood, meat, and pasta dishes with in-house desserts.
- Pizza by From Scratch, the Roman-style pizza spinoff from Chef Claudia Rovegno of the flagship restaurant From Scratch, was announced earlier this year as her next project in town.
Layer that on top of the things that were already running before this summer, the Kasschau Memorial Shell concert series that launched its free live music season on June 4, and the Ridgewood Farmers Market that runs from June 28 through November 1, and you get a picture of a downtown with enough density and programming that a film crew is closer to an inconvenience than an event. That's the through-line here. The same commercial ecosystem that can shrug off a Netflix production is a genuine asset, not a coincidence, and it's part of what makes a place like this hold up under pressure that a lot of downtowns wouldn't.
The two ball fields don't have that same resilience built in, and the difference isn't about effort. It's about what infrastructure can and can't absorb without intervention. A downtown business district recovers from a closed street in a day. A flood-zone athletic field, on this evidence, doesn't recover from a storm season without money, engineering, and a fix that's actually different from the one tried in 2021.
Why The Contrast Is The Story
The lesson from this particular week isn't that Ridgewood got unlucky twice. It's that the same town is capable of both outcomes at once: a downtown flexible enough to host a national film production without a hiccup, and a piece of school infrastructure that keeps failing the same test in the same location every few years. Anyone who already lives here has seen both versions of Ridgewood by now, the one that photographs well for Netflix and the one that shows up in a superintendent's email about turf damage. Understanding which parts of this town bend and which parts break under pressure is useful information whether you're cheering on Friday nights, walking past a bakery mid-shoot, or just trying to figure out where your kids will be playing games this fall.
If you're weighing a move to Ridgewood or trying to make sense of what a specific block or school zone actually means for day-to-day life here, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground read Max Stokes brings to every conversation. Let's Connect.
