Downtown Denville

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Denville After Dark – The Finale

Denville After Dark was created to continue to support our downtown community through the pandemic, while keeping our residents and visitors safe. Streets are closed to allow for extra space while mingling, shopping, and eating, and to focus on bringing people together in a low key way. Live music, a caricature artist, and other happenings create a fun vibe that our charming downtown is known for. And tonight is the last one for 2020!

Join us for one more night of community fun. The Fall weather is perfect for celebrating outdoors, we have two new bands (Almost Autumn and Maggie Pietrucha Live) and Denville Sunrise Rotary will be on hand for last minute duck purchases for their virtual races.

Broadway, Center Street, and a portion of First Avenue will be closed to allow for extra space, but there is plenty of parking available in the First Avenue and Bloomfield Avenue parking lots, and along Diamond Spring Road, Main Street, Bloomfield Avenue, and more.

These events are not possible without the generous donations from our sponsors (Saint Francis Residential Community, Denville Strong, Hunan Taste, Duphiney Financial Network, The Peer Hyatt Selling Team, Brad Resnick Photography, Gateway to the Arts, and The Sheeran Real Estate Group), and the tireless efforts of our Board of Directors, volunteers, and staff.

See you tonight!

*Want to help our community to continue to have more events like this? Our businesses need you – donate to our Relief Fund right here.

Downtown Denville’s Restaurant Week Begins!

Downtown Denville’s Annual Restaurant Week kicked off on Sunday, September 20, and there are 15 restaurants downtown sharing delicious specials to entice you to eat local. You’ll find everything from a different ten dollar special at Thatcher McGhee’s every day to a 10% discount off chalkboard specials at Carver’s. This is a great way to discover a new restaurant or revisit an old favorite.

With many of the downtown Denville restaurants recently voted “best in Morris County,” this is the perfect time to celebrate with them, and to continue to support our restaurant community. Restaurant Week continues through Thursday, September 24, and you can find a full list of participants at Dine Out Denville. There is an interactive map this year – just click on the orange pins to find the details from each participating restaurant. Even if a restaurant doesn’t have a special this week, they all would appreciate your patronage. This year has been challenging for many small business owners, and this is the perfect time to give our restaurants a little boost of support. With many offering outdoor and indoor dining, take out and delivery, you’ll find a convenient and delicious way to eat your way through Denville this week!

Snap a photo and tag us on Instagram – we’d love to see and share! Happy eating!

Downtown Denville Welcomes Merch Pros!

Welcome to Denville! We’re excited to have you on Broadway. How did you decide on Denville as the right place to open up your store? When we were scouting for a retail storefront, we wanted to find a place that was community oriented, beautifully maintained and had great foot traffic. Denville was the perfect fit! It not only offers one of the best downtown areas around, it is also nicely centralized, easy to navigate, has ample parking and has a great variety of businesses from major chains to unique independent businesses.

You have a warehouse location in Boonton – how long have you been in business? We have been in business in Boonton since 2004, growing from a 300 square foot space to 10,000 square feet equipped with 3 automatic screen printing presses, 50 embroidery heads, and large format digital printing capabilities.

Tell us about the products and services you’ll offer to your customers. Our main business is custom screen printed and embroidered apparel. However, we also offer a full range of printed materials, including business cards, postcards, brochures, stickers, signs, banners, trade show displays and basically any other kind of promotional item you can print your logo on from pens to drinkware and so much more. Other services we offer include direct mail advertising and free online stores for organizations like schools and sports teams to do fundraising by selling merch. Additionally, we will be launching a local town themed apparel line that anyone can come in and purchase off the rack so they can show pride for their community. Denville prides itself on being very community-oriented.

How do you hope to become involved with the town? This is a major factor that attracted us to Denville. We hope to add to the downtown culture and help our neighboring businesses with our services, marketing and design expertise. We want to help the local schools with their apparel and printing needs. We also like to use our resources to help locally wherever we can.

What’s your best piece of advice to someone opening up a business in the middle of a global pandemic? Position yourself to be sustainable in a downturn by keeping overhead low and look to innovate with new technology and services to gain an edge on your competition.

What safety practices will you have in the store to protect customers during the challenges of the pandemic? Cleanliness, social distancing and masks seem to be working in store. To protect the most vulnerable customers who need more distance and, for convenience, we are about to launch a new website where you can see all of our custom printing and embroidery products, do a quote yourself and even design online / upload art, and place an order for just about everything we offer. We can assist with graphic design in-house and complete orders via phone or email.

What’s the most important thing that potential customers should know about your business? Everything we do is custom and you don’t need to be a design expert, we do it all! And if you don’t see that we offer something just ask, we can usually do it.

Merch Pros
Web site
3 Broadway, Denville, NJ 07834
Telephone: 973-241-3131

Indoor Dining Opens in Denville

What a long strange trip it has been. As New Jersey takes another step on their path to reopening, Denville restaurants ready themselves to offer indoor dining at 25% capacity. With restaurant margins being what they are, while this is a positive next step, it still continues to be challenging to run a restaurant in 2020.

We checked in with several of our downtown restaurants to get their thoughts on indoor dining. Jason Robbins, General Manager of Thatcher McGhee’s said, “These bizarre times are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. But these bizarre times have brought out the best in many, especially the town and people of Denville. When restaurants couldn’t open at all, people supported small business by ordering in, and when outside dining opened, we were allowed to extend our area and people came out in droves. Now with the excitement of indoor dining, we know they will once again show us their support by joining us to celebrate.” Thatcher McGhee’s, on Broadway, was recently voted #1 Irish restaurant in Morris County.

Carver’s on First Avenue is a popular breakfast and lunch destination. A small, quaint restaurant with a downhome vibe, the lockdown hurt their business substantially. “The pandemic has decimated our daily business to a mere 1/3 of our regular sales. Each sale during this time kept us holding on. The greatness of Denville as a community has kept baking and soup making at a high in spite of everything. We are elated indoor dining is resuming and hope to serve as many folks as possible! We will serving at a first come basis as we try and navigate through the changes and requirements. Thank you Denville for keeping Carver’s strong,” said the owner, Carver Parrish.

Jesus Gomez, owner of El Mejicano, is “excited to be able to see our friends back in our home even if it’s in a limited capacity!” He and his staff have been busy with take-out orders during the pandemic, and he is also co-owner of the new bakery that is opening up in a few weeks, Vikingos Cake Shoppe & Bakery.

The Second Half on Main, a popular pub downtown, has been doing take out orders and serving in their beautiful outdoor dining area. Diane Gentile said, “We are beyond grateful to our awesome patrons and the Town of Denville for their unwavering support through these very difficult months. We cannot wait to welcome those that are ready back indoors.”

Whether a restaurant is doing indoor dining, outdoor dining, takeout or delivery, they all need your continued support to survive the current and ongoing challenges small business owners face in 2020. You can support them by eat locally, of course, leaving reviews on their Yelp! and Google pages, and following and sharing their social media accounts. A strong community is what allows small business owners to continue to deliver consistent and quality products and services. Our tag line, “where a community comes together,” has never been more true than this year.

Denville Wins Best Downtown {2020}!

Although we have always known it, now others will as well … Denville has been crowned Best Downtown in Morris County by the 2020 Readers’ Choice Awards from Morris/Essex Health & Life magazine! Beyond the overall downtown award win, many of our stores, restaurants, and service-based businesses have taken top honors in their individual categories as well (see below). This comes as no surprise as downtown Denville is a consistent destination to many that seek out our top-rated restaurants, boutiques, and all ’round charming atmosphere.

Ample free parking, upbeat music piped through the sound system on Broadway, gorgeous hanging flower baskets, and a real Small Town USA community environment continues to brings visitors and residents to our area regularly. Small towns like Denville continue to compete daily against large brick-and-mortar businesses, and the personalized customer service and unique mix of establishments edge them out against their competing giants. In a year that has been particularly challenging, awards like this do much to buoy the spirits of small business owners.

Come to Denville and continue to support your local businesses, and they will continue to deliver for you … both in exceptional experiences and in supporting the community. After all, it’s their community too.

A huge thank you to all who voted for Denville in the nomination process – it’s your ongoing support that keeps our community moving forward. Now get out there and shop, eat, and support local!

*Our Downtown Relief Fund is another wonderfully easy to support our community as well; more details can be found here.