Bellevue Avenue Traded Its Hardware Store for a Movie Theater. Here's What That Actually Changes.

If you haven't walked into 223 Bellevue Avenue in a while, you might still picture pizza boxes and a case of garlic knots. DaVinci's Brick Oven Pizza held that storefront for more than 25 years before it closed, and the space has sat in transition since, with Farmhouse Fried Chicken, the second concept from the team behind Dan + Day's Burgers + Shakes on Valley Road, working toward opening there. A few doors down, the old Saunders Hardware space, empty for a stretch that locals still reference by name, now holds Clementina, a modern Italian restaurant from chef Michele Rocchi that opened in early June serving Adriatic Coast-inspired seafood.

Two storefronts, two very different replacements, and one thing in common: neither one gives you a reason to be in Upper Montclair at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. That's the actual story here. The village center isn't dying and it isn't booming. It's swapping its daytime errand economy for an evening one, and the people who run businesses there are not entirely sure that's a fair trade.

What Actually Left, and What Took Its Place

The turnover on Bellevue and Valley isn't random. Line it up and a pattern shows itself.

• 223 Bellevue Avenue: DaVinci's Brick Oven Pizza, a fixture for a quarter century, out. Farmhouse Fried Chicken, an elevated sandwich-and-bone-in concept, moving in.
• The former Saunders Hardware space: hardware and household goods, out. Clementina, a full-service Italian dinner restaurant, in as of June.
• 612 Valley Road: Jackie's Grillette, the longtime Mediterranean lunch counter, didn't close, it expanded into the space next door and shortened its name to Jackie's, but the move still reads as the neighborhood consolidating around its evening and weekend crowd rather than adding daytime foot traffic.
• 208 Bellevue Avenue: a landmarked 1880 residence, vacant for years, now home to Northeast Architectural's first New Jersey showroom, a design studio for kitchens, windows and doors that the Montclair Historic Preservation Commission signed off on.

Every one of these is a real upgrade on paper. A design showroom in a historic building is not a sign of decline. But Mike Schreiber, co-host of the local podcast Montclair Pod, has pointed to the loss of Saunders Hardware and the neighborhood's longtime stationery store as the actual moment uptown's daytime foot traffic dropped, not because anyone stopped loving the restaurants, but because those two stores gave people a reason to be uptown outside of dinner. A restaurant fills a table at 7 p.m. A hardware store fills the sidewalk at 10 a.m., when someone needs a lightbulb and ends up buying a birthday card next door too. Upper Montclair has been getting very good at the first kind of business and losing the second kind entirely.

The Theater That's Supposed to Fix the Foot-Traffic Problem

This is where The Bellevue comes in, and why its return matters more than a reopened movie theater usually would.

The Bellevue first opened in 1922, kept its Tudor-style facade through a century of Bellevue Avenue's changes, and closed in 2017 after Bow Tie Cinemas declined to renew its lease. It sat dark for eight years while multiple attempts to bring it back stalled out. In 2025, the nonprofit Montclair Film signed a multi-year agreement to operate it, and the three-screen cinema reopened that October with a restored screening of The Sound of Music, timed to the Montclair Film Festival.

What makes this different from a straightforward reopening is the building's financial plan. The Bellevue's owners are adding retail space and rental apartments to the property, a deliberate move to diversify revenue and help subsidize the cinema long term, since ticket sales alone rarely cover a landmarked, three-screen operation. Montclair Film now programs it as a mix of first-run releases and a series called B-Sides at The Bellevue, its eclectic slot for cult classics and hidden gems, alongside matinees and community screenings.

Wendy Lacey, who owns Cornerstone Montclair and represents the Upper Montclair Business Association, put the stakes plainly at the reopening: "We're not just opening the doors to this beloved theater. We're opening the doors to the entire neighborhood." The theater is meant to function as an anchor the way Saunders Hardware once did, just on a different clock. A movie plus dinner at Clementina or a stop at Jackie's is a plausible night out now in a way it wasn't two years ago. Whether that pulls people uptown before 6 p.m. is a separate question nobody has answered yet.

The Meeting Where Merchants Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

That unanswered question got a public airing on August 10, when Montclair's Economic Development Coordinator, Daniel White, ran a two-and-a-half-hour ward meeting at the Bellevue Avenue library branch as the final session in the township's legally required master plan reexamination, the process that sets land use and public investment priorities for the next decade.

Lacey used her time at the microphone to raise curb safety, pointing to delivery drivers who double-park along the corridor as Uber Eats and DoorDash volume has grown, and pushing the township to think harder about designated curb space. Traffic circulation on Valley Road came up as a close second concern, along with a list of maintenance complaints that have gone unresolved for years: an unkempt parking lot behind the fire station, dumpsters left visible on streets the town rarely sweeps, and weak nighttime lighting along the strip.

Arielle Eckstut, who has run the Book Doctors and Pitchapalooza out of Upper Montclair for 20 years, used her turn at the microphone to make a broader case. She argued that keeping the village's independent businesses in place matters because so many of them are closing under pressure that has nothing to do with Upper Montclair specifically, and everything to do with what happens when redevelopment gets handed to developers instead of shaped by the town.

That distinction points to a structural gap most residents walk past without noticing. Montclair Center, the downtown business district, has a business improvement district, a formal funding structure where property owners pay an assessment that pools into district-wide marketing, cleanup and beautification. Upper Montclair has no BID. What it has instead is UMBA, the volunteer nonprofit representing more than 60 businesses and merchants, offering networking, advocacy and some marketing support. UMBA does real work, but it was never built to fund the kind of sustained cleanup and beautification a BID assessment pays for, which is part of why the same maintenance complaints keep resurfacing meeting after meeting.

The Lot That's Been Sitting There for Years

The bigger unresolved question hanging over all of this is the ACME lot, a long-discussed redevelopment site in the heart of the business district that has sat without a plan for years. The town-led versus developer-led distinction that came up around small businesses applies here at a larger scale. A developer-led project optimizes for whatever tenant mix pencils out financially. A town-led process can, in theory, protect the kind of mixed-use, independent-business character that gave Saunders Hardware and the old stationery store a reason to exist in the first place.

Nobody at the August meeting had a resolution for the ACME lot, and there's no announced timeline. But it's the parcel that will likely determine whether Upper Montclair's next round of storefront turnover looks like the last one, restaurants and design studios filling vacancies opportunistically, or something more deliberately planned around bringing daytime traffic back.

What to Actually Do About It This Fall

None of this requires waiting on a master plan to enjoy the village center as it stands right now. UMBA's 47th annual Sidewalk Sale is set for Saturday, September 19, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with more than 35 businesses participating and Valley Road closed between Lorraine Avenue and Bellevue Avenue for the day. It's the closest thing Upper Montclair has to a full-district open house, and a genuinely good way to see which storefronts have changed hands since your last walk down Bellevue.

Anderson Park, tucked near the Upper Montclair train station, still has its quiet half-mile oval for anyone getting a morning walk in before the shops open, and Eagle Rock's coffee counter on Bellevue remains one of the more reliable spots to camp out with a laptop for an hour. If you're planning an evening out, De Novo European Pub inside the historic train station pairs naturally with a Bellevue screening, and the B-Sides series is worth checking before you default to whatever's playing at the multiplex.

The village is different than it was two years ago. It isn't worse. It's just leaning harder into evenings than mornings, and the people who run the businesses there are the first to say the balance still needs work.

If you're weighing what any of this means for property values on or around Bellevue Avenue, The Wright Group tracks Upper Montclair's commercial and residential shifts as closely as we track the homes themselves. Request a complimentary home valuation and we'll walk you through what the village center's changes are actually doing to buyer interest in the surrounding blocks.