Saturday, September 12 was supposed to be the day Oceanport said goodbye to summer. It just said goodbye twice, in two different places, and only one of those goodbyes actually took.
At Monmouth Park, Food Trucktemberfest ran from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., the last food truck event of the racing season, timed to a track calendar that had already announced its own end. A few miles away, the borough's Parks and Recreation Committee opened the gates on Summers End at 5 p.m., with a rock wall, a DJ, a pie and jam contest, and fireworks at dusk, rain date built in for the next day. Same town, same Saturday, two parties both built around the idea that summer was leaving.
Here's what neither party accounted for: half a mile from both of them, at the old Fort Monmouth Commissary and the newer RiverWalk Center, nothing was ending at all. Those buildings never ran on a summer schedule to begin with. And this year, for the first time, they got big enough that the gap actually shows.
The Track Closed. The Building Next to It Didn't.
Monmouth Park's 2026 live racing season opened on May 9 and ran through September 13, per the schedule NJ Transit publishes for its seasonal train stop at the track. That's the frame most longtime Oceanport residents still carry around in their heads: racing starts in May, the Haskell happens in high summer, and by mid-September the grandstand goes quiet until next year.
What's changed is what's attached to that grandstand now. In November 2025, Caesars Entertainment opened a standalone, 16,000-square-foot sportsbook next to the clubhouse, complete with a Shake Shack, more than two dozen self-service betting kiosks, and a bar operated in partnership with Union Square Events, according to Caesars' own announcement. Unlike the racetrack itself, that building doesn't close for the season. NJ Transit's rider guide notes it stays open seven days a week, including on days when there's no live racing and the train doesn't even stop.
So the track's calendar didn't end this month so much as split in two. Racing has an off-season. The building it's attached to no longer does.
Two Landlords, One Old Army Base
The bigger shift isn't at the track at all. It's a short walk away, on the Oceanport section of the former Fort Monmouth, where two separate developers have spent the last several years turning old Army buildings into something the base never had when it was active: a reason to show up on a Tuesday in October.
The older of the two projects is Denholtz Properties' Commissary at Baseline, a renovated 53,700-square-foot former Army supermarket at 675 Oceanport Way. Birdsmouth Beer, an all-lager brewery, opened there in October 2022. Baseline Social, a 17,100-square-foot sports bar with five virtual golf simulator bays, an LED wall, and an outdoor firepit lounge, followed in October 2023. MGT Foods, a family food production business, rounds out the building. In 2024, the project won the Urban Land Institute of Northern New Jersey's Excellence Award for Entertainment and Hospitality, recognition that a shuttered grocery store had become, in the Two River Times' framing, a genuine gathering point again.
The newer project belongs to a different set of local investors entirely. Oceanport residents Michael Abboud and Christopher Ilvento, operating as Fort Monmouth Business Center LLC, bought the 12-acre RiverWalk Center parcel from the Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority back in 2018 and have been filling it in ever since. Nicol Rackets, a padel, squash, and pickleball facility, opened first in the spring of 2025. Skinny Flowers Brewing followed on August 1, 2025, a 165-seat taproom run by Jim and Liz King, who moved to Monmouth Beach from Little Silver and built the business after Jim retired from CIBC Capital Markets. The brewery's opening lineup included twelve beers on tap, among them a coffee stout made with Booskerdoo Coffee Co., plus live music on Fridays and Saturdays.
Around those two anchors, RiverWalk Center's roughly 26,000 square feet of retail space filled out fast. As of last year, the building's full tenant roster included Playa Bowls, CKO Kickboxing, Round Dough, L'Mer Nails, Stonefit, Broadway Chicken, Olive and Oak, Black Belt America, and Rogue Salon, with a drive-through leased to First Bank of New Jersey. None of those businesses have anything to do with horse racing, and none of them close in September.
What the Fort Still Has Planned
The two developers aren't finished. RiverWalk's owners have set aside the site's circa-1928 former military hospital, Allison Hall, to become a boutique hotel and event venue under a group they're calling Allison Hospitality. Rob Ilvento, who owns the Silverball Museum pinball venue on the Asbury Park boardwalk and founded Cluck U Chicken, is bringing a spirits label called Rob's Razn Rum into the mix. Developer Michael Abboud has said plainly what he thinks the appeal is: "We have ample parking, amazing views, and the entire site is walkable."
That last point matters more than it sounds. Oceanport residents who've watched the fort's slow reopening over the past four years have mostly experienced it building by building, one grand opening at a time. What's easy to miss, looking at any single announcement, is that two separate developers with two separate business models have converged on the same conclusion: this stretch of Oceanport Avenue works best as a place people walk between, not drive to for one specific errand.
What This Actually Changes on a Given Week
For a resident, the practical difference shows up almost immediately once you look for it. In August, an Oceanport Saturday might have meant a trip to the track, food trucks in the parking lot, and a decision about whether to fight traffic home before the last race went off. In late September, with racing closed for the year, that same Saturday can still include a Birdsmouth pour, an hour of virtual golf at Baseline Social, a court booked at Nicol Rackets, and a beer at Skinny Flowers, all within the same half-mile stretch, all running on their own hours rather than a race card.
That's the piece that both farewell parties on September 12 missed, in their own way. Summers End was always meant to mark an ending, and it did what it was designed to do. Food Trucktemberfest marked the end of something too, specifically the portion of Oceanport's calendar that depends on live racing. But the fort's calendar was never tied to either one. It's been running in parallel the whole time, and this year it got large enough that residents driving past on a random weeknight are starting to notice the parking lots are full when they didn't used to be.
The Town Underneath the Two Parties
None of this means Oceanport traded one identity for another. Monmouth Park remains, as Mayor Tom Tvrdik has pointed out, tied to the town's sense of itself in a way that predates almost everything else here. What's different is that the town no longer needs the track's season to be busy. The fort picked up the slack, mostly without a single ribbon-cutting big enough to make residents connect the dots all at once.
If you've lived in Oceanport through this stretch, you've probably been to at least one of these places already, maybe without registering it as part of a pattern. That's the actual news buried in two farewell parties landing on the same Saturday: the season used to end here. Now it just changes address.
If you're curious how these kinds of shifts in a town's day-to-day life tend to show up in the local housing conversation, the Suzanne Veninata Team keeps a close eye on Oceanport and the rest of the Monmouth County peninsula. Feel free to explore our Oceanport neighborhood page or schedule a complimentary consultation whenever you're ready to talk through what's happening in your corner of town.
