Most weekends between now and Thanksgiving, the parking lot behind Cedar Grove Community Park fills with the same cars. Bocce league players pulling in for Monday and Thursday evening matches. Parents dropping off for open gym. Pool members who still think of the lot as a summer-only stop, even though the water closed for the season weeks ago. Almost none of them walk past the far end of that lot into the trees, where a paved path turns to dirt, crosses a small wooden bridge, and leads to a waterfall that most Cedar Grove residents have never seen.
That's the thing worth sitting with this fall. The town's outdoor identity and its food identity both live inside a five-minute radius of Pompton Avenue, and residents tend to treat them as two separate errands: a hike day and a dinner-out day. They're the same day. You just have to know where the trail actually goes, and what's changed on the avenue since the last time you looked.
The Park You Already Know Has A Back Door
Cedar Grove Community Park is not a small green space. At 77 acres, it's the fourth largest park in the entire Essex County system, formally dedicated in December 2016. It carries the Robert J. O'Toole Community Center, four bocce courts, a farm-themed playground, and the pool most families associate with July. What doesn't show up on the recreation department's program flyers is that the same 77 acres border the Peckman River, and the river hides a waterfall about a nine-minute walk from where you parked for last week's bocce match.
Devil's Hole Falls drops roughly 9.8 feet through a narrow gorge into a pool below. It's not a destination most search engines surface when you look up things to do in Cedar Grove, and it's easy to miss even when you're standing near it, since the trail itself is unmarked. From the community park's back lot, the route is straightforward: take the paved path toward the playground until it turns to dirt, cross the wooden bridge, and follow the dry streambed to the river. At the river, turn left and follow it a short distance to the falls. An old rail bridge, still in use as part of the West Essex Trail, sits just behind the waterfall, a small reminder that this whole corridor used to move freight, not hikers.
The mechanics of the falls are part of what makes them worth explaining rather than just photographing. The Peckman River is diverted just upstream of the drop, which forces all the water down the single channel you see and leaves a dry trough to the left where, by the look of the rock, a second cascade likely ran at some point in the past. It's a small, working piece of infrastructure dressed up as a scenic overlook, which is a fairly accurate description of a lot of Cedar Grove's outdoor spaces once you start asking who actually manages them.
Three Ways To Leave The Same Parking Lot
Devil's Hole Falls is the shortest option, but it's not the only route out of that lot. Here's how the choices actually compare if you're deciding how much of an afternoon you want to give up.
| Route | Approx. distance | What you'll find |
|---|---|---|
| Devil's Hole Falls loop | Under 1 mile round trip | A 9.8-ft waterfall on the Peckman River, reachable on unmarked dirt trail |
| West Essex Trail | 2.84 miles one way | A former Erie-Lackawanna rail bed running from Verona to the Passaic County line, crossing Route 23 and the Peckman River |
| Lenape Trail connection to Mills Reservation | Variable, joins at Arnold Way | 153 wooded acres bordering Cedar Grove Reservoir, with a cliffside overlook of the New York City skyline |
The West Essex Trail is the connector. It runs along the old Caldwell Branch of the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad, and for a good stretch of its route, the Lenape Trail runs right alongside it before splitting off near Bowden Road. If you follow that split, you end up in Mills Reservation, a 153-acre wooded reservation that borders Cedar Grove Reservoir on its northwest side and includes an overlook with a clear view of the Manhattan skyline. None of this requires a car. It's one continuous walk from the same lot where you left your bocce ball bag in the trunk.
The Reservoir Nobody In Cedar Grove Actually Owns
Here's the detail that tends to surprise longtime residents more than the waterfall does.
Cedar Grove Reservoir isn't Cedar Grove's. It belongs to the City of Newark, built between 1901 and 1905 to secure a drinking water supply for a growing city thirty minutes away, and public access today is limited to the recreational route the Lenape Trail is permitted to use.
That explains a few things locals sometimes wonder about without ever chasing down the answer: why there's no boat launch, no fishing pier, no swimming access despite the reservoir sitting in the middle of some of the township's most desirable residential streets. It was never built for Cedar Grove. It was built for Newark, and the geography just happened to put it here. The construction itself wasn't simple either. Between difficult rock conditions, labor strikes, and a malaria scare, the project fell behind its original 1902 completion target and didn't formally open until August 1905.
Four Minutes Back To Pompton Avenue
Once you're back at the car, the second half of the day is a short drive down Pompton Avenue, and this stretch has moved more in the last eighteen months than most residents have clocked.
The most recent shift is still in progress. In April 2026, Cedar Grove's Planning Board approved a variance and site plan for Brivadi Restaurant LLC to convert the former PNC Bank branch at 570-572 Pompton Avenue into an Italian restaurant. A bank lobby becoming a dining room is the kind of adaptive reuse that tells you something about where retail demand on this stretch is heading, even before the first table is set.
A few blocks down, Gigi's Cafe has already had a full season to settle in. Owner Lily Lora opened the family-run spot at 509 Pompton Avenue in April 2025, serving Dominican and Venezuelan dishes alongside handcrafted coffee and fresh juice, with a ribbon-cutting attended by Cedar Grove's mayor and members of the township council. It's named after the couple's daughter, and the menu leans on recipes Lora grew up with in her grandmother's kitchen, including a fondness for pistachio that shows up across the offerings.
For something that's been part of the daily rhythm longer, Cedar Bean's Coffee Joint remains the town's gathering spot for live music and vinyl, the kind of place that turns a coffee run into twenty extra minutes you didn't plan for. And if the day is winding toward a sit-down dinner rather than a quick bite, Lu Nello on Stevens Avenue has held its place as the upscale option, the kind of restaurant locals still book a week out for on a Saturday.
None of this is more than a five-minute drive from the community park lot. Most of it is walkable if the weather holds.
One Loop, Not Two Errands
The habit worth breaking this fall is treating the trail and the table as separate trips. A Saturday that starts with the short walk to Devil's Hole Falls, continues onto the West Essex Trail toward Mills Reservation for the skyline view, and ends with coffee at Cedar Bean's or a table at Gigi's is one loop that starts and ends within a few minutes of where most Cedar Grove households already spend their weekends. The waterfall has been there the whole time. So has the reservoir, on loan from a city thirty minutes away. The only thing that's actually new is what's happening on Pompton Avenue, and that part is worth watching, because a bank becoming a restaurant is usually a sign that more of the block is about to follow.
If you've been in Cedar Grove long enough to know the bocce schedule by heart, chances are you know a dozen details like these that never made it into a guidebook. If you're thinking about what your own piece of this town might be worth on today's market, or you're weighing a move here and want someone who actually knows which parking lot leads to a waterfall, the team at Orsini Real Estate & Marketing Group has spent years working these streets and would be glad to talk it through. Request a free home valuation whenever you're ready to see where you stand.
