Walk through Garden State Plaza on a Sunday afternoon and the mall looks open. The lights are on, the food court is running, the escalators still climb toward the entertainment level. But turn into a clothing store and you'll find sections of the floor cordoned off, racks pushed against a wall, register lanes dark. Furniture showrooms do the same thing. So do appliance departments. It's not a renovation and it's not a slow news day. It's the law.
Ten miles south, at American Dream in East Rutherford, none of that happens. The same categories of merchandise, sold by many of the same national retailers, stay fully available every Sunday of the year. Two malls, similar stores, same day of the week, and completely different rules. The difference has nothing to do with what's being sold. It comes down to who owns the ground the store is sitting on.
The Ordinance That Makes Paramus Stricter Than the Rest of Bergen County
Bergen County is the only county left in New Jersey still enforcing a blue law that restricts Sunday retail. When the state legislature gave counties the choice to keep or repeal Sunday closing rules in 1959, every other county eventually opted out. Bergen voters chose to keep theirs, and they've reaffirmed that choice twice at the ballot box. A 1980 repeal attempt failed. A second attempt in 1993 wasn't close: voters rejected it by a 2-to-1 margin.
Paramus didn't stop at the county line. The borough passed its own local ordinance in 1957, months before its first mall even opened, banning nearly all "worldly employment" on Sundays. The exceptions are specific: grocery stores, gas stations, pharmacies, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues can operate. Clothing, furniture, home and business furnishings, building and lumber supplies, and household appliances cannot be sold. That's why the caution tape goes up in the exact aisles it does. A department store can sell you dinner from its café but not a coat from its floor.
Ten Miles South, the Same Question Gets a Different Answer
American Dream opened in 2019 on land owned by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority at the Meadowlands, a few minutes from MetLife Stadium. The mall's developers had told the public for years that it would follow Bergen County's blue laws once it opened. Sometime in 2024, that changed. Retail stores inside the complex began staying open on Sundays, and by the time Paramus filed suit in August 2025, the borough's complaint alleged the pattern had repeated hundreds if not thousands of times.
American Dream's position is straightforward: the mall sits on state-owned property, and county blue laws don't reach state land. Paramus disagrees, and the disagreement is now a matter for a judge rather than a shopper's decision.
What Paramus Is Actually Asking a Judge to Decide
On August 25, 2025, Paramus filed a four-count lawsuit in Bergen County Superior Court naming the mall's operator Ameream, Bergen County, the township of East Rutherford, and the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority as defendants. The borough isn't just asking for the rule to be enforced going forward. It's asking the court to declare American Dream's Sunday retail operations a public nuisance, and it's seeking escalating fines that one report placed between $250 and $5,000 per violation, a number that adds up quickly across more than 120 stores operating every Sunday for over a year.
Mayor Christopher DiPiazza framed the issue in terms of fairness to businesses that comply:
This puts our shopping centers, our malls, our retailers at a disadvantage
American Dream has been equally direct in its response, calling the suit "a meritless political stunt driven by private competitors' interests" and standing by its argument that state-owned land falls outside the county's reach.
What the Most Recent Court Filings Show
As of January 2026, the Superior Court was still reviewing motions to dismiss filed by the mall and by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority. Reporting from NJ Spotlight News in late May and NJ Urban News in early June 2026 confirmed the case remains active, with the underlying jurisdictional question, whether state-owned land is exempt from a county blue law, still unresolved. No ruling on those motions had been publicly reported as of that coverage. Whatever happens next will likely turn less on the ordinance itself and more on a narrower legal question: does a county's police power over Sunday commerce reach land the state itself controls.
If the mall wins that argument, Paramus's blue law effectively stops applying to any large enough development built on state or quasi-state land, regardless of what it sells. If Paramus wins, American Dream's retail floor faces the same Sunday restrictions the borough's own malls already live under.
What Hasn't Changed for Anyone Walking Through the Borough on a Sunday
None of that litigation has altered anything inside Paramus itself. Garden State Plaza and Paramus Park, the borough's two malls, still close their retail floors every Sunday exactly as they have for decades. What's open:
- Grocery stores and supermarkets
- Gas stations
- Pharmacies
- Hotels
- Restaurants
- Entertainment venues, including movie theaters and arcades
What stays closed, no matter how the American Dream case eventually resolves:
- Clothing and apparel
- Furniture
- Household and office appliances
- Building and lumber supplies
A resident who needs a birthday gift on a Sunday can still get lunch, fill a tank of gas, or pick up a prescription in Paramus. A new couch or a pair of jeans will have to wait until Monday, or until a ten-mile drive to a mall where the same rule doesn't currently apply. That gap, more than any single court filing, is the part of the story that plays out every week regardless of what a judge eventually decides.
The rule was written to keep one day of the week different from the other six. For now, in Paramus, it still does.
Whatever a Bergen County judge eventually decides about American Dream, the pattern of daily life inside Paramus keeps being shaped by decisions made well outside the borough's own council chambers. The Tony Nabhan Collective pays attention to those shifts because they shape what it's actually like to live somewhere, long before they show up in a listing description.
