If you've lived in Upper Saddle River for more than a few years, you probably still think of it as Oktoberfest. The beer garden at Lions Park, the hayrides, the sense that summer is officially over once the food trucks roll in. Except the event stopped calling itself that a couple of years ago, and it no longer waits for October to show up.
The borough and USR Cares now present the day as USR Day, and the rebrand came with a calendar shift that most residents haven't fully clocked. In 2024 the event doubled as a celebration of the borough's 130th anniversary and landed on September 28. In 2025 it moved earlier still, to September 13, with a rain date the following Sunday. Two years, two different names in living memory, and a two-week swing in timing that has nothing to do with when the leaves actually turn.
The Name Changed, and So Did the Month
The event has a longer history than most people realize. It started as a straightforward Oktoberfest, a German biergarten theme at Lions Park benefiting USR Cares, the nonprofit that grew out of a 2015 family tragedy in town and now runs both crisis support and senior programming. Around 2021, the theme broadened to international food and culture, with flags going up around the grounds and the vendor mix widening well past bratwurst and pretzels.
Then, in 2024, the branding caught up with what the event had already become. It was no longer a German festival with an international garnish. It was a borough-wide gathering that happened to coincide with Upper Saddle River turning 130, and USR Day was the name that stuck. The September date stuck too. If you're the kind of resident who mentally files this under "October things," you've been showing up to the wrong month for two years running.
What Actually Happens at Lions Park
The scale is bigger than the old Oktoberfest framing suggests. The Sept-Oct 2025 borough bulletin puts attendance at more than 3,000 residents for a single afternoon, running noon to 5 p.m. at Lions Park on Lake Street. That is a meaningful share of the borough turning out at once, for an event most people would tell you is a small-town fall tradition rather than the town's single biggest gathering.
What fills those five hours has grown alongside the name:
- A DJ-led music program and a dedicated dining tent
- Food trucks and a beer garden running in parallel
- Hayrides organized by the borough's own DPW
- Inflatable rides and a family fun tent for younger kids
- An obstacle course run by the USR Police Benevolent Association
- A senior tent offering lunch and hourly activities for residents 70 and up
- A vendor and community organization tent with more than 40 groups represented
All proceeds go to USR Cares, which makes the event functionally a fundraiser wearing a street-fair costume. That's worth knowing if you've only ever experienced it as the day you happened to walk past a bounce house on the way to the library.
The Real Fall Tradition Is a Few Blocks Away, on a Slower Clock
Here's the part that actually earns the word autumn. While USR Day has drifted into September and taken on the energy of a town-wide block party, the borough's genuine cider-and-woodsmoke fall event still happens on its own unhurried schedule at the corner of Lake Street and East Saddle River Road.
The Upper Saddle River Historical Society runs its Harvest Festival on the grounds of the Hopper-Goetschius House Museum, a sandstone farmhouse built by the Hopper family around 1739. It's the oldest surviving house in the borough, added to the National Register of Historic Places in January 1983, and it sits on land that once stretched from what is now Lions Park nearly to the Montvale line. The Goetschius family lived there for a century and a half before the last resident's nephew donated it to the borough in 1985.
The Harvest Festival itself is small on purpose. Old-fashioned cider pressing. A working blacksmith. Open-hearth cooking in the original kitchen. Craft demonstrations, a fortune teller, a lesson in the one-room schoolhouse on the property, and a bluegrass band called Growing Old Disgracefully providing the soundtrack. Admission runs five dollars for adults, free for kids under 12 and for Historical Society members.
If you're waiting for the crisp-air, cider-pressing version of fall in Upper Saddle River, it isn't at Lions Park anymore. It's on the museum lawn, weeks later, at a fraction of the crowd size.
That's the split worth understanding. USR Day has become the borough's biggest single gathering and it now belongs to early fall, closer to Labor Day than Halloween. The Historical Society kept the actual harvest imagery, the actual cider and the actual hearth, and kept it small enough that most of the borough never quite makes it there.
The Rest of the Season Fills in Around Those Two Poles
Once you separate the big loud September event from the small quiet October one, the rest of the calendar makes more sense as connective tissue rather than a random string of things happening.
Liberty Park keeps its own tradition running with an annual kids' fishing derby at the reflecting pond, a smaller-scale event that draws families without needing a stage or a beer tent. Anona Lake, the borough's swimming spot with its sandy beach, closes out its season as the weather turns, handing the outdoor-recreation baton to the walking paths at Lions Park rather than another lake day. And the library, which has quietly been expanding its adult programming, recently added a Silent Readers Club and a bring-your-own-craft night to its fall lineup, low-key additions that say something about what residents have been asking for even if they don't draw USR Day numbers.
The season closes, as it has for years, with the USR 5K on Thanksgiving morning at Cavallini Middle School, a race that runs entirely on volunteer organization rather than borough funding. It's the kind of event that doesn't need a rebrand because it never tried to be anything other than what it is.
Two Fall Traditions, Not One
The honest version of Upper Saddle River's fall calendar isn't a single festival that residents have simply misremembered the name of. It's two separate traditions that used to feel like one because they both used to happen in October. Now one has moved earlier and gotten louder, and the other stayed exactly where it was, on a lawn next to a 287-year-old sandstone house, run by volunteers who never needed a name change to explain what they do.
If you're planning your own fall around what USR Day used to be, you'll want to watch for a Saturday closer to mid-September than mid-October. If what you actually want is the cider and the blacksmith and the sense that the season has slowed down, that's still there, just later, smaller, and a short walk from where you'd expect it.
Knowing which event is which, and when each one actually happens, is a small thing. But it's the kind of small thing that tells you how a town actually runs day to day, which is exactly the texture worth understanding whether you've lived here for twenty years or you're still learning the difference between Lions Park and Liberty Park.
For more on what makes life in Upper Saddle River and the surrounding towns worth paying attention to, or for a conversation about the local market whenever the time is right, Ana Moniz is always glad to talk shop about this corner of Bergen County.
