Hoboken Girl describes Anthony Susco, known locally as Dancing Tony, as "a staple of the Jersey City art and music scene." His name comes up more than you'd expect for someone whose day job is running a Wednesday night concert series in a park. Susco organizes Groove on Grove, the free live music series that fills the Grove Street PATH Plaza through the warmer months. He also books the concerts at the Jersey City and Harsimus Cemetery, a six-acre burial ground on Newark Avenue that was abandoned in 2008 and has spent the years since being pulled back from the weeds by volunteers.
Those are not two versions of the same event. One is a transit plaza with a PA system and a beer line. The other is a nineteenth-century cemetery with a beekeeper, a rotating cast of weed-eating goats, and a caretaker's house that doubles as a garden project for local kids. The fact that one person's name shows up on both calendars is the detail that explains something bigger about how Historic Downtown actually runs its fall.
Two Markets, Not One
Residents who've lived here a while sometimes talk about "the farmers market" as a single thing. It isn't. The Historic Downtown Special Improvement District runs a market outside the Grove Street PATH station on Mondays and Thursdays from 3 to 7 p.m., spring through late fall. Three blocks away, Van Vorst Park runs its own market on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., a season that stretches from midsummer into November. Same neighborhood, same rough radius, two separate markets with two separate calendars and, as far as public listings show, two separate vendor rosters.
The Van Vorst market sits inside a larger program run by the Friends of Van Vorst Park, a nonprofit that has been maintaining the park's gardens and green space since 1991. Beyond the Saturday market, FVVP's season includes Shakespeare in the Park, an outdoor film series run jointly with the Van Vorst Park Association, a spring festival, craft fairs, an egg hunt, and a holiday party once the weather turns. It's a lot of programming for a two-acre park, and none of it comes from the city. It comes from a volunteer board that has, by its own account, raised or received more than $300,000 in grants and donations since it started.
A Graveyard With a Program Director
The Harsimus Cemetery operates on the same logic, at a very different scale of strangeness. Founded in 1829 as New Jersey's first chartered cemetery company, the grounds sit on land that saw Revolutionary War skirmishes and later served as a War of 1812 ammunition bunker. By 2008 the last of its original trustees had died, and the cemetery sat neglected until a new volunteer board took it over, cleared the overgrowth, and in the process found tunnels and forgotten crypts along the hillside.
What's happened since is a preservation project that also runs like a small cultural venue. Goats have handled the weed control every summer since 2011. A local 4-H group leads bird identification days for kids. A beekeeper installed hives on the grounds and is planning to sell honey from them at future events. Every Saturday, gates open at 9 a.m. for "Wake and Rake," an open call for volunteers to show up and help with grounds work, no sign-up required.
The board's own stated goal is direct:
"Our goal is to achieve State and National Landmark Preservation Status."
None of that work is free, and the cemetery has no regular funding source. It runs entirely on donations and the proceeds from events, which is where Susco's booking work matters beyond scheduling logistics. The concerts he organizes there aren't incidental programming. They're closer to a revenue line for an all-volunteer nonprofit trying to hold onto a piece of the city's founding history.
The Weeks Between Now and Halloween
This is the stretch where both of Susco's calendars converge with a run of other neighborhood dates. Laid out together, it's a season that rewards knowing the names behind it rather than just the addresses.
- Already behind us: Bembe, a casual steak and raw bar, along with a second concept called Steaks Shakes + Harmony, opened in the former Better Days space at 143 Newark Avenue on September 16, per the Historic Downtown Special Improvement District's own announcement.
- Ongoing through the fall: Van Vorst Park's Saturday market keeps its hours, and the Grove Street PATH plaza market continues on its Monday and Thursday schedule.
- October 23 and 24: Ghost of Uncle Joe's, the cemetery's annual music and theatrical fundraiser, returns to the Harsimus grounds.
- October 31: The Halloween Family Bash takes over the Newark Avenue Pedestrian Plaza, organized by HDSID with a corn maze, pumpkin decorating, and trick-or-treating at participating storefronts. Programming details post through the district's own site as the date gets closer.
Layer the restaurant openings from earlier this year onto that same map and the month starts to look less like a list of unrelated dates and more like a neighborhood that's filled in around its own foot traffic. Punjab Meet House opened at 25 Christopher Columbus Drive on July 3, a sister restaurant to Gramercy's GupShup and the East Village's Bungalow, brought in by owner Jimmy Rizvi, who lives in Jersey City and has said he wanted a full-service Indian dining room rather than another takeout counter. Dagda, a new Irish bar, took over the former Café Coretto space at 123 Newark Avenue. Two doors down at 8 Erie Street, The Life of Reilly has been running as a speakeasy-style cocktail bar since earlier this year, ahead of a fall arrival from Dubu Hana, a Korean concept from the team behind Mökbar.
None of that changes what Ghost of Uncle Joe's is. But it does mean a resident walking from Van Vorst Park to the cemetery for the October show has a genuinely different set of options for dinner first than they did a year ago.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
The throughline across all of this is not that Historic Downtown has a busy fall. Plenty of neighborhoods do. It's that the busy fall runs almost entirely on a small number of named organizations and a handful of people who show up in more than one of them. FVVP maintains the park and books its own season. A separate volunteer board keeps the cemetery upright and funds it through the same kind of programming. Susco's name links the two, not because there's an official partnership between a park and a graveyard, but because Jersey City's arts and music scene is small enough that its most reliable organizer ends up booking talent for whoever needs it.
That has a practical edge for anyone who lives within walking distance of either location. The public events, the market, the Halloween Bash, Ghost of Uncle Joe's, are the visible layer. The Saturday morning Wake and Rake sessions, the FVVP volunteer meetings, the informal ask to help plant or set up for a craft fair, are not usually where the flyers point. They're where you end up if you already recognize the names on the flyers.
If you're weighing what the fall actually looks like on the ground here, from the market schedule to the cemetery's preservation push to the new rooms filling in around Newark Avenue, Bill Kowalczuk can walk you through how those details tend to shape day to day life in Historic Downtown, whether or not a move is anywhere on your radar yet.
