Walk into Riverview Park on a Sunday this September and something is missing. For three years, the longest line at the Riverview Farmers Market belonged to a tent slinging bright green matcha lattes to a crowd that didn't seem to mind the wait. That tent is gone. Jane's Matcha played its last Sunday at the market on August 9, and if you assumed that meant the neighborhood lost something, you have the story backward. Jane's Matcha didn't leave the Heights. It graduated.
The new address is 93 Franklin Street, a short walk from the park where the whole thing started. Jane Yang's tearoom now serves a menu built with Jersey City chef Joe Piccirillo, whose résumé includes stretches at Jean-Georges and Momofuku, alongside the market's original hand-whisked matcha lattes. The signature drink is a Honeycomb Latte made with local honey. The food side leans into onigiri and shokupan sandos. There's a ceramics shop built into the space too, so the tearoom that started as a folding table under a tent now has walls, a menu with a chef's name attached, and a retail component. That's not a closure. That's a pop-up that outgrew its pop-up.
What Filled the Gap
The market didn't skip a beat. Ritual House, which also shows up at the Hamilton Park and Cole Street farmers markets, took over the Sunday matcha slot. A new cheese vendor, Jersey Artisan Co., joined the same week, bringing Italian-style cheese made in a facility in Whippany. If you've been to Riverview on a Sunday in the past month, you've watched a live demonstration of how this market actually works. It's not a static roster of the same dozen vendors every May through November. It's a rotation, and the rotation has a direction: some vendors arrive small and stay small, and some arrive small and leave because they got too big for a tent.
That second category is the interesting one, and it's worth sitting with for a second. A Sunday farmers market in a dense, mostly residential neighborhood isn't typically where a food business tests a concept before opening a storefront with a chef-collaborated menu. But that's exactly the pattern Riverview has now produced at least once, in public, with receipts.
Sixteen Years Since Someone Said This Would Never Work
The market itself has a origin story that makes the Jane's Matcha arc feel less like a fluke and more like a habit. Back in 2010, a group of Heights residents pitched the idea of a farmers market in the neighborhood as part of a citywide sustainability challenge. At a community meeting, a local resident told them flatly that it would never happen.
"The farmers would never come out here."
The founding group, which included Mo Kinberg, Lisa Blando, Destenė Styles, Adrienne McCauley, Trish Ocone, and Beverly Brown, proved her wrong. The market opened, and this year it's running its 16th season, from May 3 through November 22, at Riverview Park on Palisade Avenue. Sixteen years is long enough for a market to stop being a scrappy experiment and start being an institution with its own gravity, one that can take a folding-table pop-up and send it out the door with a chef's name on the menu.
The market's monthly newsletter, the Riverview Roundup, is where the Jane's Matcha send-off got its formal write-up alongside the Peach Pie Contest wrap-up from earlier in the summer. That contest is in its 12th year, which tells you the same thing the matcha story does: the small, recurring rituals here have had a decade or more to build an audience that shows up on purpose, not by accident.
The Park That Started All of This
None of this happens without the park itself, and Riverview Fisk Park earns the loyalty. It sits at the edge of the Heights on Palisade Avenue with views of the Manhattan skyline, the Hudson River, the Verrazano Bridge, and the George Washington Bridge, all visible from a gazebo that doubles as market headquarters and community stage. There are two basketball courts and a playground, and on the Fourth of July the park becomes one of the best unofficial fireworks-viewing spots in the city, a tradition that pulls in newcomers every year alongside the families who've been coming for decades.
The Riverview Neighborhood Association, founded in 1983, is the reason a lot of this stays intact. It's one of the oldest continually active neighborhood associations in Jersey City, and its advocacy work over four decades has focused on protecting the views from the park and the Palisade cliffs, pushing for responsible development, and keeping the market's home base viable. The association meets on the second Tuesday of most months, and its fingerprints are on more of the neighborhood's daily texture than most residents probably realize.
The Neighborhood Picked to Open the City's Biggest Art Weekend
The market isn't the only thing proving the Heights can launch something bigger than itself this season. The Jersey City Art & Studio Tour, now in its 37th year, returns October 1 through 4 across all six wards of the city, and this year's opening ceremony happens right here in the Heights. The 2026 theme is "Unbounded Nature," and the festival kicks off with the JCAST Legend Awards honoring Diane Dragone and Ben Jones, two figures the local arts community has chosen to recognize as this year's honorees. From there the tour fans out to more than 150 venues, over 200 artist studios, curated exhibitions, and a lineup that includes 20 musicians and poets performing in spaces around the city. Twenty-five free art workshops, funded in part through an NJEDA grant, are built into this year's programming specifically to widen who gets to participate, not just watch.
Getting picked to host the opening night of a citywide festival isn't nothing. It puts the Heights at the literal starting line for four days of programming that will pull visitors from every ward into a neighborhood that, sixteen years ago, someone assumed couldn't sustain a farmers market.
What This Adds Up To
None of these threads is a coincidence on its own. Put them next to each other and a pattern shows up that a single news item wouldn't reveal. A market nobody believed in has spent sixteen years quietly building the kind of audience that can turn a pop-up tent into a storefront with a chef's name attached. A neighborhood association older than most of its residents has spent four decades protecting the physical space where that market happens. And this fall, the city's biggest annual arts event chose this same stretch of the Heights to open its doors first.
If you already live here, none of this is a reason to do anything differently on a Sunday morning. But it's worth knowing that the tent you walk past at Riverview Park isn't just where you get vegetables. It's one of the more reliable places in Jersey City for something small to become something real, and this fall, with JCAST opening blocks from where Jane's Matcha used to set up, the neighborhood is doing the same thing at a bigger scale.
The Heights Holiday Market returns to Riverview-Fisk Park on December 5, and the regular market season runs through November 22, so there's still time this year to watch whoever's in the matcha tent now build toward whatever comes next.
If you're thinking about what a home in a neighborhood like this is actually worth, whether you're the one selling or the one trying to get in before the next Jane's Matcha story happens, Bill and Guy can walk you through it. Request a complimentary home valuation and get a straight answer grounded in what's actually happening on these blocks, not just the comps.
