On a Monday afternoon in August 2025, Cindy O'Brien loaded groceries into her car in the Harrison Avenue parking lot and told a reporter she was thrilled. "I loved it. I'm really happy to see it back," she said. A few feet away, Dr. Mark Hiatt was doing the same thing with his wife. "It's been an integral part of the neighborhood and we were so upset when Sickles closed," he said, before asking the new owners to bring back the pastry section.
Five months later, the pastry section never fully materialized, and neither did the coffee bar or the smoothie bar the new owners had promised. On January 18, 2026, at 5 p.m., 1663 Market closed for good.
If you live in Little Silver, you already know the broad strokes. What's harder to find in one place is what actually happened between those two moments, what the town has and hasn't decided about that corner since, and where the confusion about "Sickles" versus "Sickles Park" keeps tripping people up at borough meetings.
A Five-Year Plan That Lasted Five Months
The market at 1 Harrison Avenue started as a farm stand more than a century ago, before the Sickles family built it into the gourmet grocery and garden center generations of Little Silver residents grew up shopping at. When it collapsed into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2024, the debts were specific and large: a $5.3 million lien held by Northfield Bank, $800,000 in unpaid sales tax, $1.3 million in merchant cash advance claims, and $300,000 owed to former employees.
Three Rumson residents, Jennifer Griffin Karp, Dennis Devine, and Timothy McCooey, formed an entity called 1663 Partners and bought the assets out of bankruptcy. Devine later described the motivation as protecting the parcel itself, telling the Two River Times that saving the market was about safeguarding the property "from a development that would no longer include the market and would have been terribly impactful to the community." The trio talked about a five-year vision to make 1663 Market "the premier food and garden destination on the Jersey Shore," complete with chef collaborations, seasonal festivals, and a plan to sponsor the Light of Little Silver benefiting the Little Silver PTO.
None of that had time to happen. When the closure came, the owners' statement was blunt: "Despite our commitment, time, and investment, the lack of sustained community support, along with lingering negativity rooted in past failures that were not ours, has made the business unsustainable." AJ Willner Auctions was brought in to liquidate the commercial kitchen equipment and the greenhouses that had stood in front of the store for decades.
Two Different Sickles, and the Town Wants That Clear
A week after the closure, Little Silver's borough government announced on Facebook that it would seek Green Acres funding to add an educational arboretum and raised community garden beds to Sickles Park. Confusion followed almost immediately, because a lot of residents assumed "Sickles" meant the same six-acre parcel the market had just vacated.
Mayor Bob Neff moved to shut that down fast. "This has nothing to do with the 1663 Market (former Sickles) properties," he told Patch. "The town does not own that property and the grant application applies only to the Sickles Park property."
The two sit next to each other at the intersection of Harrison Avenue and Rumson Road, but they are not the same thing:
- Sickles Park is borough-owned. It already has ball fields, walking trails, and a newly built inclusive playground funded by a $750,000 state grant. The town's current ask adds trees and garden beds, nothing more.
- The former Sickles Market site is privately owned, sits on multiple lots, and includes parcels zoned for residential use. As of late January 2026, Neff said there was no application before the town to build housing there, though he added, "Of course, that could change."
That distinction matters because it tells you where to actually watch for news. Anything happening at Sickles Park will show up in borough Green Acres paperwork. Anything happening to the market site would show up in front of the Planning Board, which as of the most recent public minutes had nothing pending on it.
What the Bankruptcy Paperwork Already Assumed
Here's the part that gets lost in the sadness over losing a grocery store: residential development was already written into the 2024 deal that saved the market in the first place.
The memorandum of understanding that let 1663 Partners buy the property proposed tearing down the smaller house at 5 Harrison Avenue and using that land for residential construction. Dan Stolz, the bankruptcy attorney representing the Sickles family, told Patch at the time that the plan was straightforward. "The idea is they will keep the market open and build residential around it," he said. "They are currently evaluating what is the highest and best use for that land."
The two Little Silver properties combined were appraised at $6.25 million in court filings, though the Sickles family believed the land was worth considerably more. The market's survival was never framed purely as a rescue of a beloved grocery store. It was framed as a way to raise the value of a site that everyone involved, including the family's own lawyer, expected to eventually include housing.
That context changes how you should read the mayor's "no application yet" statement. It's accurate. It's also not the whole picture, because the zoning question here has been on the table since long before 1663 Market ever opened.
The Zoning Already Sitting Half a Mile Away
If you want to see what a residential conversion on a commercial corner in Little Silver actually looks like right now, you don't have to imagine it. Walk to 1 Sycamore Avenue, less than 500 feet from the train station, where the borough approved a new TH-2 Townhouse Zone in February 2026 for a project called Little Silver Crossing.
The plan calls for 13 townhomes across three buildings: three units designated affordable, and ten market-rate units built as four-bedroom homes with roughly 3,000 square feet and two-car garages. That works out to 12.5 units per acre, which one resident, Mr. O'Hern, pointed out at a public hearing is about 42% denser than the nearby Carriage Gate development's 8.76 units per acre. He also raised concerns about flooding, showing the council photos of ponding on the site during recent storms. The project is part of the borough's fourth-round affordable housing plan, which state law required Little Silver to submit by March 15, 2026.
Little Silver has been building toward this kind of zoning tool since at least 2019, when it created a set of Inclusionary Housing Overlay zones specifically to satisfy state affordable housing mandates and avoid a builder's remedy lawsuit, the legal mechanism that strips towns of control over development when they fall out of compliance. At a 2019 public session on those zones, Mayor Neff himself referenced a different nearby site, the Parker Homestead, telling residents it sat "near Rumson Road and Sickles Market," as one of the locations Fair Share Housing Center originally wanted included in the overlay conversation.
In other words, this exact corner of town has been part of the borough's affordable housing calculus for years. The Sycamore Avenue project shows what that calculus produces when it runs its course: a site zoned for commercial or light residential use converted into a denser townhouse development, approved over resident objections, with construction targeted for spring and occupancy signage already up for fall 2026.
Where the Corn Actually Went
For the part of this that affects your Saturday morning more than your reading of borough minutes, the honest answer is that Little Silver doesn't have a direct replacement inside its own borders yet. Most residents who used to make the short drive to Harrison Avenue have redirected toward a small cluster of Monmouth County farm markets instead.
Delicious Orchards in Colts Neck, on Route 34 South, has become the closest substitute for the grocery-and-garden-center combination Sickles offered, though it's worth knowing it isn't a pick-your-own operation. It's a market and bakery, open Tuesday through Saturday, known for its butcher counter, cheese case, and apple cider donuts. If you actually want to pick fruit yourself, Eastmont Orchards sits nearby and runs its pick-your-own season from mid-July through the last weekend of October, with more than 15 peach varieties at the height of summer.
Families in Middletown Township have long relied on McCormack Farms, where owner Leah McCormack likes to say "the first time the produce leaves the farm is in your car." And Tinton Falls' E&M Gold Beekeepers has become a familiar name at the farmers markets that fill the gap Sickles used to occupy on its own.
None of these fully replicate what Sickles was, a single stop that combined grocery, garden center, and prepared foods under one roof in Little Silver itself. That gap is real, and it's part of why the site's future matters beyond zoning maps.
What to Actually Watch For
The next real signal won't come from Facebook posts about Sickles Park. It will come from the Planning Board agenda, the same body that approved the Sycamore Avenue conversion this year. Until an application appears there for 1 or 5 Harrison Avenue, the corner remains exactly what it was after the 2024 bankruptcy and after the 2026 closure: a commercially zoned parcel with residential potential already priced into its bankruptcy valuation, sitting in a borough that has spent years building the exact zoning infrastructure to convert it.
If you want to keep an eye on the neighborhood beyond this one corner, our Little Silver guide tracks what's changing across the borough as it comes up.
Jennifer Sabodish has spent two decades reading the fine print behind Monmouth County real estate decisions, from zoning overlays to bankruptcy filings, so her clients never have to find out the hard way what a property's "highest and best use" really means. If you have questions about what's happening on a specific block in Little Silver, Rumson, or anywhere else in Monmouth County, Jennifer Sabodish is a direct call away. Let's Connect.
