Walk down Washington Street on a Saturday afternoon this fall and you'll hear the noise before you see where it's coming from. Multiple flatscreens, a wall of soccer scarves, a crowd that skews younger than you'd expect for a craft brewery and older than you'd expect for a sports bar. If you assumed Varitage Brew Works was the kind of trendy pop-up that shows up in a town, gets a write-up, and moves on in eighteen months, you'd be wrong on every count. That assumption is worth correcting, because it says something true about the rest of Bloomfield's fall calendar too.
Nothing filling up the town's weekends this October and November arrived from outside. The brewery, the park's biggest annual event, and the volunteer group keeping Brookdale Park in shape all trace back to people who were already here, doing this work quietly, long before anyone was writing about it.
The Brewery That Wasn't Trying to Become Anything
Varitage sits at 58 Washington Street, and its founder, Mark Costa, grew up a few towns over in Nutley. His weekends as a kid were built around soccer and family, specifically Saturday mornings in Newark's Ironbound with his father, catching European league matches on TVs blaring in different languages over a pint. That habit followed him into adulthood. When Costa and his partners opened the brewery, the plan wasn't to build a soccer hub. It was to brew good beer.
Word got around anyway. A few friends and neighbors started pulling up stools on weekend mornings to watch Premier League games, and the crowd kept growing until Varitage had gone from two flatscreens over the bar to eight scattered through the room, with a projector rolled out for anything big. The soccer scarves that now crisscross the ceiling started as one row hung along a single beam.
Costa still coaches soccer on the side. He spent five years at Belleville High School before taking over as head coach at Nutley High. That's not incidental biography. It's the reason the brewery reads less like a themed bar and more like an extension of somebody's actual life, which is part of why it's become the place Essex County soccer fans default to during major tournaments. Costa put it plainly when he described what the brewery has become: "Now we're just the soccer brewery."
The space itself is small enough that Varitage doesn't serve food, which turns out to be a feature rather than a gap. On any given matchday the air carries the smell of wings and pizza drifting in from next door, because the brewery leans on its Washington Street neighbors, including WNB Factory for its wing and trivia nights and the pizzeria around the corner, to feed the crowd it draws in. That's a downtown functioning the way small commercial strips are supposed to function: businesses covering each other's gaps instead of competing to be everything at once.
Twenty-Seven Years of the Same Two Weekends
If Varitage represents something that grew organically and recently, the Rose Squared Art Show at Brookdale Park represents the opposite: an institution that keeps showing up on schedule, twice a year, without needing to reinvent itself. The fall edition returns October 17 and 18, 2026, marking its 27th year in the park at 473 Watchung Avenue. More than 150 juried artists set up across the park's paths to sell fine art and craft work, everything from ceramics and jewelry to photography and artisanal food, and the show typically pulls somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000 visitors over the weekend, free and rain or shine.
That's a meaningful number to sit with. A one-weekend art fair drawing five figures of attendance isn't a pop-up experiment. It's a show that has had time to become a habit for people well outside Bloomfield, and it's one of three Essex County park venues Rose Squared partners with, alongside Anderson Park in Upper Montclair and Verona Park. The county's own parks system, including Brookdale, was laid out in the Olmsted tradition, which is part of why the setting works as well for a juried art show as it does for the running trails and open lawns the rest of the year sees.
The show's longevity matters more than its size. A one-off event asks nothing of a town beyond a single weekend. A show entering its 27th fall run has become part of how residents mark the calendar, the same way people plan around the county's summer concert series in the same meadow or the annual Pilates sessions under the park gazebo. None of it needed a rebrand or a new sponsor to keep going. It just kept happening.
The Park Has Its Own Volunteers, Not Just Visitors
Underneath the big, county-scale event is a smaller, entirely volunteer-run one. The Brookdale Park Conservancy organizes a running slate of hands-on programming that has nothing to do with drawing outside crowds. Its Pollinator Garden hosts kid-friendly parties on Saturday mornings, most recently scheduled for September 19, and the group runs regular community volunteer mornings roughly every few weeks through the fall. On November 7, the conservancy is hosting a guided walk through the park's trees, led by Cam Kanterman, for anyone who wants a closer look at what's actually growing along those Olmsted-era paths.
This is the part of Bloomfield's fall calendar that doesn't show up in event roundups, because it isn't designed to. Nobody is buying a ticket to a tree walk. The Brookdale Park Conservancy exists because a group of residents decided the park deserved ongoing attention beyond what the county's maintenance schedule provides, and they've kept showing up to weed beds and lead tours for years without needing the credibility of a headline event to justify it.
That's the throughline connecting a brewery on Washington Street, a 27-year-old art show, and a volunteer tree walk. None of them are being propped up by outside capital or a marketing calendar built to manufacture buzz. They're being run by people who had a reason to be there before anyone was paying attention, and the reason hasn't changed.
What a Bloomfield Weekend Actually Looks Like This Fall
If you're trying to plan around all of this rather than stumble into it, here's how the next two and a half months actually lay out:
- September 19: Pollinator Garden family morning at Brookdale Park, plus ongoing Saturday matchdays at Varitage for early-season Premier League fixtures.
- October 17 and 18: The 27th Annual Rose Squared Art Show takes over Brookdale Park's paths and lawns, free and open both days from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- November 7: Brookdale Park Conservancy's guided tree tour with Cam Kanterman, a slower, smaller counterpoint to the art show three weeks earlier.
- Ongoing through fall: Saturday soccer at Varitage, with the brewery's usual mix of Premier League mornings and midweek Champions League matches drawing the same crowd that's been showing up since the place opened.
None of these dates depend on each other, but they add up to a fall where the town's biggest weekends and its quietest mornings are being run by the same kind of person: someone who already had a stake in Bloomfield and decided to keep building on it rather than start something new elsewhere.
That's worth knowing whether you've lived on Washington Street for twenty years or moved in last spring. The businesses and volunteer groups shaping how Bloomfield spends its fall weekends aren't chasing a trend that will move on to the next town. They're the reason the town has a rhythm at all.
If you're watching this corridor because you're weighing what's next for a home here, or you're curious what a property in this stretch of Bloomfield is actually worth given how the neighborhood is developing, Nicholas Salemme knows this market from the ground up. Let's Connect.
