The Last Closed Sunday

The World Cup final fell on a Sunday this year. The largest crowd of the summer poured out of MetLife Stadium, and the stores at American Dream were open and selling. Ten miles north, the biggest mall in New Jersey was dark. Westfield Garden State Plaza closes every Sunday. Paramus Park closes. The Bergen Town Center closes. Nearly every other retailer in Bergen County closes, because a statute older than any of the malls says clothing, furniture, appliances, lumber, and home furnishings may not change hands on the first day of the week. Bergen County likes it that way. The voters have said so twice, both times by landslide. The voters never got a say over the ground under American Dream. That is where the case lives.

Paramus put the trouble in a caption and a docket. The borough sued American Dream on August 25, 2025, in the Superior Court of Bergen County. Ameream, the mall’s operator, is named alongside Bergen County itself, the borough of East Rutherford, and the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which owns the land beneath the mall. The seventeen-page complaint counts more than 120 retail stores open on Sundays and accuses them of breaking the law “hundreds if not thousands” of times across twenty-nine or more Sundays. Paramus wants an order closing the stores on Sunday, escalating disorderly-persons fines for each violation, and a declaration that the Sunday operation is a public nuisance that can be shut down. American Dream answered that the suit was “a meritless political stunt,” because Bergen County’s blue laws do not reach property owned by the state. The mall sits on state land, next to a stadium that sells jerseys on Sundays all fall.

The borough came to court carrying a promise. At a public hearing in 2011, when the mall was still a project, the developer’s vice president for development and construction testified to the law’s effect. Tony Armlin told the record the blue laws “prohibit our ability to have retail activities on Sundays,” and he offered the limitation as a virtue, because it would hold down traffic. Mayor Christopher DiPiazza says the mall “promised on record” that it would follow the law once it opened. Bergen County Executive Jim Tedesco says the operators assured him the same thing to his face, and his statement after the suit was filed ran four words long: “They broke that promise.” I have read the Armlin line the way the borough reads it. The transcript is not ambiguous. The developer understood the law, priced the law into its traffic studies, and then, five years after opening, decided the law was for other people.

American Dream opened in chapters beginning October 25, 2019, first a Nickelodeon theme park and an ice rink, with the retail halls following in 2020. The complex runs three million square feet at a reported cost of $5 billion, the second-largest mall in the country, built by Triple Five, the Canadian family company behind the Mall of America. For its first years the retail side stayed shut on Sundays, as promised. Coverage in the Record dates the change to 2024. By January 2025 the mall was advertising fully open Sundays, up to a billboard on the building itself. The billboard is part of the case now: the complaint alleges the Sunday openings were public and encouraged by the mall’s ownership. Nobody here is arguing about what happened. The argument is about whether anybody can do anything about it.

The defense is a map. American Dream stands on land owned by the Sports and Exposition Authority, the state agency created in 1971 to run the Meadowlands Sports Complex. The mall leases from the state instead of sitting on the county’s tax rolls like an ordinary parcel. The authority’s motion to dismiss, filed in December 2025, calls Paramus “a legal stranger” to the question. It also notes that the borough never filed the tort claim notice New Jersey requires before suing a state agency. At the argument in June, the mall’s attorney, Angelo Genova, pressed the standing point: “Paramus seeks to enforce rights outside of its borders.” East Rutherford’s attorney told the judge his town was in the case “because of geography,” since it has no control over the state-owned site. Bergen County, sued by a town inside its borders, took the strangest position of all. The county wants the mall closed on Sundays and says it lacks the power to close it.

Judge Gregg Padovano heard the motions in Hackensack. He turned the geography over in open court. If Paramus can sue over what a mall does in East Rutherford, he asked from the bench, “where does that end?” He pressed the borough’s lawyer on MetLife Stadium, which sells merchandise on Sundays at every Giants game, on the same state-owned complex, without a whisper of complaint from Paramus. The borough’s answer is that it does not object to the amusement park, the water park, or the ski slope selling hats and tickets on Sunday, because entertainment was always exempt and the statute was always about retail goods. The answer is accurate as far as the statute goes. Whether it survives the standing argument is a harder question than the borough admits.

The case has already outlived its first decision dates. The court’s December notices pointed to rulings on January 9 and January 30, 2026, and both dates came and went. On June 9, 2026, Padovano heard ninety minutes of argument in Hackensack and reserved judgment, promising an opinion shortly. World Cup shoppers were already in the Meadowlands, and the round of sixteen and the final itself both landed on Sundays in July. As of this writing, October 21, 2026, no written decision has been reported. The stores were open last Sunday.

This law is narrower than its reputation. The Sunday Closing Law, which Bergen County’s municipal websites cite as N.J.S.A. 2A:171-1.1 and following, bans Sunday sales in five categories: clothing and wearing apparel, building and lumber supply materials, furniture, home and office furnishings, and appliances. The penalty ladder starts at $25 for a first offense and climbs to $500 and six months in jail for a fourth. Every sale to every customer is a separate violation, which is how a hundred open stores become thousands of counts. Wyckoff’s official list of what may still be sold reads like a rummage table: greeting cards, flashlights, film and camera supplies, first aid products, candy, magazines, infant care items. A Bergen resident can buy a book on Sunday, or a bouquet, or a garden spade, and cannot buy a toaster, a sofa, or a pair of socks. One more thing cannot be bought on Sunday anywhere in New Jersey, from High Point to Cape May, and that is a car, under a statewide criminal ban that stands apart from the county option.

Even the birthday is contested. The Record’s published history, from April 2026, puts the founding in 1704 and the codification in a 1798 Act to Suppress Vice and Immorality. Under that act a resident could travel to church or fetch a doctor only within twenty miles, and public swearing cost fifty cents. NJ Spotlight’s account dates American blue laws to the 1600s. The reporter for the New Jersey Supreme Court’s Sunday case settles it as far as the record can: dissenting in Two Guys from Harrison v. Furman, Justice Francis traced the statute, in substantially similar form, back to 1675. What governs the Bergen case is younger. The old vice act lost its teeth in a 1951 revision. A 1958 rewrite covering eighteen counties was voided as arbitrary in Sarner v. Township of Union. The Legislature answered with chapter 119 of the Laws of 1959, signed June 17 of that year. That statute is sixty-seven years old.

Chapter 119 handed the choice to the counties. The resort counties wanted out, the suburban counties wanted in, and the Legislature declined to choose, so the act took effect only where voters adopted it. The question on the November 1959 ballot read: “Shall the Sunday Closing Law (P.L. 1959, c. 119) apply within this county?” Fifteen counties asked the question, and twelve adopted it, Bergen among them. The unwinding took decades. County after county repealed the law, and the last to go, Hudson County, voted out in the mid-1980s, according to the Associated Press account of the era. Bergen stayed. Of twenty-one counties, only Bergen still lives under chapter 119, and a Sunday shopping trip there remains a legal question.

A discount chain picked the first fight. Two Guys from Harrison, a New Jersey retailer with a genius for Sunday crowds, attacked chapter 119 the moment it passed. The case reached the New Jersey Supreme Court as Two Guys from Harrison v. Furman, 32 N.J. 199, in 1960. The caption page holds a familiar name among the law’s defenders: the Garden State Plaza Corporation intervened alongside R.H. Macy’s Bamberger’s to uphold the statute. That same Paramus mall promises to keep closing on Sundays no matter what American Dream does. Chief Justice Weintraub’s opinion sustained the law as an independent statute aimed at a secular evil: the loss of one common day of relief from the week’s pressure. A legislature, he reasoned, may sort what can be sold by weighing the traffic, the noise, and the bustle each kind of commerce drags behind it. The Puritan language was still on the books. Quoted in the opinion, the 1951 revision opened with the old command: “No worldly employment or business, except works of necessity and charity.” The court upheld the new law on grounds the Puritans never offered.

The United States Supreme Court settled the question a year later. McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420, was decided May 29, 1961. Chief Justice Warren wrote for eight justices that such statutes had shed their religious purpose and now served rest and recreation. The same morning, in a companion case out of Pennsylvania, the Court ruled against the same discount chain a second time: Two Guys from Harrison-Allentown v. McGinley, 366 U.S. 582. The opinion’s footnotes hold the plainest version of the argument. A Pennsylvania legislator explains why the 1959 statute was needed: the Two Guys store outside Allentown opened on Sundays as a novelty, and shoppers came from five named counties and beyond and “jammed traffic on the highways.” The blue law, as the courts rebuilt it between 1959 and 1961, is a traffic ordinance in a Puritan coat. That coat dates to 1675. The fit is pure 1959, and what it covers on Sundays in Bergen County is cars.

Bergen County has voted on this twice. Both votes were landslides. Repeal failed in 1980 by 192,394 votes to 157,648, a margin near thirty-five thousand, per the Star-Ledger’s archive. It failed again in 1993 by more than eighty thousand votes. The New Yorker’s account of that election counts nearly sixty-five percent for the blue laws, with majorities in sixty-six of sixty-nine towns. In Paramus, the mall capital itself, the vote ran thirteen to one. A repeal group called Modernize Bergen County tried again in 2013. The statute’s quiet defense mechanism stopped them: the first referendum needed only twenty-five hundred signatures. A repeat petition demands pen-and-ink signatures from ten percent of registered voters, some fifty-five thousand people. Resubmission waits three years under the statute. The group never reached the ballot. Nobody has reached the ballot since 1993, and the law has now gone longer without a vote than at any point in its life.

Paramus runs a stricter Sunday than the county that contains it. The borough passed its own ordinance in 1957, two months before its first mall opened, by The New Yorker’s account. The New York Times noted on the eve of the 1993 vote that even a countywide repeal would leave Paramus shuttered, because the borough law would still stand. Paramus is a town of roughly twenty-six thousand people, twelve miles west of the George Washington Bridge. Six days a week it absorbs one of the heaviest retail loads in America: more than $6 billion in sales a year, by the count in NJ.com’s lawsuit coverage, along Routes 4 and 17 and the Garden State Parkway. Its three malls obey both the county law and the borough’s. Mayor DiPiazza frames the suit in those terms: “We don’t want ghost towns in Paramus,” he told News 12, and the borough wants every store competing on the same field. Proponents describe what Sunday buys back as a break from traffic and noise. The town plans its week around the quiet day, and the quiet day is what makes the other six bearable. The cases from 1960 onward call it relief, respite, surcease. In Paramus it looks like a driveway that stays empty for a whole Sunday.

The county showed what the law is for in 2012. Hurricane Sandy tore up the state in late October of that year. On November 3, Governor Chris Christie signed Executive Order 109, suspending the Sunday sales restrictions in Bergen County so storm victims could replace clothing, lumber, furniture, and appliances. Paramus announced it would keep enforcing the borough ordinance anyway, sued over the suspension, and lost; a judge upheld the governor. Two Sundays of open malls followed. Then Bergen County Executive Kathleen Donovan petitioned Trenton to give the county its law back, and on November 16 Christie signed Executive Order 117, rescinding the suspension and restoring the ban in time for the third Sunday after the storm. The blue law bent for a hurricane and snapped back inside two weeks. Nobody in the record asked to keep the suspension for the shopping. The county asked for its quiet Sunday back, the same commodity the law had been distributing for fifty-three years by then.

The current suit found the one hole in the law’s fence. Paramus Borough Administrator Hector Olmo filed a brief dated March 24, 2026. The managers of the borough’s three malls, he told the court, had advised him they would stop honoring the blue laws if American Dream is permitted to ignore them. He called the mall’s Sunday operation “a major threat to their operations.” Bergen Town Center declined to confirm or deny the account, and Paramus Park never answered. Westfield Garden State Plaza said it will keep following the law “regardless of the hours observed by other shopping centers in the area.” That sentence shows the equilibrium’s seams. The biggest mall in the state has pledged itself to a rule its neighbors are openly reconsidering, and the pledge holds only as long as the rule does. An arrangement built in 1959 is coming apart in a filed brief instead of at a ballot box.

The honest case against the law deserves its turn. The record supplies a live experiment. North Dakota repealed its Sunday closing law in 2019, and a 2025 report from the Center for Economic Policy Research found that Sunday morning visits to Walmart jumped immediately, with no matching change across the border. David Flynn, the University of North Dakota economist who has studied the repeal, told NorthJersey.com that the traffic evened itself across the week, that Monday went dead at the stores, that the week reshuffled itself. All of that can be true in Fargo and carry no weight in Paramus. Bergen County holds about 978,000 people, more than the entire state of North Dakota, packed against the George Washington Bridge corridor, and its highways jam six days a week under the present law. Sunday is the release valve. The referendum stands guard. The law ends whenever the voters say so, and the voters, asked twice, said no twice.

Hackensack asks a narrow question. American Dream does not need to persuade Bergen County of anything. No referendum ever reached the ground the mall stands on. The mall’s landlord answers to the state, and the state authority has told the court it is a commercial landlord that will not police the lease. Every other retailer in the county lives under a law the voters adopted and twice defended. One defendant was built where the county has no say, and that defendant is the one positioned to beat the law. A win here is a win as an island: open on Sundays inside a closed county, while the malls ten miles north decide whether to keep a promise the law no longer makes for them. Professor Sarah Swan of Rutgers Law School puts the stakes plainly: the suit has drawn new attention to whether Bergen County still wants this law, and the county can repeal it whenever it chooses. That choice has been available for sixty-seven years. The county has never once taken it.

I keep returning to the transcript from 2011. It holds the whole case in miniature. The developer’s man stood up in a public hearing and used the blue law as evidence of good neighborliness, a guarantee that Sunday traffic would stay where Sunday traffic belonged. That guarantee helped get the mall approved. Once open, the mall kept its stores closed on Sundays for a while, and then it did not, and the guarantee turned out to be a position on the record, valuable as long as it cost nothing. Judge Padovano will write what he writes, and whenever it comes, it will answer the narrow question of who may enforce a county law against state land. The larger question answers itself every weekend. Last Sunday the malls of Paramus were closed, and American Dream was open. This Sunday will look the same.