On the evening of August 21, kayaks and small boats strung with lights circled off Island Beach for what the Recreation Department billed simply as "paddle, glow, and make waves with us." It was the borough's first lighted boat parade, expected to run somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes depending on how many boats showed up and how fast the slowest one moved. Three days later, at the August 24 Borough Council meeting, Mayor Melissa Muilenburg opened with two lines of thanks: one to the Recreation Department for what she called a "successful first lighted boat parade," and one to the Woodlands Advisory Committee, whose pilot program had spent the summer clearing invasive brush out of three of the borough's pocket parks using a rented herd of goats.
Neither item was on the meeting agenda. Nobody spoke about them during public comment. The council took no formal vote on either one. They were simply two things the mayor wanted on the record as having gone well, the kind of remark that in most towns disappears into minutes nobody reads.
In Mountain Lakes, that offhand tone is usually where things start.
What Happened at Island Beach
The parade itself was small by design. One lake, one evening, decorated boats making a loop while people watched from the shoreline. What makes it worth noting isn't scale. It's that a lake surrounded by roughly 162 acres of waterfront and nine man-made lakes, a place that has run swim tests and lifeguard programs at Birchwood Lake for generations, had never organized a version of this before this August. The Recreation Department built a new evening use for water the town has managed as daytime infrastructure for over a century.
What the Goats Were Actually Hired to Do
The goats had a less photogenic job. Mountain Lakes owns more than 100 pocket parks, small wooded lots tucked between residential blocks that the borough describes as preserving privacy between homes and the community's wooded character. Over the decades, many had filled in with invasive vegetation, dense brush, and fallen debris that standard borough crews couldn't easily clear without herbicide or heavy equipment. The Woodlands Advisory Committee proposed goat grazing as an alternative, and the pilot this summer cleared three of those parks. The Department of Public Works provided access, neighboring homeowners shared water and let the goats work along their own property lines, and residents of all ages turned out to watch, according to the borough's own recap of the project. The committee members who supervised the goats are now doing the follow-up work themselves, hauling out the debris the animals left behind.
Small crowds, an unglamorous outcome, and no press release beyond a borough web page. That's consistent with how most of the town's actual improvements arrive.
A Hundred-Year-Old Habit
Zoom out and both stories look less like isolated summer novelties and more like a civic reflex the borough has been running on since 1910, when developer Herbert Hapgood built Mountain Lakes as a planned community for New Yorkers he marketed as wanting "country estate living." Hapgood ran a trolley line along what is now the Boulevard, connecting the new development to the Boonton train station so commuters could reach Hoboken and then Manhattan. The Morris County Traction Company's Boonton Branch covered the route from Denville to Boonton at 30-minute intervals from 6 a.m. to midnight, until buses replaced the trolley cars in 1928.
When the tracks came out, the town didn't leave the right-of-way empty. Residents voted to convert the old trolley bed into a walking path, still known today as the Trolley Track Walk, which runs a little over two miles alongside the Boulevard between Elcock Avenue and Pocono Road. New Jersey Monthly later included it among the state's best scenic strolls, describing the colonial, Georgian, and Spanish-style homes that flank the route and the mature shade trees that make it comfortable even in summer heat. It's one of the few paths in town that gets plowed in winter, which says something about how heavily it's used the other ten months of the year.
The same instinct shows up in smaller, odder places. The old police station's basement now houses The Train Station, a model train shop, a fittingly literal way for a town built around a rail line to keep that history underfoot. A hundred years separate the trolley conversion from this summer's boat parade and goats, but the mechanism repeats. A committee notices a piece of shared infrastructure that isn't being used the way it could be, an abandoned rail bed, an overgrown pocket park, a lake that goes quiet after Labor Day, and proposes something small and specific to change that. The Recreation Department runs a parade. The Woodlands Advisory Committee hires goats. The volunteers circle back and finish the cleanup themselves.
The Next Thing the Same Committee Is Watching
That committee structure doesn't sit idle between projects. The Woodlands Committee and Shade Tree Commission have also spent time briefing residents on beech leaf disease, an emerging threat to the borough's beech trees carried by a microscopic nematode that spreads on birds and wind. It's a slow problem without a single dramatic event to mark it, which is exactly why it needs the same kind of standing committee infrastructure that got three pocket parks cleared this summer. If the pattern holds, whatever comes out of that monitoring will look less like an announcement and more like another quiet, specific fix that shows up on next year's calendar.
Dinner Along the Route
If you want to hear residents actually talk through any of this, it isn't happening at Borough Hall. It's happening at The Station at Mountain Lakes, the restaurant occupying the borough's old train depot on Midvale Road, where owners Carlos Vasquez, Steve Turkot, and Chef Bradley Cooper are running the place into its 26th year with the same easy, everybody-knows-your-name atmosphere they built it on. It's happening at Barka on Route 46, where the seafood menu and white-tablecloth setting have earned the restaurant a 4.7 rating across nearly 1,200 reviews on OpenTable, the kind of place people book ahead for a real dinner before heading home along the Boulevard. And it's happening over Sunday brunch at Hapgood's on Midvale Road, named for the man who built the town's original trolley line, still serving a classic American breakfast and lunch menu to a full room most weekend mornings.
Walk the Trolley Track Walk on any evening this fall and you'll pass dog walkers, joggers, and parents pushing strollers under the same shade trees that once lined a route carrying a train car past every half hour. The parade lights from Island Beach are packed away. The goats have moved on to whatever comes next. The path everyone is still using is the one the town built a century ago out of something it had decided no longer had a use.
If you're the kind of Mountain Lakes reader who reads committee minutes as closely as restaurant menus, Your Dream Home NJ keeps an eye on both, and is always glad to talk through the story behind something you noticed on the Boulevard.
