Drive the corner of East Allendale Road and West Saddle River Road this month and you'll pass a barn that wasn't there a year ago. It sits on the old Exxon lot, scaffolding still up in places, fresh glass in some of the window openings, grading work visible around the foundation. It looks like construction. It's also a restoration project.
Many of Saddle River's distinctive houses sit at the end of long driveways, screened by trees, and some of its oldest buildings are on private land. The barn at 66 East Allendale Road breaks that pattern. It stands at one of the most-traveled intersections in the borough, visible to anyone doing a school pickup, anyone heading to Ramsey, anyone just passing through. That alone makes it worth paying attention to.
The Barn’s Move to a New Address
The building is an 1800s Dutch colonial barn that originally stood on the landmarked property of John George Achenbach's house, a structure the National Register of Historic Places recognized in 1979. Over the following decades the property split in two. The barn stayed on one half, at 4 Apple Ridge Road, while the Achenbach House itself ended up at a separate address, 184 Chestnut Ridge Road, after a 2002 subdivision approval that came with a condition: the barn and an old driveway were supposed to move to the neighboring lot. That condition never got carried out. In 2004, the same year a fire destroyed most of the Achenbach House, the barn's owner asked the Planning Board for relief from the relocation requirement so the barn could stay put as an accessory building. For close to two decades, it did.
That changed when the Apple Ridge Road property sold in 2023. The new owners worked out an arrangement with the borough: they'd donate the barn rather than tear it down, and the town would take on the job of moving and restoring it. A Planning Board hearing on November 3, 2025 approved the plan unanimously, and a resolution adopted the following month freed up escrow funds tied to the 2023 sale to help pay for the move. The estimate at the time was about $58,000, with $19,000 coming from the municipal budget and the rest from private money, including a personal contribution from Steven Perillo, whose family owns Perillo Tours and had already set up a trust connected to the sale.
By late 2025 the barn had been moved from Apple Ridge Road to the borough-owned lot at East Allendale and West Saddle River, a site that spent the years since 2005 as a shuttered Exxon station and, before that, as the location of the borough's own blacksmith shop. Mayor Albert Kurpis framed the project as a continuation of work started by his predecessor, calling it a chance for "rescuing an authentic piece of Saddle River's past from demolition."
What's Happened Since the Move
Restoration work through 2026 has been steady rather than dramatic, the kind of progress you'd only notice by checking the borough's own bill lists. Here's roughly what's gone into the barn since it landed:
- May 2026: exterior painting and replacement glass for several window openings
- June 2026: a new exterior door, an electrical panel, lighting, and initial grading and seeding around the site
- July 2026: utility trenching and installation of a new well
- August 2026: additional electrical supplies
None of that is finished work, and the borough hasn't posted a completion date. What it shows is a project moving through the unglamorous middle stretch, the phase where a barn stops being a demolition risk and starts becoming a usable structure again. The 25-by-36-foot building isn't open to the public yet. The lot sits at the edge of the Saddle River Center Historic District, added to the National Register in 1986, which runs along West Saddle River Road to this same intersection. The barn's location places a restored agricultural building at a prominent borough intersection and within a nationally recognized historic district.
The timing lines up with something bigger than one construction project. Saddle River held a community event on June 14, 2026 marking the country's 250th anniversary, one the borough described as honoring both national history and its own heritage. Bergen County has been running its own historical programming around the same milestone, including talks on the Dutch families who settled this part of the county, the same lineage the Achenbach barn comes from. A town doesn't usually fund a barn relocation and host an anniversary celebration in the same year by coincidence.
The Other Barn in Town
Saddle River has actually had a soft spot for barns for a while. It just hasn't put them on a corner before. The Saddle River Inn, the borough's best-known restaurant, operates out of a converted barn set along the banks of the river itself, tucked well off the road the way most things here are. Chef Jamie Knott runs it as a French-American fine dining spot, BYOB, reservation-driven, and it's earned real recognition for it: OpenTable named it to its 2025 Top 100 Restaurants list based on diner reviews and reservation trends. A few doors down, Knott's second restaurant, Saddle River Cafe on East Saddle River Road, does the same barn-adjacent trick in a more casual register, serving farm-fresh eggs, pressed juices, and grain bowls to a lunch crowd that's built up its own following since opening.
Both restaurants show how historic barn settings can serve different uses in Saddle River. The Achenbach barn, by contrast, is being restored as a landmark at a prominent intersection.
What to Watch For This Fall
The bill lists suggest the project is past its heaviest construction phase and into finishing details, electrical, landscaping, the kind of work that tends to wrap up rather than expand. There's no public date yet for when the site will be considered complete, and the borough hasn't announced what the finished barn will be used for beyond restoration for its own sake. What's already true is that the corner looks different than it did a year ago, and it's going to keep looking different through the rest of this construction season. If you drive that intersection regularly, this is the fall to actually slow down and look.
Michael Properties keeps a close eye on what's actually changing on the ground in Saddle River, not just what's listed for sale in it. If you want the next update on how the barn restoration wraps up, or what else is shifting around town, Michael Properties is worth bookmarking.
