Ask a Nutley dog owner where they walk and most people give you one word: Yanticaw. Ask them what's on the other side of the tree line and the answer gets vaguer. That gap between "I go there every day" and "I don't actually know where it leads" is the whole story of this town's park system, and this fall is the moment to close it.
Nutley doesn't have one park. It has six, strung along the Third River like beads on a wire, and they connect without a single car trip between them. Locals who've walked the full stretch have their own shorthand for it: the string of six, running roughly north to south from Kingsland Park through Memorial Park III, II, and I, into Yanticaw, and finally Booth. Most residents use one bead. Almost nobody walks the wire.
The Chain Nobody Finishes
Start at the north end and the shape becomes obvious fast. Kingsland Park feeds into Memorial Park III, then II, then I, the last of which locals still call the Mud Hole, sitting at the corner of Passaic Avenue and Vreeland Avenue. Together the three Memorial parks cover roughly 13.5 acres, with a fishing pond, an open lawn, and a walking track that ties directly into the shaded riverside path running toward Yanticaw.
Yanticaw itself is the anchor. At 28.75 acres, it's the largest of the six, and it just passed its 112th year. Essex County began buying the land in 1911, drained the wetlands, dammed a section of the Third River into a lake, and finished the park in 1914. The lake didn't survive the century. In 1962, the county drained it and cut a new channel to keep the river flowing south instead, which is the version of Yanticaw that exists today: paved paths, a stream still stocked with fish and ducks, a small waterfall near the southern edge, and enough shade that the walk stays cool well into October.
Keep going south past Yanticaw and you're on the same trail segment that runs about a mile through Booth Park, ending downtown where Booth Drive hosts the weekly farmers market. Add Yanticaw's acreage to the Memorial parks alone and you're looking at more than 42 acres of connected, car-free parkland, before Kingsland and Booth are even counted. Nobody markets it that way. The township's own maps list each park separately, as if they were unrelated dots instead of one continuous system.
A Park Nobody Was Supposed To Get
The connected version of this park chain wasn't inevitable. It was fought for, and the fight has names attached to it.
In 1895, a Nutley resident named John R. Clark and a Dr. Thomas E. Satterthwaite started campaigning for a real park along the Third River. It took until 1909 for Clark to force a Nutley Park proposal into the first Essex County Park Appropriations bill. Even then, the county wasn't moving fast enough for Charles B. Vroom of the Nutley Improvement Association, who argued to the Park Commission that Nutley had been paying county park taxes for seventeen years while watching parks rise in every neighboring town but its own. Vroom kept showing up to meetings until the county relented with $40,000 for land acquisition and $200,000 for development. Land buying started in 1911. The park opened in 1914.
Even the name carries that history. Yanticaw comes from the Lenni-Lenape word for "place of the wood boundary," tied to an annual thanksgiving dance the Lenape held near where the Third River meets the Passaic, on their yearly trip to the shore for fish and shells. The park sits on ground people were already gathering on centuries before Vroom ever showed up to a commission meeting.
What Most Residents Don't Know They're Standing On
Yanticaw and Booth aren't just local parks. They're also a working segment of the Lenape Trail, a 36-mile route the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference mapped in partnership with Essex County that links 18 parks across 11 municipalities, running from Newark's Branch Brook Park all the way up through the Watchung Ridges. The mile through Booth and Yanticaw is a small piece of that larger system, but it means the paved path under your feet on a Sunday walk connects, eventually, to trailheads in towns most Nutley residents have never had a reason to visit.
That's the part worth sitting with. A walk that feels like a neighborhood loop is actually a fragment of a county-wide greenway, and the Essex County Parks system maintains it as such, whether or not the average dog walker knows it.
This Sunday Puts It On Display
Here's where the calendar makes the case better than any description could. Sunday, October 4, 2026, two things are happening on the same day at opposite ends of this chain.
The Nutley Fall Festival in the Park is scheduled that afternoon at Memorial Park I, the Mud Hole, with the mix of live music, food trucks, and vendor stalls the event has featured in past years. Meanwhile, downtown at Booth Drive, the Nutley Farmers Market is in its 17th season, running every Sunday through October 25 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., with live music from 10 to 1 and its long-running Apple Baking Contest typically falling somewhere in this stretch of the calendar.
Walk the chain that day and you can start at one seasonal event and end at another, on foot, without touching Franklin Avenue.
A working route for that Sunday:
- Morning: Start at Yanticaw Park, Centre Street and Park Drive, for the quiet stretch before crowds arrive.
- Midday: Follow the riverside path north to Memorial Park I for the Fall Festival, arriving as it opens.
- Afternoon: Reverse south past Yanticaw and continue the mile-long stretch through Booth Park into downtown, timed to the farmers market's afternoon hours before its 2 p.m. close.
The market itself already treats walking as part of the experience. Its Market Walk & Talk series pairs a three-mile scenic hike through town with an informal conversation led by a rotating local guest, before shoppers even reach the stalls. The township built a walking event into its own farmers market. The infrastructure for a longer version of that walk has been sitting here the whole time.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
None of this requires a car, a membership, or an admission fee. It requires knowing that Kingsland doesn't dead-end, that Yanticaw isn't the destination so much as the middle of the route, and that Booth Park sits close enough to the farmers market to make the whole stretch a single afternoon instead of six separate errands.
For dog owners, Yanticaw's shaded paths and streamside stretches stay walkable well past the point most open lawns turn to mud. For anyone with kids, Memorial Park I's playground and open field make a natural stopping point before or after the Fall Festival crowd thins out. For longtime residents who've never walked the full mile between Booth and Yanticaw, October gives you the best possible weather window before the trail gets slick with leaf litter and the daylight runs out earlier each week.
The six parks were never separate. The town just never advertised them as one thing. Walk the chain once this fall and it stops being six errands and starts being the best free afternoon Nutley has to offer.
If a walk through this stretch of town has you thinking more seriously about what a home along this corridor is actually worth, Donna Keena offers a free home valuation for Nutley and the surrounding Essex County towns, no obligation attached.
