Sickles Went Quiet. Oceanport Avenue Got Loud. Here's Why.

"It is with deep disappointment that we announce the closing of 1663 Market." That was the whole of it, posted to Instagram on a Thursday in January, and by 5 p.m. that Sunday the lights at 1 Harrison Avenue were off again. Across town, on Oceanport Avenue, a different kind of Sunday was happening. Tables were full at Locale, glasses were being poured under a liquor license the borough hadn't issued to a restaurant in decades, and nobody walking past the old Pix Shoes storefront was thinking about bankruptcy court.

Both of these are Little Silver stories from the same stretch of time. One is about how fast trust can collapse. The other is about how long it actually takes to build.

The Debt Nobody Wanted to Talk About

Sickles Market was not a chain trying out a location. It was a farm stand the Sickles family started on that same Harrison Avenue land more than a hundred years ago, one that grew into a specialty grocery, garden center, and prepared foods operation that Bob Sickles Jr. eventually ran with his two daughters. For a lot of people who grew up here, corn season at Sickles was a fixed point on the calendar, not a nice-to-have.

The end was abrupt. Sickles Jr. closed the market in February 2024, then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy that May, listing roughly $7.5 million in debt. A second Red Bank location that hadn't worked out was part of the story, but the part that stuck with people longer was what happened to employees and customers. Workers said they were owed wages that never came. Families who'd bought gift cards weeks before the closure found them worthless, and some filed small claims court cases to try to get money back. A local meat vendor filed its own lawsuit over unpaid invoices exceeding $100,000. Whatever affection the town had for Sickles as an institution, the closure left a specific kind of resentment behind, the kind that doesn't clear on its own.

Six Months, Then Silence Again

In 2025, a bankruptcy court approved the sale of the Sickles property and inventory to three Rumson residents, Dennis Devine, Jennifer Karp, and Timothy McCooey, who had been longtime customers rather than industry operators. They reopened the site as 1663 Market, with a nursery launching first and the full market following that summer. Devine framed the purchase as protecting the property from a redevelopment that would have erased the market altogether, telling a reporter, "We were not just customers, our families shopped here every day."

The new owners tried to do right by the old wound. Outstanding Sickles gift cards would be honored, they said, redeemable in 20 percent increments per purchase given how large the total outstanding balance was. A handful of former Sickles staff came back. The pitch was ambitious: a five-year plan to become, in Devine's words, "the premier food and garden destination on the Jersey Shore," with pumpkin painting, yoga classes, cooking workshops, and a holiday market called The Light of Little Silver benefiting the Little Silver PTO.

None of it had enough runway. 1663 Market closed for good on January 18, 2026, about six months after it opened. The owners' statement pointed to "the lack of sustained community support, along with lingering negativity rooted in past failures that were not ours." Whether or not that reads as fair, it's a useful admission. A five-year vision doesn't get five years if the first six months can't clear the debt of someone else's mistakes.

Where Things Actually Stand on Harrison Avenue

Here is the part that tends to get scrambled in conversation at the train station or in the Nextdoor comments. The property at 1 Harrison Avenue is privately owned, and as of late January 2026, Mayor Bob Neff confirmed there was no application before the borough to build housing on it, even though part of the site is zoned residential. Separately, and this distinction matters, the borough was pursuing Green Acres funding for improvements to the adjacent, town-owned Sickles Park, including an educational arboretum and raised community garden beds. Neff went out of his way to tell Patch that the park proposal "has nothing to do with the 1663 Market (former Sickles) properties." Two different pieces of land, two different stories, one shared corner.

What did move was the equipment. A.J. Willner Auctions ran two online sales liquidating the market's commercial kitchen gear, retail fixtures, and garden center assets, everything down to the greenhouses out front and, according to the listing, a cow. The second auction closed on March 26, 2026. Through that most recent reporting, no new tenant had been announced for the storefront itself.

A rough timeline of the last two years:

A Few Blocks Away, a Different Kind of Patience

While that saga played out, Little Silver quietly ended a much longer wait. The borough had issued its only liquor consumption license close to a decade earlier, and nobody had used it for a restaurant until Locale opened its doors at 51 Oceanport Avenue, on the former Pix Shoes site between the NJ Transit lot and Brave New World Surf and Snow.

The history behind that license is its own small piece of local trivia. A 1976 push for a liquor license in Little Silver went nowhere. In 1981, residents voted it down 2 to 1. It took until a November 2015 referendum for voters to reverse course, which Mayor Neff summed up simply: "They said, Little Silver, go ahead and issue a license. So, we did that."

Even after that vote, it took local builders Matthew and Michael Kelly, who had held the license through their construction firm for years, nearly a decade of continued advocacy before ground actually broke on a restaurant. They partnered with the Ottaiano family, established Italian restaurateurs, to open Locale as a family-style Italian restaurant and bar. It has since become one of the more talked-about tables in town, drawing both praise for its atmosphere and some grumbling in reviews about noise and pricing on busier nights, the kind of split reaction that usually means a place is actually full.

The Difference Between the Two Stories

Line these up next to each other and the contrast isn't about food or real estate at all. It's about what each business asked the town to do on day one.

1663 Market asked for immediate belief. It opened just over a year after a bankruptcy that had left real financial wounds in the community, then closed after six months, well before the five-year vision it had asked people to trust ever had a season to prove itself. That's not a knock on the owners' intentions. It's just a hard trade to make.

Locale asked for nothing on day one, because the asking had already happened, slowly, over roughly ten years of licensing work most residents never saw. By the time the doors opened, there was no debt to explain and no gift card policy to apologize for. There was just a restaurant, ready to be judged on its own terms.

What This Means If You're Watching Harrison Avenue

If you're one of the people still checking Patch or the borough's public notices page for news on 1 Harrison Avenue, the honest answer, based on everything reported through this spring, is that nothing was imminent. No redevelopment application was pending, the auctions had closed out the equipment, and the storefront sat as private property with an uncertain next chapter. The more interesting question isn't when something reopens there. It's what kind of owner earns the right to try.

Little Silver has now watched one legacy business ask for trust it hadn't rebuilt yet, and one new business earn a shot by putting in years of unglamorous work first. Keep that in mind the next time either story updates.

If you're the type who likes to know what's actually happening on your own streets, not just what shows up in a listing photo, I'm always around for that conversation. Reach out to Katherine Raftery any time. Let's Connect.