Jumping Point Park sits south of the Rumson-Sea Bright Bridge and is home to a playground, several picnic tables and the Capt. Joshua Huddy Leap Memorial. EMILY SCHOPFER
RUMSON – At a special meeting held by the Rumson Borough Council Aug. 25, the West Park/ Jumping Point Park Improvement Project and 2026 Roadway Improvement Program were both officially awarded contracts. Combined, the contracts total around $1.5 million and are expected to take less than a year to complete.
The projects were approved to go out to bid in July, and the winning bids for both projects came in below the borough engineer’s cost estimates. The borough council held a special meeting to give both projects a three-week head start, rather than wait for the regularly scheduled September meeting.
WEST PARK/ JUMPING POINT PARK
The new and improved Rumson-Sea Bright Bridge opened last summer. It replaced the 76-year-old bridge that has since been demolished. On the northern and southern sides of the western entrance to the bridge on Rumson Road sit West and Jumping Point Parks. Combined, the parks provide the borough with about 5.72 acres of open space, 2.85 acres on the north and 2.87 acres on the south.
Now that the bridge work is complete, Rumson’s borough engineer David Marks said “it’s just time” for the borough to improve the parks. “It is the right time because the park was out of commission for a while, we built the bridge, and now it’s been turned back over to us. Since most of the contractor’s activity within the park is complete, now is the right time for (the borough) to step in.”
The borough’s pending park improvements are separate from the contractual obligations associated with the Rumson-Sea Bright Bridge project and any bridge-related improvements made to the park by the county.
The goal for the parks is to keep them passive, Marks said, and a major part of the project will be replacing the existing playground on the south side of the bridge. The new playground will be in a “similar style” to the existing one, “just upgraded” from the 25- to 30-year-old equipment, according to Marks. This is a “local, neighborhood, community park,” he said.
Monmouth County completed work in and around the park during the bridge construction, Marks said, and the remainder of the project after the new playground will be “filling in some of the gaps where the county left us.”
Additional work will include replacing asphalt walkways, installing new picnic tables, benches, and bike racks, new water fountains and bottle-filling stations, and rehabilitating the Huddy Leap Monument. The park is located where Capt. Joshua Huddy, an American military officer and privateer, is rumored to have jumped into the Navesink River to escape capture by Loyalists during the Revolutionary War. A riverfront monument dedicated to this local lore is housed in the park.
Suburban Consulting Engineers Inc., which prepared the project plans and provided a cost estimate of approximately $670,000. The project was awarded to Precise Construction LLC of Woodbury for about $497,000, coming in nearly $175,000 below budget. The borough has used Precise Construction in the past for the Meadow Ridge Park improvements, as well as Piping Rock and Victory Park, Marks said.
In 2025, the borough requested the maximum match of $500,000 through the Monmouth County Open Space Grant to help fund what was then proposed to be an approximately $900,000 project. The borough ended up receiving a $361,817 grant, as reported by the TRT, July 30.
“This time of year is critical,” Marks said, given the weather-induced delays of the winter months. The new playground equipment is expected to arrive mid-to-late October. He said he hopes to “get the demolition done, get the playground installed, start getting irrigation installed, plantings, depending on the weather” done this fall. “Some of it might have to float to spring because of the weather, but we want to get the bulk of the work done now,” he said. Worst-case scenario, Marks said, is that the park is completed by the start of next summer.
2026 ROADWAY IMPROVEMENT PROGRAM
This project is the third of the planned Roadway Improvement Programs. In 2024, the program focused on replacing concrete curbs, sidewalks and driveway aprons, and milling and paving North Street, West Street and Bruce Place.
In 2025, a two-phase program focused on improvements to “Bellevue Avenue from West River Road to the southern terminus at Heathcliff Road,” according to the Rumson’s “Borough Projects & Improvement Plans” page on the borough website.
For 2026, the project will include Buttonwood Lane, Broadmoor Drive and Thornton Way. The borough awarded the project contract to L&L Paving of Farmingdale at the Aug. 25 special meeting. L&L Paving completed previous roadway projects within the borough, including the 2025 Roadway Improvement Project, “which went very well,” Marks said. He said the project was estimated to cost around $1.3 million and came in under budget at a $1.05 million contract to be funded locally.
“On those roads, it’s more than just milling and paving; there’s some drainage improvements, and there’s also some concrete curbing,” Marks said. He estimated this project would wrap up around Thanksgiving.
This article originally appeared in the September 10-16, 2026 print edition of The Two River Times.
