Demarest, NJWindow Installation & Glass Repair
Demarest is deep Northern Valley — a two-square-mile borough of just under 5,000 people bordered by Cresskill, Closter, Haworth, Dumont, and Alpine, about twenty minutes northeast of our Garfield shop. Nearly nine in ten of its roughly 1,750 housing units are owner-occupied and some 97% are single-family detached; there is no highway, no passenger train, and no real downtown — a deli and a few storefronts on Park Street across from the old depot stand in for one. Every Demarest call we take is residential, and the owners tend to hold their houses for decades.
The stock splits our work in two. The core is mid-century — median build year 1964 — so split-levels and ranches with openings now past sixty generate steady whole-house replacement and fogged-glass calls. Layered over that is a genuine teardown wave: nearly a quarter of the housing went up after 2000, and those rebuilds order the other half of our Demarest tickets — oversized casements, big fixed-picture units, frameless showers, and mirror walls in new primary baths.
What We Work On in Demarest
Median construction year is 1964, with about 15% of homes predating 1940 — older colonials scattered along County Road and Piermont Road near the Art School at Old Church, the nonprofit that rescued a 19th-century church building in 1974 — and the balance postwar single-family plus a heavy run of 2000s-2010s teardown rebuilds. County Route 501 (County Road) and CR 505 (Knickerbocker Road, past Northern Valley Regional High School) are the through streets. The Duck Pond, a widened section of the Tenakill Brook, marks the heart of town along County Road, and the brook slips under Hardenburgh Avenue through an 1875 stone bridge with its own National Register listing. The 1872 railroad depot at 38 Park Street — Romanesque Revival, designed by J. Cleaveland Cady, Register-listed in 2004 — is now the senior center and home of the local historical society; the Northern Branch tracks behind it sit dormant, with a proposal afoot to turn the corridor into the Northern Valley Greenway trail.
Common Demarest Jobs
- Whole-house replacement on 1950s-60s split-levels and ranches with original openings
- Sealed-unit swaps where first-round double-pane glass has fogged
- Oversized casement and fixed picture glass in 2010s teardown rebuilds
- Frameless shower enclosures and mirror walls in high-end bath remodels
- Basement hopper replacement on the Tenakill Brook blocks near Wakelee Field
Demarest has no historic district — its two Register listings, the Cady depot and the Hardenburgh Avenue bridge, are individual landmarks — so nothing about a window permit here triggers preservation review. The Building Department at 118 Serpentine Road keeps short small-borough hours (the counter closes at 3pm and shuts for a midday lunch break), so we phone before filing and submit under NJHIC #13VH13970900 whenever scope requires a permit. Police direct school-run traffic where County Road meets Hardenburgh Avenue, so we route Duck Pond-area deliveries around morning drop-off.
Demarest's one real exposure is water, not noise: no interstate or state highway touches the borough's roughly 27 miles of roads, and the old Northern Branch corridor through town no longer carries trains at all. The Tenakill Brook runs straight through the middle of town, and Ida in September 2021 showed what it can do — a stretch of county road in Demarest collapsed in that storm, trapping a car — while just downstream in Cresskill the Army Corps of Engineers is running a Tenakill Brook flood-risk feasibility study. On brook-adjacent blocks around Wakelee Field and the Nature Center we check basement frames for rot at the measure visit and usually recommend replacing water-damaged hoppers rather than patching them.
- Address
- Building Department, 118 Serpentine Road, Demarest, NJ 07627
- Phone
- (201) 768-3398
- Typical window-permit turnaround
- Counter open weekdays 8am-3pm with a midday lunch closure — call ahead; allow about a week for a standard window permit
We pull the permit directly under NJHIC #13VH13970900 — homeowner does not file or pay the township separately.
Neighborhoods we serve in Demarest
ZIP codes: 07627
Services
Demarest Window FAQ
Demarest is quiet — is soundproof or laminated glass worth paying for here?
Usually not. No highway or state route crosses the borough, there's no passenger rail, and the Northern Branch tracks through town have sat out of service for years — the future being discussed for that corridor is a greenway trail, not trains. We'd rather see the budget go into low-E insulated glass and a tight installation. The exception is a bedroom directly on County Road, where drop-off traffic for County Road School starts early.
Our basement windows near the Tenakill Brook took water during Ida — repair or replace?
Once a wood or builder-grade frame has been submerged, rot works from the sill up and repair rarely holds. We pull the unit, inspect the rough opening, and set a new hopper with sealed glass — sized at the first visit, back from fabrication inside a week, and swapped in without disturbing the surrounding wall.
Do I need a permit from the borough to replace my windows?
Same-size, insert-style replacement is often exempt; a permit applies when the opening changes size or the project runs whole-house. Demarest's Building Department is at 118 Serpentine Road, (201) 768-3398. When a permit is needed we file it ourselves under our NJHIC registration and fold the inspection into the install schedule.