For as long as most residents can remember, Oceanport's calendar ran on two separate clocks. One belonged to Monmouth Park, which fills the borough with strangers for a handful of big weekends and then goes quiet again. The other belonged to Fort Monmouth, the fenced Army post that sat mostly empty for more than a decade while plans for its future came and went. The two never overlapped. You could set your summer by the track and ignore the fort entirely.
This year they landed on the same calendar. In the same six weeks that Monmouth Park ran its biggest weekend of the season, crews a mile away finished topping off the first buildings of Netflix's production studio, and a charcuterie shop opened a diner to feed the workers building it. That overlap, not any single ribbon-cutting, is the story of Oceanport's summer.
The Beam That Went Up In June
On June 23, 2026, workers installed the final structural beam on Stages 3 and 4 at Netflix Studios Fort Monmouth, the topping-off moment that marks the skeleton of the first soundstages as complete. That's roughly six weeks before this writing, which means if you've driven past the fort recently and noticed steel where there used to be nothing, you weren't imagining it.
The scale is worth sitting with. Netflix is putting $1 billion into transforming the former 292-acre Army post into a production campus with 12 soundstages totaling nearly 500,000 square feet. Over the past year, crews have torn down 85 former military buildings to clear the site, according to Jersey Digs, and Netflix says the project has diverted about 80 percent of its construction waste, more than 55,000 tons of material, from landfills through recycling.
Here's the detail locals tend to miss: the part that's actually rising right now sits entirely on the Oceanport side.
| Oceanport side | Eatontown side | |
|---|---|---|
| Footprint | The fort's 29-acre McAfee Zone | Remaining project acreage |
| Soundstages | First four, each 22,000 square feet | Remaining eight |
| Status as of August 2026 | Structural beams topped off June 23 | Construction slated to begin later this year |
| Projected online | 2027 | Follows Oceanport's phase |
The fort straddles both towns, but the buildings you can see going up this summer, the ones with the topped-off beams, belong to Oceanport's half of the site. Eatontown's eight remaining soundstages haven't broken ground yet.
Why A Charcuterie Shop Opened A Diner Instead
Long before a single camera rolls, the construction economy has already reshaped a storefront on East Main Street. Olive & Oak, a charcuterie and catering business that launched in 2020 and built its name on grazing tables and event catering, opened its first-ever café this spring in Oceanport. Owner Felicia Aschettino said in a video announcing the concept that the storefront was designed to serve two audiences: the construction crews building the studio right now, who need somewhere quick to grab food before or after a shift, and later, once the soundstages open, the actors and production staff who'll need the same thing.
That's the part worth pausing on. A local business owner made a real estate and staffing decision based on a studio that hasn't opened yet, betting on a construction workforce that exists today and a production workforce that doesn't exist for another year. The studio's economic footprint on Oceanport arrived before its cultural one did.
Haskell Weekend Already Happened. Here's What It Left Behind.
Monmouth Park's 2026 meet is a 50-day season running May 9 through September 13, with 36 total stakes races worth $5.85 million in purses. The headline card landed on July 18, when the $1 million Grade 1 Haskell Stakes anchored a program that also included the $500,000 Molly Pitcher, the $500,000 United Nations, and three other stakes, per the Daily Racing Form.
The day before, on July 17, the track ran what the borough calls Book'Em Danno Day, when Oceanport residents get free admission ahead of the Haskell crowds. It's a small gesture, but it's the kind of thing that only exists because the track and the town share an address, not just a zip code. A month earlier, on Father's Day, the track drew more than 30,000 visitors, according to the mayor's own summer update on the borough's website.
That kind of foot traffic doesn't stay inside the grandstand. It spills into the restaurant row that's grown up along the fort's edge, where newer names like Apéro Steakhouse and dockside spot The Wharf now sit alongside longer-running places like Locale and The Squire. Apéro in particular has drawn attention as one of the more talked-about new openings in the area, a modern American steakhouse with a sushi bar that didn't exist in this cluster a few years ago.
"It has also been another exciting season at Monmouth Park," Oceanport's mayor wrote in the borough's summer update, calling the track "one of Oceanport's greatest attractions."
A Town Marking 250 Years While Building Its Next One
The fort's new chapter carries an odd symmetry. Fort Monmouth spent decades as a center of American military innovation, including major work on radar and communications technology. Its next act, if the studio opens as planned, will be a place where television and film get made a short drive from the beach.
Oceanport is leaning into that sense of history this year. The borough is marking the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding with a full slate of programming, and on July 4, 2026, that included burying a new community time capsule beside the original one from the country's Bicentennial in 1976. The project was conceived and completed as an Eagle Scout project by Zachary Fichter, sponsored by the Oceanport Historical Committee. Both capsules are set to be opened together in 2076, which means whatever's buried in the ground right now is meant for people who haven't been born yet. The borough has also flagged a Liberty Tree planting and a monument dedication tied to the town's Revolutionary War history as part of the same anniversary programming, still to come later this year.
It's a strange but fitting bookend. A town that's spending the year looking back a quarter of a millennium is also watching its biggest employer-in-waiting rise out of ground that was, until recently, a relic of a very different American era.
What's Left On The Calendar
The rest of Oceanport's summer runs on the smaller, steadier rhythms that don't make headlines but fill the actual weeks. The borough's Music in the Park series continues at Old Wharf Park, with the band Sundries playing in June and The Kicks scheduled for August 27. The town's annual Summer's End Festival, the traditional close to the season, is still ahead as well.
None of these individually would be worth a headline. Together, they're the texture of a town that's still doing the ordinary summer things it has always done, while a few hundred yards away the ordinary stops applying. The Haskell still runs every July. The Music in the Park series still plays every summer. But this year, both of those familiar rhythms are happening in the shadow of cranes that weren't there before, on a site that spent over a decade being a promise rather than a place.
That's the actual story of Oceanport this summer. Not a single opening or a single event, but the moment two clocks that never used to sync up finally landed on the same page.
If you're watching Oceanport change and wondering what it means for your own address, The Mallan Group knows this stretch of Monmouth County block by block. Get your free home valuation and find out where your property stands as the fort's next chapter takes shape.
