Walk down Haddon Avenue on a Friday night and you'll see the same ritual that's defined Collingswood dining for decades: parties of four walking in with a bottle of red under one arm, servers uncorking it tableside without a second thought. That ritual is not going anywhere this November, no matter how the borough votes.
Collingswood's Board of Commissioners passed a resolution on August 19 sending a question to voters this fall: should the borough finally end a prohibition on alcohol sales that traces back to its Quaker founding in the 19th century. It's the kind of headline that invites an easy but wrong conclusion, that a "yes" vote turns Haddon Avenue into a strip of full bars overnight. The actual mechanics of the vote say otherwise, and the math behind it is worth understanding before anyone assumes their favorite BYOB spot is about to change.
The Ballot Math Nobody's Doing
New Jersey caps liquor consumption licenses at one per 3,000 residents. Collingswood's population sits at roughly 14,400, which means even a decisive "yes" vote unlocks at most three consumption licenses for restaurants and bars, plus one separate distribution license for a liquor store. That's it. Four licenses, total, for a downtown restaurant scene that has drawn regional recognition and James Beard-nominated chefs to a strip of storefronts that runs several blocks deep.
Here's what's actually going on the ballot:
- A yes-or-no question on whether Collingswood should allow on-premises alcohol sales at bars and restaurants, Monday through Saturday
- A borough that would then be eligible for three restaurant/bar consumption licenses and one off-premises liquor store license
- A signature threshold already cleared: organizers submitted more than 1,100 signatures, and the borough verified 1,019 as valid, just eight over the minimum required
- An August 21 deadline the commissioners had to hit to get the question certified in time for the county clerk
Even the borough's own petition math tells the real story. Getting the question in front of voters took a genuine grassroots push. Winning the vote is only the first of several steps that follow.
The Mayor Already Answered the Question Everyone's Asking
Mayor Daniela Solano-Ward addressed the confusion directly at the August 19 meeting, telling residents that BYOB dining will remain legal in Collingswood regardless of how the vote turns out. That single clarification does more to explain what this referendum is and isn't than any amount of speculation about Haddon Avenue's future. A "yes" vote adds a small number of licenses to a scarce pool. It doesn't touch the right of any restaurant, licensed or not, to let customers bring their own bottle.
That distinction matters because it reframes what's actually being decided. This isn't a referendum on Collingswood's dining culture. It's a referendum on whether four scarce, expensive licenses get created and, if so, who gets to bid on them. Borough administrator Cassandra Duffey has already flagged the harder question waiting on the other side of a "yes" vote, whether those licenses go to a public bidding process open to outside buyers or get steered toward the independently owned restaurants that built the corridor's identity in the first place.
What Haddon Heights Just Learned the Hard Way
Collingswood doesn't have to guess how this plays out. A few miles down the White Horse Pike, Haddon Heights already ran this exact experiment. Voters there ended a roughly 120-year dry-town ban back in 2024. The borough then tried to auction its first retail liquor license with a $400,000 minimum bid and found no buyers. It's back at auction this month, September 15, with the minimum reserve cut to $200,000, still a steep price for an independent restaurant to absorb on top of build-out costs and rising food costs.
That's the preview worth paying attention to if you live in Collingswood and wonder what a "yes" vote means for the restaurant you already love. A license, if Collingswood creates one, becomes a six-figure asset that most existing Haddon Avenue restaurants would have to compete for against deeper-pocketed bidders from outside town. It's also worth noting that Collingswood isn't the only dry town in the county still working through this. Audubon Park and Haddonfield remain dry as well, part of a small cluster of Camden County boroughs where BYOB culture became the default not by choice but by ordinance.
Moorestown's Ten-Year Wait
If Haddon Heights is the cautionary tale about price, Moorestown is the cautionary tale about time. Moorestown voters approved their own referendum ending prohibition back in 2011. The measure sparked immediate controversy and legal challenges, and it took more than a decade before the township issued its first license, which went to the liquor store Super Buy Rite inside the Moorestown Mall. Outside the mall, there are still no liquor sales in Moorestown today.
More than a decade is a long runway between a "yes" vote and an actual bottle on an actual shelf. Nothing about Collingswood's situation guarantees a faster timeline. The referendum, if it passes, is the start of a process, not the end of one, and it's one that will likely involve its own disputes over who gets first crack at a license that's suddenly worth six figures.
A Pizza Shop That Didn't Wait for Any of This
While the borough sorts out its ballot question, one of Haddon Avenue's most anticipated openings is arriving on a completely separate timeline, and it says something about how the corridor actually plans around scarcity like this. Pizzeria Cusumano, at 872 Haddon Ave, is set to open this October after five years of development. Sal Cusumano, a third-generation pizzaiolo whose family runs My Angelo's in Berlin and Voorhees, first teased the concept back in September 2021. He spent the years since working with Philadelphia pizza consultant Gregorio Fierro, hired in 2017, to build a dough formulation from scratch, sourcing an imported oven and a specialized mixer that ran roughly $12,000, all in service of a single-focus menu built around Detroit and Roman-style square pies rather than a full Italian restaurant spread.
That's a business built entirely around BYOB norms, not around the possibility of a liquor license someday landing in its lap. It's also opening into a corridor under real financial pressure. Local operators along Haddon Avenue have described a summer of rising labor, ingredient, and packaging costs combined with softer weekday evening traffic, pressure severe enough that it recently pushed Kitchen Consigliere into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Against that backdrop, a restaurant betting on differentiation rather than volume, and building for the BYOB reality that will still exist in November regardless of the vote, looks less like an outlier and more like the smart read of the room.
Collingswood's only current exception to the dry-town rule, the Raccoon Taproom, operates under a limited brewery license from Swedesboro Brewing Co., made possible by a 2015 ordinance carving out room for microbreweries specifically. It's one business, one license type, in a town of dozens of restaurants. Whatever November's vote does or doesn't add to that count, the corridor's day-to-day character, the BYOB tradition that's shaped Haddon Avenue's dining scene for a century, isn't the thing actually up for a vote.
If you already call this corridor home, or you're weighing what a neighborhood like Collingswood is worth watching for reasons that have nothing to do with a for-sale sign, Dream Home by Steven keeps a close eye on exactly this kind of local detail. Whenever you're curious what any of it means for your own property, Request a Free Market Valuation and we'll walk through it together.
