Wedding DJ at Upper Greenwood Lake Property Owners Association in Hewitt, NJ

The Space

The Upper Greenwood Lake Property Owners Association manages a private lake community in Hewitt built around a lake that did not exist until 1932, when West Milford Brook was dammed to create it. In the 1930s, the Mirror Holding Company purchased the surrounding land and began developing it, offering affordable lots to city dwellers looking for a retreat, and Dr. William Smadbeck, who also owned the New York Coliseum, sold individual lots for $97.50 each once the lake was finished.

What a couple books through the Association is not a single building so much as access to a private lake community: the clubhouse on Lakeshore Drive, which the Association owns and rents out to property owners, sits alongside an outdoor pavilion, a boat launch, and a beach, all clustered along the same stretch of shoreline. Upper Greenwood Lake should not be confused with the larger, better-known Greenwood Lake nearby, though a connecting stream links the two.

Capacity & Layout

Because the venue here is really a community and its shared facilities rather than one fixed room, capacity depends on which combination of clubhouse, pavilion, and beach a couple uses and how the day moves between them. The community itself spans roughly 2,100 properties, each carrying a deeded right to use the lake for swimming, boating, and fishing, which gives a sense of how much shared amenity space exists beyond just the clubhouse building.

A wedding built around the Association’s facilities can use the beach or lakeside pavilion for an outdoor ceremony and then move into the clubhouse for the reception, taking advantage of the fact that all three sit along the same short stretch of Lakeshore Drive rather than being spread across the property. That proximity keeps a wedding day compact even though the overall community itself covers a hillside of over 2,100 homes.

Amenities

The Association owns most of the waterfront around the lake, land known locally as the Parklands, and maintains it for use by all residents rather than letting it pass into private hands lot by lot. That means the lakefront views a couple gets on their wedding day are protected by the Association’s own ownership structure, not dependent on the goodwill of a single adjacent property owner.

Beyond the clubhouse itself, the Association maintains the outdoor pavilion, boat launch, and beach along Lakeshore Drive as standing community amenities, available as part of the same booking rather than requiring separate arrangements. Since the community converted many of its original summer cottages to year-round homes after World War II, the infrastructure here has had decades to mature well beyond a seasonal resort’s bare minimum.

Location & Getting There

The community sits atop a 1,135-foot hill, primarily in Passaic County with a portion reaching into Sussex County, a setting that puts real elevation and distance between the lake and the flatter roads most guests will be driving in from. It is a genuinely rural, residential lake community, not a commercial event corridor, so guests should expect a drive up and into the hills rather than a straightforward highway exit into a venue parking lot.

We’ve worked an event through the Association before, and the open water and surrounding hillside change how sound behaves outdoors: a ceremony or reception near the beach or pavilion carries differently across open water than it would in a closed room, so we angle speakers to project toward the guest seating rather than out across the lake, where the sound would otherwise just travel off into the open air and lose its punch by the back row.