On a Saturday morning on Franklin Avenue, the line at the pork store starts before nine. People wait for sopressata sliced to order, for fresh mozzarella still warm, for the bread that will sit on the table at dinner. The Italians in Nutley have been keeping this rhythm for more than a century, and the town has shaped itself around it. This is one of the most Italian places in America, and it wears the distinction quietly.
The Place
Nutley is a township in Essex County, New Jersey, a little under three square miles wedged between Belleville to the south and Bloomfield to the west, with the Passaic River along its eastern edge. It was incorporated as Franklin Township in 1874 and reincorporated as a town in 1902, taking township status again in 1981.
It is dense and walkable in the old way, a place of two-family houses, corner churches, and a commercial spine on Franklin Avenue that still belongs to butchers and bakers more than to chains. Today around 30,700 people live here.
What sets Nutley apart is not its size but its ancestry. At the 2000 census, 36 percent of residents claimed Italian descent, the twelfth-highest share of any municipality in the United States. More recent estimates put the figure higher still.
How It Became Italian
Before Nutley was an Italian town it was a quarry town, and that is where the two stories meet.
The brownstone years
The land that is now Glotzbach Field, in the Avondale section, held one of the largest brownstone quarries in the eastern United States. The King Quarry Company bought the farm there in 1810 and worked the stone hard through the nineteenth century. Nutley brownstone went into New York City Hall and into the harbour fortifications at Fort Lafayette.
Quarry work was brutal, low-paid, and constant, which is to say it was the kind of work that drew immigrants. By the late 1800s the men cutting and hauling the stone in Avondale were largely Italian and Irish, many of them living in company housing near the pits.
This is the first layer of Italian Nutley: labourers who came for the stone, saved, and bought small houses within walking distance of the work. The quarries faded as concrete and steel replaced brownstone, but the families stayed.
The First Ward connection
The larger wave came from a few miles south, in Newark. Italians began settling Newark’s First Ward in the 1880s, and by the turn of the century it was one of the great Little Italys of America. Around Seventh and Eighth Avenues the enclave packed tens of thousands of people into less than a square mile, lined with mutual-aid societies, fish markets, and groceries.
The First Ward did not fade. It was demolished. Beginning in the 1950s, urban renewal cleared block after block of the old neighbourhood to make way for highways and public housing, scattering its families across the suburbs.
Nutley, just up the road and already Italian at its edges, was a natural landing place. Families who had grown up around Seventh Avenue, and others from Newark’s Ironbound and the “Down Neck” streets, moved north into Nutley’s two-families and never looked back. They brought their parishes, their feasts, and their recipes with them.
The move was short in miles but enormous in meaning. The First Ward had been crowded, poor, and entirely Italian, a place where the language of the street was Neapolitan and the church bells set the day. Nutley offered a yard, a driveway, and a measure of breathing room, without asking anyone to stop being Italian.
So the families recreated what they could. The two-family house became the new model of the old tenement: parents on one floor, married children or grandparents on the other, the kitchen as the centre of gravity. The Saturday shopping run, the Sunday gravy, the September feast, all of it survived the journey north.
Building the parish life
Faith organised the new arrivals as much as work did. Holy Family parish on Brookline Avenue was founded by Italian immigrants and grew into the spiritual centre of Italian Nutley, anchoring its calendar with an annual Italian festival that honours Maria Santissima Addolorata, Our Lady of Sorrows.
St Mary’s, a short walk away, served the wider Catholic population and tied Nutley’s Italians into a parish network that stretched south into Belleville. The line between the two towns blurred entirely for Italian families, who often had cousins on both sides of it, and the parishes later became formally linked, Holy Family serving both Nutley and Belleville.
The same blurring ran west into Bloomfield, another Essex County town with deep Italian roots and its own Sons of Italy lodges. For practical purposes the Italians of Nutley, Belleville, and Bloomfield formed a single extended community, intermarrying, attending each other’s feasts, and shopping each other’s avenues. Genealogists who work the area have a saying that in old Belleville and Nutley, everyone is cousins.
By the second half of the twentieth century the pattern was set. Nutley was a place where you could be born at one parish, marry at another, and eat at the same pork store your grandparents had, all within a mile.
The Landmarks
Holy Family Church, 28 Brookline Avenue. Founded by Italian immigrants a century ago, this is the heart of Catholic Nutley. Its September Italian festival, with the procession for Our Lady of Sorrows, is the closest the town comes to a feast in the old First Ward style.
A & S Italian Pork Store, 152 Franklin Avenue. A working pork store of the kind that has all but vanished from American main streets. People come for the sopressata and the chicken cutlet sandwiches, and for the simple fact that the counter still does things the slow way.
Violante’s, 105 Franklin Avenue. A family butcher, bakery, deli, and caterer rolled into one, with prime cuts at the counter and bread baked by Vitiello’s of Nutley out the back. It is the sort of place where the order is half groceries and half conversation.
Mamma Vittoria, 160 Franklin Avenue. A restaurant and banquet hall that has hosted decades of Nutley christenings, communions, and wedding receptions. For many local families the milestones of life were marked in its dining rooms.
Glotzbach Field, Avondale. Once the floor of one of the East Coast’s biggest brownstone quarries, now a town ballfield. The Italian and Irish quarrymen who worked here were the first generation of immigrant Nutley, and the stone they cut still stands in lower Manhattan.
Annie Oakley’s house, 304 Grant Avenue. The sharpshooter bought the lot in 1892 and lived here for twelve years, at the height of her fame. Her first Nutley appearance came in March 1894 at the Nutley Amateur Circus, a fundraiser for a local branch of Clara Barton’s Red Cross.
86 Elm Place. Martha Stewart, born Martha Kostyra to a Polish-American family, grew up in this tidy three-bedroom house. Her childhood among Nutley’s gardens and kitchens, many of them Italian, became the raw material for the magazine empire she built.
Where They Came From
Nutley’s Italians came overwhelmingly from the Italian south, the Mezzogiorno. The great migration that filled Newark’s First Ward, and through it Nutley, drew from Campania around Naples, from Calabria and Basilicata, from Sicily and the Abruzzo.
These were the regions that sent millions of Italians to America between 1880 and 1924: farming and fishing families pushed out by poverty, heavy taxation, and crowded land. They left for work and they followed each other, with one paesano sponsoring the next until whole villages had cousins on the same Newark block.
That chain is why Nutley feels so cohesively southern Italian rather than generically Italian. The food, the dialect words that survive in older households, and the saints honoured at the September feast all trace back to specific towns south of Rome.
Newark, and through it Nutley, became one of the most important Italian destinations in the country. At the turn of the twentieth century Newark held one of the five largest Italian populations of any American city, and the families who built that community are the direct ancestors of the people lining up on Franklin Avenue today.
Nutley Today
Nutley remains strikingly Italian, but it is no longer only Italian, and that is the honest picture. The township is now roughly 63 percent white and around 13 percent Asian, with growing Hispanic and other communities reshaping the school rolls. The town’s public schools, long a point of local pride, draw families precisely because the place has stayed steady.
The old institutions hold. Franklin Avenue still runs on pork stores, bakeries, and family restaurants rather than national brands, and the Holy Family festival still fills the streets each September. For families who left the First Ward two generations ago, Nutley is the place where the old neighbourhood, the one the bulldozers took, was quietly rebuilt.
Younger Italian-Americans here are more likely to be third or fourth generation, college-educated, and spread across professions their quarrymen ancestors never imagined. But many still come home on Saturdays for the bread, and that small loyalty, repeated week after week, is what keeps the town what it is. It is the same instinct that holds Italian neighbourhoods together in Hoboken and Wayne, and across the river in Staten Island and Bensonhurst.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Nutley, New Jersey?
The Italians in Nutley arrived in two waves: brownstone quarry workers in the late 1800s who settled the Avondale section, and a much larger group displaced from Newark’s First Ward when urban renewal demolished that Little Italy beginning in the 1950s. Nearby and already partly Italian, Nutley absorbed those families.
What percentage of Nutley is Italian?
At the 2000 census, 36 percent of Nutley residents claimed Italian ancestry, the twelfth-highest share of any municipality in the United States and among the highest in New Jersey. More recent estimates put the figure even higher, making Italians in Nutley a clear plurality.
Where did Nutley’s Italian families come from in Italy?
Overwhelmingly from southern Italy, the Mezzogiorno. The chain migration that filled Newark’s First Ward and then Nutley drew from Campania, Calabria, Basilicata, Sicily, and the Abruzzo, with families often sponsoring relatives from the same village.
What is the connection between Nutley and Newark’s First Ward?
Newark’s First Ward was one of America’s largest Little Italys until urban renewal demolished it from the 1950s onward. Many displaced Italian families moved a few miles north to Nutley, bringing their parishes, feasts, and food traditions with them.
What Italian food is Nutley known for?
Franklin Avenue is the centre of it, with old-style pork stores like A & S, butcher-bakeries like Violante’s, and restaurants like Mamma Vittoria. The Saturday ritual of buying fresh mozzarella, cured meats, and bread is still central to Italian life in Nutley.
Did any famous people grow up in Nutley?
Yes. Annie Oakley lived at 304 Grant Avenue for twelve years from 1892, and Martha Stewart grew up at 86 Elm Place. Senator Frank Lautenberg was also a Nutley figure. The town’s Italian-American character formed the backdrop to all of these lives.
If your family’s story passed through Nutley, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Campania to Newark’s First Ward, to a two-family house off Franklin Avenue, to wherever you are now.