On a quiet circle where Knickerbocker Road meets Madison Avenue, a granite obelisk rises sixty-six feet into the Bergen County sky. It marks the edge of what was once an army camp, and the start of something else: a suburb that the Italians in Cresskill, New Jersey, would help build into one of the most settled and quietly prosperous towns in the county. The story runs from the tenements of Hudson County to maple-lined streets, from a borough of a few thousand to a place where Italian remains the single largest ancestry on record.
The Place
Cresskill is a small borough, just 2.07 square miles, tucked into the eastern flank of Bergen County between Tenafly, Demarest, Dumont, Bergenfield and Alpine. It was incorporated on 8 May 1894, carved out of Palisades Township during the wave of municipal splintering that locals later nicknamed “Boroughitis,” when 26 new boroughs were formed in Bergen County in that single year.
The name is older than the town. “Cress” comes from the watercress that grew in the local streams, and “kill” is the old Dutch word for a creek, a relic of the land’s colonial-era settlers. Before any of them, the ground belonged to the Munsee-Delaware.
Today it is a town of well-kept homes, low crime and high real estate prices, a commuter suburb roughly twenty minutes from the George Washington Bridge. It is also, in its bones, an Italian-American town.
How It Became Italian
An army camp, then a suburb
To understand Cresskill, you have to understand Camp Merritt. During the First World War the U.S. Army built a vast embarkation camp here, Camp Merritt, more than 770 acres sprawling across what is now Cresskill, Dumont, Tenafly, Demarest and Bergenfield. From its construction in September 1917 until it was decommissioned in 1919, more than a million American soldiers passed through Camp Merritt on their way to the troopships and the war in Europe.
When the camp closed, the land was sold off and slowly absorbed into the suburban grid. Streets were laid, lots were sold, and Craftsman houses went up through the 1920s. The borough that had counted just over two thousand residents in 1940 grew to 3,535 by 1950, and kept climbing. The framework for a postwar suburb was already in place.
The move out of Hudson County
The Italians who filled those new streets did not, for the most part, come straight from Italy. They came from the dense Italian quarters of Hudson County a few miles south: the Little Italys of Hoboken, the crowded blocks of Jersey City and the wards along the Hudson where their parents and grandparents had landed a generation earlier. The story of the Italian community in Hoboken is in many ways the prologue to Cresskill’s.
The pattern was a familiar one across northern New Jersey. As the postwar economy lifted second- and third-generation Italian-American families into the middle class, they did what so many wanted to do: they left the apartments and the shared stoops for a house with a yard. The completion of the George Washington Bridge in 1931 had stitched Bergen County to Manhattan and to the working world, and the GI Bill put suburban ownership within reach of returning veterans.
Building a community around the parish
The institution that anchored that arriving population was the church. St. Therese of Lisieux on Monroe Avenue had broken ground in May 1924, and the first Mass was celebrated on 30 September that year. When the young French saint was canonised only months later, the borough’s church became, very likely, one of the first in the world named for her. It was run by the Carmelites, with Father Fidelis Paulding as its first pastor.
As Bergen County filled up in the late 1940s and early 1950s, St. Therese filled with it. The parish grew from a small congregation into a large and busy one, and in 1956 it opened a parish school, staffed by the Felician Sisters, with classrooms crowded from the first day. For Italian-American families raising children in a new town, the parish and its school were the centre of gravity, a place to be baptised, married, schooled and buried among neighbours.
Settling in for good
By the second half of the twentieth century, the children of those Hudson County families were Cresskill natives, raising their own children on the same streets. The Italian surnames on the church rolls, the school registers and the borough’s businesses became part of the town’s permanent character. When the census recorded the borough’s ancestry, Italian came out on top, a larger share than Irish, German or Polish, and well above the New Jersey state average.
The Landmarks
Camp Merritt Memorial Monument, intersection of Knickerbocker Road and Madison Avenue. A 66-foot obelisk of Stony Creek granite, modelled on the Washington Monument, dedicated on Memorial Day, 30 May 1924. General John “Black Jack” Pershing gave the address to a crowd estimated at 20,000. It honours the 578 people who died at Camp Merritt, most of them in the 1918 influenza epidemic, and it stands as the literal centre of the suburb that grew on the camp’s old land.
St. Therese of Lisieux Church, 120 Monroe Avenue. The Carmelite parish at the heart of Catholic Cresskill, dedicated in June 1925 to the newly canonised “Little Flower.” Its parish school, opened in 1956 under the Felician Sisters, educated generations of the town’s Italian-American children. For many local families it remains the place where the milestones of life are still marked.
Alanza Traditional Italian, 1 Union Avenue. A neighbourhood Italian restaurant on the borough’s main commercial corner, the kind of unshowy, family-style table that Italian-American suburbs are built around. It sits on Union Avenue, Cresskill’s small downtown spine of shops, delis and storefronts.
Union Avenue downtown. The borough’s commercial heart, a short, walkable stretch of family businesses, delis and restaurants. It is the everyday Cresskill, where the pizza counter, the deli case and the corner table do the quiet work of holding a community together.
Camp Merritt’s recycled blocks. When the army camp was torn down, many of the timber structures that had served the soldiers were salvaged and reused, rebuilt into homes and shops across the new borough. To walk parts of Cresskill is, in a small way, to walk through the bones of a vanished WWI camp.
The borough’s tree-lined residential streets. Cresskill is known for its maple-lined streets and well-kept houses, the physical reward at the end of the Hudson-to-Bergen journey. These quiet blocks, more than any single building, are the landmark: they are the thing the move out of the city was always for.
Where They Came From
The deeper origins of Cresskill’s Italian families lie in the great wave of Italian emigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when millions left the Mezzogiorno, the regions of southern Italy, along with Sicily, for the industrial cities of the American Northeast. They came for work in manufacturing, construction and the trades, and they came through chain migration, one family member sending for the next.
In New Jersey, that wave settled first in the cities: Newark, Jersey City, Hoboken and the mill towns. Bergen County, just to the north, became the place those urban Italian communities expanded into once they had the means. It is no accident that Italian is the most commonly reported first ancestry in all of Bergen County. Cresskill is one small, concentrated expression of a county-wide story.
The same engine that built Cresskill built its Italian-American neighbours across the region. The communities of Italian Nutley and of Italian Wayne are siblings to it, each the suburban landing place of families who had first put down roots in New Jersey’s older urban quarters.
Cresskill Today
Cresskill in the 2020s is a layered place. The 2020 census counted 9,155 residents, up 6.8 percent from a decade earlier. Italian is still the largest single ancestry recorded in the borough, at roughly 18.9 percent, a figure that comfortably tops the next groups and the state average alike.
But the town has changed around that Italian core. The same census recorded the borough as about 58 percent non-Hispanic White and about 31 percent Asian, the result of a substantial and well-established Korean-American presence that has reshaped Cresskill and its neighbouring towns. The Korean community of Cresskill is a distinct story from this one, centred on different institutions and a different and more recent migration, even as the two communities share the same streets and schools.
What endures is the shape the Italian families gave the place: the parish and its school, the family restaurants on Union Avenue, the quiet streets of single-family homes that were the whole point of leaving Hudson County. Cresskill is no longer only Italian, and never was only anything. But its modern character as a settled, family-centred Bergen County suburb was largely written by the people who came up from the city and decided to stay.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there really many Italians in Cresskill, New Jersey?
Yes. Italian is the single largest ancestry recorded in the borough, at roughly 18.9 percent of residents, ahead of Irish, German and Polish, and above the New Jersey state average. The Italians in Cresskill, New Jersey, have been the town’s defining ethnic group for generations.
Where did Cresskill’s Italian families originally come from?
Most descend from the great wave of southern Italian and Sicilian emigration of the early twentieth century, which first settled in cities like Hoboken, Jersey City and Newark. They moved to Cresskill and other Bergen County suburbs in the postwar decades, especially the 1940s through the 1960s.
What is the main Italian-American church in Cresskill?
St. Therese of Lisieux on Monroe Avenue, a Carmelite parish dedicated in 1925 and likely one of the first churches anywhere named for the saint. Its parish school opened in 1956 under the Felician Sisters and educated generations of local children.
What is the Camp Merritt monument in Cresskill?
It is a 66-foot granite obelisk at the junction of Knickerbocker Road and Madison Avenue, dedicated in 1924 to the soldiers of the WWI Camp Merritt embarkation camp, especially the 578 who died there. The suburb that the Italians in Cresskill, New Jersey, helped build grew directly on the old camp’s land.
Is Cresskill an affluent town?
Yes. Cresskill is a small, low-crime Bergen County borough about twenty minutes from the George Washington Bridge, known for well-kept maple-lined streets and high real estate prices. It is one of the more comfortable suburbs in an already prosperous county.
How is the Italian community different from the Korean community in Cresskill?
They are two separate stories. The Italian community is older, rooted in postwar migration from Hudson County and centred on parishes like St. Therese. The Korean community is more recent and now makes up a large share of the borough’s population, with its own institutions in Cresskill and nearby towns such as Closter and Tenafly.
If your family’s story passed through Cresskill, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the southern Italian villages your great-grandparents left, to the Hudson County tenements, to a maple-lined street in Bergen County, to wherever you are now.