On a Saturday morning at Corrado’s on Main Avenue, the line for fresh mozzarella curls past the olive bins and the trays of stuffed artichokes, and somewhere in it is a grandmother who left Newark’s First Ward sixty years ago. The Italians in Clifton are not a memory here. They are the people ahead of you in line, the names on the parish bulletins, the families who turned a Passaic County mill town into one of the most comfortably Italian-American places in New Jersey.
The Place
Clifton sits in Passaic County in the crook of the Passaic River, wedged between the old industrial cities of Paterson and Passaic and bordering the Essex County suburbs to the south. It was carved out of Acquackanonk Township and incorporated as a city by the New Jersey Legislature on April 26, 1917.
Today it is the state’s eleventh-largest municipality, with a population of 90,296 at the 2020 census. It is not a single downtown but a patchwork of distinct neighbourhoods: Botany Village, Lakeview, Athenia, Allwood, Delawanna, Richfield and Montclair Heights, each with its own character.
What holds it together is a particular kind of north Jersey middle-class comfort: tidy two-family homes, well-tended yards, parish carnivals and a food culture that runs deep.
How It Became Italian
Clifton’s Italians did not arrive in one wave. They came in two, and the second is the one that made the city what it is.
The mill town and its first immigrants
The first Italians came for work, the same reason everyone came to this corner of Passaic County. The mills did it. Botany Village, the oldest commercial district in Clifton, grew up around the Botany Worsted Mills, established in 1889, a wool and worsted operation that became one of the largest in the country and pulled in thousands of immigrant workers.
Italians, Germans, Poles, Eastern Europeans and others filled the tight blocks of row housing and walk-ups near the looms. The Botany district was the engine room of early Clifton, and its workforce was as mixed as any in industrial New Jersey.
By the early twentieth century, Clifton already had enough Catholics to need parishes of its own. St. Andrew the Apostle, on Mt. Prospect Avenue, was founded in 1909, when the surrounding area was still filling in. These early Italians were a minority among the mill hands, not yet the defining community they would later become, but they laid the groundwork: the first delis, the first social clubs, the first family names that would still be on Clifton mailboxes a century later.
The exodus from Newark and Paterson
The transformation came after the Second World War. A few miles south, Newark’s First Ward had been the largest Little Italy in the state, settled by Italian immigrants from the 1870s onward, its Seventh Avenue blocks packed with tens of thousands of people in less than a square mile.
Beginning in 1953, urban renewal tore it apart. The city and developers cleared the old neighbourhood to build the Christopher Columbus Homes housing project and to run Interstate 280 through it, scattering Italian-American families who had spent eighty years building the place.
Many of them did not go far. They moved out along the old streetcar and highway lines into Belleville, Nutley, Bloomfield and, crucially, north into Clifton. The same path carried families to neighbouring Lyndhurst as well, as Italian households across the region looked for room, yards and quieter streets.
Clifton offered exactly that. It was close enough to keep the old parishes, the old bakeries and the old aunts within Sunday-dinner range, but it had single-family and two-family homes, decent schools and a tax base built on the mills and on the businesses along Main and Lakeview avenues. The pattern echoed across north Jersey, in towns like Wayne and East Hanover, where the same generation of families put down comfortable suburban roots.
Building a parish life
As the population grew, so did the churches. St. Philip the Apostle, in the Athenia section, began humbly: the first Mass was celebrated on June 6, 1943, for fewer than a hundred people in a converted barn that served as the community house.
By Christmas Eve of 1953, eleven hundred people crowded into the new church through the mud to attend the first Mass in the finished building. That trajectory, from a barn to a packed church in a decade, is the story of postwar Catholic Clifton in miniature, and Italian families were a large part of it.
By 2000, census figures recorded Italian Americans as 17 percent of Clifton’s residents, the single largest ancestry group in the city. The mill workers’ grandchildren and the First Ward refugees’ children had become, simply, Clifton.
The Landmarks
Corrado’s Family Affair, 1578 Main Avenue. The institution. What began as a small operation serving Paterson-area Italian immigrants grew into a full-service market when the family opened on Main Avenue in 1975. Generations have come here for fresh mozzarella, imported cheeses and meats, prepared foods and, in autumn, the California wine grapes that home winemakers haul out by the case.
St. Andrew the Apostle Parish, 400 Mt. Prospect Avenue. Founded in 1909, it is one of Clifton’s oldest Catholic anchors, a parish that watched the city grow up around it from mill-era blocks to postwar suburb.
St. Philip the Apostle Parish, Athenia. The parish that grew from a converted barn in 1943 to a packed new church by 1953. For decades its carnivals, festivals and Sunday Masses have marked the calendar of Italian-American Athenia.
Italian American Family Association, 282 Parker Avenue. A club whose stated mission is to preserve and honour Italian culture, traditions and heritage. It is the kind of place where the dialect still gets spoken, the cards still get dealt and the feast-day dinners still get cooked.
Matthew’s Italian Restaurant, 1131 Bloomfield Avenue. A beloved, hidden-in-plain-sight Italian kitchen on Bloomfield Avenue. Owner Matthew Tyahla bought his first restaurant, Café d’Amici, at this address when he was in his twenties, and the place has been a neighbourhood fixture ever since.
Spuntino Wine Bar & Italian Tapas, 70 Kingsland Road. A newer generation’s take on Clifton Italian, “old school, new school” cooking and a long wine list in the Delawanna section. It is proof that the city’s Italian table did not stop evolving when the mills closed.
Botany Village, around Parker and Dayton avenues. The old mill district where many of Clifton’s first immigrant families landed. Its brick storefronts and worker housing still trace the shape of the city that the wool industry built, and a Special Improvement District has worked to keep the streetscape alive.
Where They Came From
Clifton’s Italians, like most of New Jersey’s, trace overwhelmingly to the Mezzogiorno, the south of Italy. The great migrations that filled Newark’s First Ward and Paterson’s silk-era tenements drew from Campania, including Naples and its hinterland, from Calabria, Sicily and the regions around them.
Those origins arrived in Clifton secondhand, carried north by families leaving the cleared blocks of Newark and the crowded streets of Paterson rather than straight off the boat. It is a path that shaped Italian New Jersey from the waterfront tenements of Hoboken to the suburbs of Passaic County. The result is a community whose roots run through Ellis Island and through two New Jersey cities before reaching Clifton.
You can still hear it in the food: the Sunday gravy, the homemade sausage and the wine pressed in basements from those autumn grapes at Corrado’s, all dialects of southern-Italian cooking that survived the move out of the city intact.
Clifton Today
Clifton is no longer a majority Italian city, and it never quite was. By the 2020 census its residents were roughly 49 percent white, 40 percent Hispanic or Latino and nearly 10 percent Asian, a genuinely mixed city where new arrivals from Latin America, the Middle East and South Asia now shape daily life.
Even Corrado’s reflects the shift. The market that once stocked almost entirely for Italian neighbours now imports from Turkey, Spain, Bulgaria and beyond to serve a customer base that is Spanish-speaking, Arabic-speaking and Eastern European as well as Italian. The Italian items, by every account, still sell.
What remains is an Italian-American Clifton that is comfortable, settled and quietly enduring. It is a middle-class community in the most ordinary and durable sense: homeowners, small-business families, parishioners and grandparents who never moved away. The parishes still hold their feasts, the family association still meets, the bakeries and pork stores still draw weekend lines, and the grandchildren of First Ward refugees still come back across the county line for mozzarella.
You see it most clearly on a holiday weekend, when the parking lot at Corrado’s fills before nine in the morning and the conversations at the cheese counter slide between English and a southern-Italian dialect that survived three moves and a hundred years. The community has become part of the city’s foundation rather than its headline, which is, in its own way, the surest sign that it stayed.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Italians live in Clifton, New Jersey?
At the 2000 census, Italian Americans made up about 17 percent of Clifton’s population, the largest single ancestry group in the city. With Clifton’s 2020 population of 90,296, the Italians in Clifton remain one of its most significant and long-established communities, even as the city has grown more diverse.
Why did so many Italians move to Clifton?
Two reasons. The first Italians came in the early twentieth century to work in Clifton’s mills, especially around Botany Village. The larger wave came after 1953, when urban renewal cleared Newark’s First Ward Little Italy and many displaced families, along with Italians from nearby Paterson, moved north into Clifton for its homes and yards.
Where is the best Italian food in Clifton?
Corrado’s Family Affair at 1578 Main Avenue is the legendary market for fresh mozzarella, imported goods and wine grapes. For sit-down dining, Matthew’s Italian Restaurant on Bloomfield Avenue and Spuntino Wine Bar & Italian Tapas on Kingsland Road are longtime favourites among the Italians in Clifton.
What is Botany Village?
Botany Village is Clifton’s oldest commercial district, built up around the Botany Worsted Mills founded in 1889. It drew immigrant mill workers, including many of Clifton’s first Italian families, and today its historic streetscape is maintained through a local improvement district.
Which Catholic parishes served Clifton’s Italian community?
St. Andrew the Apostle on Mt. Prospect Avenue, founded in 1909, is among the oldest. St. Philip the Apostle in the Athenia section, which celebrated its first Mass in 1943, grew rapidly in the postwar years alongside the city’s expanding Italian-American population.
Are Italians still a major community in Clifton today?
Yes, though Clifton is now a mixed city that is also heavily Hispanic, Asian and Middle Eastern. The Italian-American community remains deeply rooted through its parishes, its family association on Parker Avenue and its markets, even as businesses like Corrado’s have expanded to serve all of Clifton’s communities.
If your family’s story passed through Clifton, 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 in Clifton, to wherever you are now.