Drive north out of the George Washington Bridge traffic, past the strip malls of Fort Lee and the Hangul-lettered storefronts of Palisades Park, and the roads begin to narrow and shade over. By the time you reach Harrington Park, the noise has fallen away entirely. Here, on tree-lined lanes of Colonial Revivals and Cape Cods, the Koreans in Harrington Park have built one of the quietest and most accomplished diaspora chapters in all of Bergen County, a borough of barely five thousand people where roughly one resident in eight traces their roots to Korea.
The Place
Harrington Park is a small borough in the Northern Valley of Bergen County, New Jersey, tucked between Closter, Norwood and the Oradell Reservoir. It was incorporated on 29 March 1904 from portions of Harrington Township, Washington Township and Closter, and took its name from the old Harring family who settled the region in colonial times.
It is, by any measure, an affluent and unhurried place. The 2020 census counted 4,741 residents, and the median household income sat near 116,000 dollars in the years following. There is no real downtown, no traffic light on most corners, just wooded walking paths, a historic stone house, and some of the highest recreational acreage per capita of any town in the state.
What it does have, and what brought many of its newest families here, is a school system the state ranks among its very best.
How It Became Korean
The Korean story in Harrington Park cannot be told from the borough line outward. It has to be told from the bridge inward, because the families who now fill the borough’s classrooms arrived as the last and most deliberate step of a migration that began miles to the south.
The bridge and the first enclaves
Korean immigration to the United States surged after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed the old national-origin quotas. In the New York metropolitan area, the first arrivals clustered in Flushing, Queens, and then began crossing the Hudson into the towns nearest the George Washington Bridge.
Fort Lee and Palisades Park, sitting at the bridge’s western foot, absorbed the heaviest waves through the 1980s and 1990s. Palisades Park would eventually become the single most concentrated Korean enclave in America, with Koreans making up more than half its population. These were the gateway towns: dense, commercial, lined with Korean restaurants, churches and groceries.
The move north into the Valley
By the 1990s Bergen County held the highest per capita Korean American population of any county in the United States. In 1990 there were roughly 16,000 Koreans in the county; by 2000 the figure had climbed to about 37,000, and by 2010 it reached some 58,000, a per capita share of 6.3 percent that trailed only Southern California nationally.
As the bridge towns grew crowded and expensive, established families looked further up the county. They followed the same logic that has shaped Korean settlement across America: safety, commuting access and, above everything, schools. The Northern Valley boroughs of Closter, Demarest, Cresskill, Norwood, Old Tappan and Harrington Park offered all three, with the added pull of school districts that consistently topped state rankings.
Harrington Park as a destination
Harrington Park became one of these Northern Valley landing places. By the 2010 census, Asian residents made up 17.43 percent of the borough, and Korean Americans alone accounted for 13.0 percent of the total population, a remarkable share for a town this small and this far from the original enclaves.
The draw was the Harrington Park School District, a pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade district that holds a federal Blue Ribbon designation and ranks among the strongest in Bergen County and the state. The state Department of Education historically placed it in District Factor Group I, the second-highest of its eight socioeconomic groupings.
For high school, the borough’s children attend Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan, shared with Northvale, Norwood and Old Tappan, where graduation rates routinely exceed 95 percent. For Korean parents who had crossed an ocean partly to secure their children’s education, a town built around schools like these was the obvious next move.
An education culture imported and adapted
The academic intensity that Korean families are often associated with did not arrive in a vacuum. Scholars studying the New York metropolitan area, including the Korean communities of Bergen County, have traced how immigrant parents imported the hagwon, the private cram school, and adapted it to the American suburbs.
Across the Northern Valley and the nearby commercial corridors, Korean-run test-prep academies and tutoring centres grew alongside the families, serving everything from SAT preparation to the entrance exams for the selective Bergen County Academies. The result is a community whose presence in Harrington Park is measured less in storefronts than in classrooms.
The Landmarks
Harrington Park keeps its own landmarks modest, and the most visible markers of Korean life tend to sit just over its borders, in the larger Northern Valley towns. Both belong to the same story.
Blauvelt House, 622 Lafayette Road. This stone Dutch Colonial house, built around 1800 by a member of the Blauvelt family, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 9 January 1983. It anchors the borough’s sense of its own past, the colonial Dutch farming village that long predated the families who now walk past it on the way to the park.
Harrington Park School, Harrington Park. The borough’s single public school is the institution most responsible for its modern demographics. Its Blue Ribbon record and small enrolment of roughly 645 students make it the quiet centre of gravity around which Korean and other professional families have organised their lives here.
Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan, 100 Central Avenue, Old Tappan. Just minutes from the borough, this is where Harrington Park’s teenagers finish school. The Korean presence in its hallways, its college-admissions culture and its Advanced Placement rosters reflects decades of families choosing the Valley for exactly this stretch of their children’s lives.
H Mart, 25 Lafayette Avenue, Englewood. The nearest of the great Korean supermarkets, part of the chain headquartered in Lyndhurst, just down the county. For Harrington Park families it is the weekend grocery run: banchan, fresh fish, Korean produce and a food culture that no ordinary American supermarket carries.
Closter Plaza, Closter. The Northern Valley’s main shopping centre, a short drive from the borough, rebuilt and reopened by 2016. Around it and along the commercial spines of Closter and Norwood sit the Korean bakeries, restaurants and service businesses that the Valley’s families rely on day to day.
The Korean churches of the Valley. Korean Protestant and Catholic congregations spread across the Northern Valley and the bridge towns through the 1980s and 1990s, becoming the social spine of immigrant life: Sunday worship in Korean, language classes for the children, and the network through which newcomers found jobs, homes and one another.
Pondside Park. One of the borough’s oldest green spaces, dating to its 1904 founding, part of the recreational acreage that ranks among the highest per capita in New Jersey. It is the kind of unglamorous, well-kept town park that makes a place feel safe enough to raise a family, which is precisely what drew so many of those families in.
Where They Came From
The Koreans of the Northern Valley overwhelmingly trace their origins to South Korea, and within a single generation. Many of the parents now raising children in Harrington Park were born in Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi Province, or in the southern cities of Busan and Daegu, and came of age during South Korea’s rapid postwar transformation.
A large share arrived as adults, often well educated, drawn by professional opportunity in the New York region. Some came through the Manhattan-based branches of Korean firms and wholesale businesses that relocated to Bergen County in the 1990s as city rents climbed. Others were doctors, engineers, accountants and small-business owners who settled first near the bridge and worked their way north.
What unites them is not a single home region but a shared destination logic. Where earlier diasporas were scattered by war or poverty, this one moved with intent: from South Korea to the gateway towns at the bridge, and then deliberately up the Valley to the boroughs with the strongest schools and the quietest streets.
Harrington Park Today
Harrington Park today is not a Koreatown, and it never set out to be one. There are no Hangul-lettered shopping streets here as there are in Palisades Park or Fort Lee. The borough’s character is still the leafy, low-key New Jersey suburb it has been for a century, and that restraint is part of its appeal.
What has changed is who is raising children behind those Cape Cod and Colonial doors. A town that was overwhelmingly white a generation ago now counts roughly one in five residents as Asian, with Korean Americans the largest single group within that figure, woven into the school district, the recreation leagues and the civic life that residents describe as held together by volunteerism.
The commercial life of the community still happens over the borders, at the H Mart in Englewood, the restaurants of Closter and Norwood, the churches scattered across the Valley. Harrington Park is where these families come home to sleep, study and grow up. It is a diaspora chapter written almost entirely in private: in report cards, in piano lessons, in the steady accumulation of a settled middle-class American life. For a community that crossed an ocean for exactly that, it is a quiet kind of arrival, and a complete one.
The same Northern Valley pattern has shaped its neighbours, from the Koreans in Norwood next door to the families in Old Tappan, Closter, Demarest and Cresskill. Further afield, the same school-driven logic built Korean enclaves in Frisco, Texas and Bellevue, Washington, while a parallel professional migration shaped the Chinese community of Princeton elsewhere in the Garden State.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Koreans live in Harrington Park, New Jersey?
At the 2010 census, Korean Americans accounted for 13.0 percent of Harrington Park’s population, with Asian residents overall making up 17.43 percent. In a borough of fewer than 5,000 people, that makes the Koreans in Harrington Park the largest single Asian group and a significant share of the town.
Why did Korean families move to Harrington Park?
The main draw is education. The Harrington Park School District holds a federal Blue Ribbon designation and ranks among the best in Bergen County and the state, and the town feeds into the highly regarded Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan. Safety and proximity to New York via the George Washington Bridge also played a part.
Is Harrington Park a Koreatown like Palisades Park?
No. Unlike Palisades Park or Fort Lee, which have dense Korean commercial districts with Hangul signage, Harrington Park is a quiet residential suburb with no Korean business strip. The Koreans in Harrington Park live here and shop, dine and worship in the larger surrounding towns.
Where do Harrington Park’s Korean families shop for groceries?
Many rely on H Mart at 25 Lafayette Avenue in nearby Englewood, part of the New Jersey-based Korean supermarket chain headquartered in Lyndhurst. The restaurants and bakeries of Closter and Norwood, a short drive away, also serve the community.
What high school do students in Harrington Park attend?
Harrington Park has its own pre-K through eighth-grade district, and students then attend Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan, at 100 Central Avenue in Old Tappan. The school is shared with Northvale, Norwood and Old Tappan, and its graduation rate routinely exceeds 95 percent.
When did Koreans first settle in this part of Bergen County?
The major waves came through the 1980s and 1990s, when Bergen County developed the highest per capita Korean American population in the United States. Families first settled in the bridge towns of Fort Lee and Palisades Park, then moved north into the Northern Valley boroughs, including Harrington Park, in search of better schools.
If your family’s story passed through Harrington Park, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Seoul and the bridge towns of the Hudson, to a quiet borough chosen for its schools, to wherever you are now.