On a Saturday morning in late spring, the smell of charcoal and grilling lamb drifts north across Hazel Street, past the body shops and the two-family houses, into the quiet residential blocks of Clifton, New Jersey. Follow it and you find the other half of a community that the maps usually credit to Paterson alone. The Turks in Clifton are not a footnote to their famous neighbours across the line. They are the same people, the same families, simply living on the calmer side of a border that immigration never bothered to recognise, an extension of the larger story of the Turks in Paterson.
The Place
Clifton sits in Passaic County, a city of roughly 91,500 people wedged between Paterson to the north and the suburbs of Essex County to the south. It is one of New Jersey’s larger cities, yet it has always felt more like a collection of neighbourhoods than a single downtown, stitched together by the Garden State Parkway and Route 3.
It is comfortable rather than wealthy in the manner of the Bergen County commuter towns, the world of the Koreans of Norwood or the Syrian Jews of Deal down the shore. The median household income in Clifton reached about $98,000 in 2024, up sharply from around $50,000 at the turn of the century, the arithmetic of a city that has steadily absorbed and held its immigrants rather than losing them to the exurbs.
The southern edge of Clifton runs hard against South Paterson, and it is along that seam, around Hazel Street and the lower stretch of Main, that the Turkish story plays out. The official boundary is a line on a tax map. The community treats it as a suggestion.
How It Became Turkish
The Turkish presence in the Paterson and Clifton corridor is one of the oldest in the country, and one of the least understood. It did not begin with a single famous arrival or a planned settlement. It began with mill work, cheap rent, and the slow logic of people sending for their cousins.
The 1950s arrivals
A Turkish community has existed in South Paterson since the 1950s, alongside a smaller Azeri community and immigrants identified as Karachay, a Turkic people from the North Caucasus. Paterson at mid-century was still a working manufacturing city, the old Silk City, with a stock of cheap multi-family housing and factory jobs that did not require fluent English.
That combination made it an obvious landing place. The earliest Turkish arrivals settled in the southern wards, the part of Paterson that hugged the Clifton line, and they did what immigrant pioneers everywhere do. They opened a grocery, then a bakery, then a place to eat, then a place to pray.
Little Istanbul takes shape
By the late twentieth century the neighbourhood had earned its nickname. South Paterson became known as Little Istanbul, and on Main Street the signage turned to Turkish and Arabic, the cafes poured Turkish coffee, and the halal butchers and grocers multiplied. The same article that records this also records the area’s other name, Little Ramallah, because the Turkish enclave grew up beside one of the largest Palestinian American communities in the United States, the Palestinians of Paterson.
At its height the Turkish American population of the area was substantial. By accounts gathered in the neighbourhood it numbered roughly 60,000 around half a century ago. The corridor was dense enough to support its own newspapers, its own travel agents flying people back to Anatolia, and a commercial strip where a newcomer could conduct an entire day’s business without speaking English.
The spill into Clifton
As families found their footing, many made the short move south. Clifton offered what the crowded Paterson wards could not: a driveway, a small yard, a quieter street, and schools with a steadier reputation, all within walking distance of the bakery and the mosque. The migration was measured in blocks, not miles.
This is why so much of the Turkish institutional life now anchors on the Clifton side. The restaurants and the cultural centre that serve the whole community increasingly carry a Clifton address, even as the densest residential core remains just over the line in South Paterson. The two cities function as one neighbourhood with two postmarks.
A community that thinned but stayed
The story since then has not been one of uninterrupted growth. The Turkish American population of the corridor has fallen to around 20,000 by recent counts, roughly a third of its earlier peak. Some families followed the familiar suburban path further out into New Jersey, the same pull that drew the Chinese to Princeton. Some returned to a Turkey that had grown more prosperous. Newer arrivals from other parts of the Middle East reshaped the commercial strip around them.
Yet the community did not dissolve. It consolidated. What remains is denser in its institutions if smaller in its raw numbers, and the move into Clifton is a large part of why. The families who stayed put down deeper roots, bought houses rather than rented flats, and built the kind of organisations that a transient population never bothers with.
The Landmarks
Toros Restaurant, 489 Hazel Street, Clifton. Toros is the corridor’s best-known Turkish kitchen, a reasonably priced grill house specialising in Turkish and Middle Eastern cooking that has since opened sister locations in Paterson, Montclair and New Milford. Its Hazel Street room sits squarely on the Clifton side of the seam, a short walk from the Paterson core, and on weekends it fills with families ordering mezze, kebabs and lahmacun.
Taskin Bakery, 103 Hazel Street, Paterson. Founded in 1997 and open around the clock, Taskin is the bread engine of the whole community, just over the Clifton line but feeding both cities. Its ovens turn out simit, the sesame-crusted Turkish ring, and pogaca, the soft savoury breakfast pastry, and its loaves supply restaurants as far away as New York. For Clifton’s Turkish households it is the place you stop on the way home.
Turkish Cultural Center New Jersey, 420 Kuller Road, Clifton. The centre is the community’s secular meeting ground, running cultural programmes, educational activities and interfaith gatherings designed to introduce Turkish culture to its non-Turkish neighbours. Its best-known tradition is Noah’s Pudding night, the sharing of ashure across faith lines, a deliberately open door into the community.
Main Memorial Park, Clifton. Every year the Paterson Clifton Turkish American Day Parade marches from Madison Avenue in Paterson, down the length of Main Street, and ends here in Clifton with a festival of folk dancing, live singers, food stands and stalls of Turkish goods. For one afternoon the park becomes the largest open-air gathering of Turks in New Jersey.
The Hazel Street corridor. More a place than a single address, the stretch of Hazel and lower Main where Clifton meets South Paterson is the commercial spine of the community. Halal butchers, Turkish grocers, hookah cafes and bakeries crowd together here, the signage shifting between Turkish, Arabic and English from one storefront to the next.
Main Street, South Paterson. Just over the Clifton boundary, Main Street between Madison Avenue and the city line holds the densest concentration of Turkish and Arab shops in the region. Clifton’s Turkish families treat it as their high street, which is exactly what it has been for two generations.
Where They Came From
The Turks of the Paterson and Clifton corridor trace back overwhelmingly to Turkey itself rather than to the wider Turkic diaspora, although the earliest waves did include Azeri and Karachay families who arrived in the same decades.
One thread runs to the Black Sea coast. The community’s own parade is organised in part by the Turkish American Giresunlular Organization, a hometown association for people from Giresun, the Black Sea province known for its hazelnut groves and steep green hills. Hometown associations like this are a reliable signpost of chain migration, the way one successful family from a single province pulls a long line of relatives and neighbours across the Atlantic to the same few American blocks.
The pattern is the one that built so many American enclaves. A pioneer found a factory job and a flat in South Paterson, wrote home, and over years became the anchor for an entire stretch of village and province. The result was a community concentrated enough that, at its peak, it could reproduce the texture of an Anatolian town inside two New Jersey cities.
Clifton Today
The Turkish community in Clifton today is quieter and more settled than the bustling South Paterson strip suggests. The shops and restaurants still cluster along the Hazel and Main Street seam, but the homes behind them, the two-family houses with the small yards, are increasingly the Clifton side of the story. This is where the families who arrived as renters have become owners.
The institutions have followed the people. A cultural centre on Kuller Road, the corridor’s flagship restaurant on Hazel Street, and a parade that deliberately ends its route in a Clifton park all point to a community whose civic centre of gravity has drifted south of the old Paterson core. The numbers are smaller than they once were, but the footprint is more permanent.
It is an honest portrait rather than a triumphant one. The corridor has lost much of its earlier population, and newer immigrant communities now share and reshape its streets. What endures is a working neighbourhood where Turkish is still spoken in the bakery queue, where the parade still draws thousands every spring, and where a Clifton driveway and a South Paterson high street remain, for these families, two halves of the same home.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there really Turks in Clifton, or just in Paterson?
Both. The Turks in Clifton and South Paterson form a single community split by a city line. The densest residential core sits just inside South Paterson, but many families have moved south into Clifton’s quieter streets, and several of the community’s main institutions now carry a Clifton address.
When did Turkish immigrants first settle in the area?
A Turkish community has existed in South Paterson, immediately adjacent to Clifton, since the 1950s, alongside smaller Azeri and Karachay groups. It grew through chain migration over the following decades into what became known as Little Istanbul, with families steadily spilling across the line into Clifton.
How large is the Turkish community in Clifton and Paterson?
The Turkish American population of the corridor is estimated at roughly 20,000 today, down from about 60,000 at its peak around half a century ago. The decline reflects suburban moves, returns to Turkey, and the arrival of other immigrant groups, though the community remains the country’s best-known Turkish enclave.
Where do the Turks in Clifton come from in Turkey?
Many trace to Turkey’s Black Sea coast, including the hazelnut province of Giresun, reflected in the Turkish American Giresunlular hometown association that helps organise the local parade. The earliest waves also included Azeri families and Karachay people of Turkic origin from the North Caucasus.
What is the Turkish American Day Parade?
It is an annual spring celebration that marches from Madison Avenue in Paterson down Main Street and finishes at Main Memorial Park in Clifton. Organised by Turkish American community groups, it features folk dancing, live music, food stalls and Turkish goods, and is the largest yearly gathering of the Turks in Clifton and Paterson.
Where can I eat authentic Turkish food in Clifton?
Toros Restaurant at 489 Hazel Street in Clifton is the corridor’s best-known Turkish kitchen, serving kebabs, mezze and lahmacun. For bread and pastries, Taskin Bakery on Hazel Street in adjacent Paterson bakes simit and pogaca around the clock and supplies much of the neighbourhood.
If your family’s story passed through Clifton, or any of the places Turks have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hillside village above the Black Sea in Giresun to a two-family house off Hazel Street, to wherever you are now.