Drive north out of Newark along the Passaic River and the city does not so much end as soften. The factory blocks thin out, the streets tilt up toward the cherry trees of Branch Brook Park, and you arrive in a township whose name means, simply, beautiful town. For most of the twentieth century, the Italians in Belleville, New Jersey were the people who made it so: the stonemasons and pork butchers and quarry hands who followed their cousins out of the crowded Newark wards and built front porches, social clubs and a Sunday gravy tradition that still scents the air on Bloomfield Avenue.
The Place
Belleville sits in Essex County, hard against the Passaic River, just two miles north of downtown Newark. The French name, adopted on the Fourth of July in 1793 when the Second River section of Newark renamed itself, translates as beautiful town, and the township was formally incorporated in 1839 with roughly five hundred residents.
Its southern end carries the curious name of Soho, a borrowed piece of England that arrived with the town’s first industry. Today Belleville is a dense, working township of around 38,000 people, layered over centuries of milling, quarrying and migration. A slice of Branch Brook Park, famous for the largest collection of cherry blossom trees in the United States, falls within its borders.
How It Became Italian
To understand why so many Italian families landed in Belleville, you have to start with the river and the copper it powered.
The Soho works and the call for labour
Belleville was an industrial town before it was an Italian one. In 1753 Josiah Hornblower hauled the first steam engine in the United States here to pump out the Schuyler copper mines, and Congress would later, in 1994, pass a resolution recognising the township as a birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, a heritage detailed in the township’s own recorded history.
The name Soho came from Nicholas Roosevelt, who built a foundry and machine shop near the river and dubbed it after the celebrated Soho works in Birmingham, England. In 1813 the Hendricks brothers, importers of copper, established the Belleville Copper Rolling Mill, formally the Soho Copper Company, on the same ground. Its copper sheeting clad early American steam vessels, and the mill ran until 1938.
Mills, quarries and a canal need muscle. The earliest hands were largely Irish, and St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church on William Street, founded in 1838 on a rise locals called Irish Hill, served them. But by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the men arriving to dig, haul and cut stone were increasingly Italian.
Overflow from the First Ward
The great Italian arrival in this corner of Essex County funnelled first through Newark. From the 1880s, Italian immigrants packed into Newark’s First Ward, the tenement district just to the south, and into the riverside neighbourhood known as Down Neck. Belleville and neighbouring Nutley became the places families moved to when they could afford a little more air and a patch of yard, part of the same outward push that built Italian Bloomfield next door.
The nucleus of Italian Belleville was Silver Lake, the township’s southern edge bleeding into Bloomfield, close enough to the Newark wards that families kept one foot in each. Local historian Anthony Buccino, who chronicled the Italian roots of Belleville and Nutley, recorded the surnames of a single block of Meacham Street: Lardier, Dimichino, Gingerelli, Troino, Francisco, Bonano, Buccino, Cerami, D’Ambola. Most families in one town, he noted, had relatives in the other.
Work, then a house with a porch
The first generation took the jobs the industrial town offered. They cut and hauled in the brownstone quarries, laid water mains and sewers, dug the line of the Morris Canal and bent over machines in the factory sweatshops along the river. The pay was poor and the hours were long, and outings to the shore or to Branch Brook Park were the balance against them.
What that labour bought, slowly, was permanence. A two-family house with a porch and a fig tree wrapped in tar paper for winter. A garden tomato patch. Membership in a social club where men from the same villages and dialects could gather over cards and a glass of homemade wine. By the time the 2000 census was taken, Italian was the single most common ancestry in Belleville at nearly 31 percent, far ahead of Irish, German or Polish.
The famous and the ordinary
Belleville’s Italian generation produced a striking roll of talent. Joe Pesci was raised in the township and graduated from Belleville High School; his own family roots ran back to Turin in the north and to Aquilonia in the province of Avellino. The singer Connie Francis attended Belleville High as well, and Frankie Valli, born Francesco Castelluccio in Newark’s First Ward, belongs to the same overlapping Italian world that stretched from the Newark wards up into Belleville and Nutley.
But the story was never really about the famous. It was about the butcher who knew your nonna’s name, the baker whose bread you bought on the way home from Mass, the men in the club hall arguing in three dialects at once. The celebrities were simply the loudest echo of an ordinary, deeply rooted community.
The Landmarks
Belmont Tavern, 12 Bloomfield Avenue. An old-school Italian restaurant that opened in 1967 and has barely changed since. Its kitchen made the Chicken Savoy, a vinegar and oregano roasted dish, into a regional legend, and the cramped, photograph-lined room remains a pilgrimage site for those who grew up on this kind of cooking.
St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, 155 William Street. Founded in 1838 on the rise once called Irish Hill, St Peter’s began as the parish of the township’s earlier Catholic immigrants and absorbed wave after wave that followed, Italian, then Spanish-speaking, then Filipino and Vietnamese. Its long adaptation is a map of who came to Belleville and when.
The Belleville Copper Rolling Mill site, near the river in Soho. Formally the Soho Copper Company, established in 1813, the mill rolled copper sheeting for early American steamships and ran until 1938. The Soho name it gave the neighbourhood, borrowed from Birmingham, England, is the reason a slice of an Essex County township shares a name with a London district.
Branch Brook Park, northern Belleville and Newark. The first county park in the United States, opened in 1895 and shaped by the Olmsted firm, with a portion inside Belleville’s borders. Its thousands of cherry trees, the largest such collection in the country, drew generations of Italian families for Sunday picnics and still fill with visitors each April.
Silver Lake, southern Belleville. The dense residential quarter where the Italian community first concentrated, pressed against the Bloomfield line and a short walk from the Newark wards. The two-family houses, narrow yards and corner clubs here were the everyday architecture of Italian Belleville, an arrangement echoed in older enclaves like Dyker Heights in Brooklyn and Revere outside Boston.
The Reformed Dutch Church of Second River, Main Street. Belleville’s oldest congregation, with a current stone building dating to 1853 and a churchyard holding the graves of 62 Revolutionary War veterans. It anchors the township’s pre-industrial memory, the deep past the Italians arrived into.
Belleville High School. The civic crossroads of the township, the school that turned out Joe Pesci and Connie Francis among countless less famous sons and daughters of the Italian community. For decades it was where the children of quarrymen and pork butchers became Americans.
Where They Came From
The Italians of Belleville were not from one place but from many, knit together by the chains of family that pulled village after village across the Atlantic. The men at the social clubs, as the chroniclers put it, came from the same villages and spoke the same dialects, and the clubs themselves were sorted by exactly those origins.
The documented roots run in two directions familiar to Italian America. Northern, as with the Pesci family’s link to Turin in Piedmont. And southern, the larger current, as with the same family’s ties to Aquilonia in the province of Avellino, deep in the Campanian interior east of Naples. Avellino, Salerno and the wider Mezzogiorno fed the broader Newark migration that Belleville drew from, the same southern current that shaped Italian enclaves from Bristol, Rhode Island to East Haven, Connecticut.
What every origin shared was the same engine: a relative already settled, a job he could vouch for, a spare room or a cousin’s porch to start from. That is how a quarry town two miles up the Passaic came to fill with families who had last seen each other in the hill villages of southern Italy.
Belleville Today
Belleville is no longer a majority-Italian town, and there is no use pretending otherwise. The most recent figures put the township’s largest group as Hispanic, around half the population, with the white share, the category most Italian Americans fall into, well under a third. The grandchildren of the quarrymen largely moved out to Nutley, to Lyndhurst, to the wider suburbs, the same kind of generational shift that reshaped New Jersey towns from Jewish Passaic to Lakewood as immigrant communities across the country resettled outward.
What remains is real, though, and it is more than nostalgia. Belmont Tavern still serves Chicken Savoy to a packed room. The pork stores and Italian bakeries that survive still draw the diaspora back across the county line on a Saturday morning. The cherry trees of Branch Brook Park still bloom over the same picnic grounds.
And the township has done what Belleville has always done, which is absorb the next arrival. The Soho section that took its name from an English foundry, that filled with Irish and then Italians, has since been home to one of the East Coast’s early Chinatowns and now to a large Latino community. The Italian chapter is closing, but it left the porches, the parish, the recipes and the name of a beautiful town slightly more beautiful for having been lived in so fully.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Italians first settle in Belleville, New Jersey?
Italian immigrants began arriving in the Newark area from the 1880s, first crowding into Newark’s First Ward and Down Neck before moving north into Belleville and Nutley for more space. The Italians in Belleville, New Jersey concentrated chiefly in the Silver Lake section on the township’s southern edge.
Why is part of Belleville called Soho?
The name came from Nicholas Roosevelt, who built a foundry near the Passaic River and named it after the famous Soho works in Birmingham, England. The Hendricks brothers later established the Belleville Copper Rolling Mill, formally the Soho Copper Company, there in 1813, fixing the name on the neighbourhood.
Which famous Italian Americans came from Belleville?
Actor Joe Pesci was raised in Belleville and graduated from Belleville High School, and singer Connie Francis also attended the school. Frankie Valli came from the adjacent Italian world of Newark’s First Ward, part of the same migration that filled Belleville and Nutley.
Where in Italy did Belleville’s Italian families come from?
They came from across Italy but disproportionately from the southern Mezzogiorno, including the province of Avellino east of Naples, alongside northern roots such as the Pesci family’s tie to Turin. Chain migration meant whole village networks resettled together around Newark and Belleville.
Is Belleville still an Italian town?
Not in the way it once was. Italian was the single largest ancestry in Belleville as recently as the 2000 census, but the township is now majority Hispanic, with the Italian community’s descendants largely moved to surrounding suburbs while institutions like Belmont Tavern keep the heritage alive.
What is the best place to taste Italian Belleville?
Belmont Tavern at 12 Bloomfield Avenue, open since 1967, is the enduring landmark, famous for its Chicken Savoy. Surviving Italian bakeries and pork stores around Silver Lake, plus a springtime picnic under the cherry blossoms of Branch Brook Park, complete the experience of the Italians in Belleville, New Jersey.
If your family’s story passed through Belleville, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the hill villages of Avellino to a two-family house in Silver Lake, to wherever you are now.