By eight in the morning the brick ovens on Hazel Street have already been running for hours, and the smell of sesame and hot bread drifts out toward Main Street. A man carries a paper sleeve of simit, the ring-shaped loaf crusted in seeds, past a window stenciled in Turkish. Two doors down, the television above a counter is tuned to a soccer match from Istanbul, and someone groans at a missed goal. This is South Paterson on an ordinary weekday, and for the Turks in Paterson it has been a second Anatolia for the better part of seventy years.
Paterson holds the largest Turkish American community in the United States, an enclave locals and visitors alike call Little Istanbul. It grew up inside a faded silk town, threaded itself along one long commercial street, and turned a corner of New Jersey into a place where you can buy fresh pide more easily than you can in parts of Turkey.
South Paterson: The Place
South Paterson sits at the southern edge of the city, pressed against the Clifton border in Passaic County, with Garret Mountain rising to the west and Route 19 forming its outer boundary. The Turkish and Arab commercial strip runs along Main Street, roughly bounded by Madison Avenue to the north, Crooks Avenue to the south, Hazel Street to the west, and East Railway Avenue to the east. The housing is dense and old: two- and three-family frame houses, brick walk-ups, and storefronts with apartments stacked above them. New York City is a bus ride away, which is how most of the first arrivals reached it.
How South Paterson Became Little Istanbul
Before the Turks
Paterson was an industrial city before it was an immigrant one. In 1792 Alexander Hamilton’s Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures chose the Great Falls of the Passaic River to power the country’s first planned industrial city. By the 1880s Paterson was producing roughly half of all the finished silk made in the United States, and earned the name Silk City.
At its peak around 1910 the city held about 125,600 people, with some 25,000 workers tending looms in roughly 350 mills. The mills pulled in weavers from Lyon, Macclesfield, Biella, and Lodz, then southern Italians and Eastern European Jews. Arab families from what was then Greater Syria began arriving around 1890, and by 1900 Syrian owners ran about 35 of the city’s silk mills. When the great 1913 silk strike shut the looms for months, the industry never fully recovered, and the mills emptied slowly across the next half century. That decline left behind exactly what the next wave needed: cheap housing and empty storefronts on a long, walkable street.
The Turks Arrive
The first Turkish-speaking families settled in South Paterson in the 1950s, alongside a small Azeri and Karachay community. They were a modest group at first, clustered near a tiny prayer room that served everyone. The numbers climbed through the 1960s and 1970s, the decades when Turkish labor migration to the West was at its height, and chain migration did the rest. One brother sponsored another, a cousin took a room until he found his own, and a village in the old country slowly reassembled itself on a single set of blocks.
By 1978 the original prayer space could no longer hold the crowd, and the community built Ulu Cami, the Grand Mosque, on Knickerbocker Avenue. A further wave followed Turkey’s financial crisis in 2001, when families came looking for work and steadier ground. New Jersey is now the third-largest center of Turkish American life in the country, after New York and California, and Paterson is its heart.
South Paterson at Its Peak
For a stretch of years the Turkish presence here was enormous. By community estimates the Turkish American population around South Paterson once reached roughly 60,000, a density that made Main Street feel transplanted whole from a Black Sea town. Bakeries ran day and night. Grocers stacked jars of pepper paste, tins of olive oil, and white cheese in brine. Coffeehouses filled with men playing okey and watching Galatasaray and Fenerbahce on satellite feeds.
The neighborhood was never only Turkish. It has always shared Main Street with a large Arab and Palestinian population, and the two communities built the corridor together, storefront by storefront. The Turkish presence simply gave the street its bakeries, its kebab houses, and its mosques, and gave the wider area one of its enduring nicknames.
The Change
The count today is closer to 20,000, well down from that earlier peak. Some families followed the familiar path out to Clifton, Wayne, and the quieter suburbs of Passaic and Bergen County, trading the walk-up apartment for a lawn. The children and grandchildren of the first arrivals went to college and into professions, and not all of them came back to the old blocks.
The shops did not vanish, though. The names on Main Street still read in Turkish, the ovens still run, and the corridor remains a regional magnet, the place suburban families drive back to on weekends for bread, books, and a proper plate of kebab. Like the Palestinian community that shares these blocks, the Turks of Paterson dispersed without disappearing.
The Landmarks of Little Istanbul
Ulu Cami (Grand Mosque), 408 Knickerbocker Avenue. Founded in 1978 when the small Karacay mosque could no longer hold the growing congregation, Ulu Cami is one of the oldest mosques established by Turks in the United States. It holds up to a thousand worshippers, and on Eid mornings three back-to-back prayers fill it to the doors. Its longtime imam, Mustafa Bahacan, has described it plainly as the mosque with the biggest Turkish community in the country.
Taskin Bakery, 103 Hazel Street. Opened in 1997, this family bakery built its name on bread pulled from brick hearth ovens: simit studded with sesame, soft pide, baklava, and savory borek. It was the first Turkish bakery in the country to sell pide as a branded loaf, and it supplies ethnic grocers across the New York area. A 2018 renovation added Anatolian touches, a fireplace, and tables, and the doors stay open around the clock.
Toros Restaurant, 1083 Main Street. Open since 1995, Toros is one of the corridor’s anchor kebab houses, turning out Adana, shish, and doner along with the long lunch that draws office workers and weekend visitors alike. For many newcomers a table here was an early taste of home, and for many suburban grandchildren it still is.
Oz Karadeniz, 1023 Main Street. Run by Ahmet and Yadigar Bayrou, this spot wears its origins in its name, which means Pure Black Sea, the region most of Paterson’s Turks trace back to. The doner turns in the window over bulgur and pilaf, family recipes served to a third generation now growing up behind the counter.
Zinnur, 1019 Main Street. For years the only Turkish bookshop in the tri-state area, Zinnur stocked the printed life of the community: Turkish-language books, newspapers, and the small things that keep a language alive across an ocean. In an enclave full of food, it fed a different appetite.
The Great Falls of the Passaic. A short walk north of the enclave, the seventy-seven-foot falls are the reason Paterson exists at all. The Turks who settled here inherited a city built around water and machinery, and made their own quieter industry of it, in ovens rather than looms.
Where the Paterson Turks Came From
Most of Paterson’s Turkish families trace their roots to the Black Sea coast, and to Giresun in particular, the steep green hazelnut country east of Samsun. The pull is plain in the names on the street, from Oz Karadeniz to the Turkish American Giresunlular Organization that helps run the city’s annual festival. The earliest Turkish-speaking arrivals also included Karachay and Azeri families, part of the broader movement of Muslim communities out of the late Ottoman world.
The reasons were the ordinary ones. The Black Sea provinces sent generations of men abroad for work, much as the hazelnut harvest itself draws seasonal labor from across Turkey. Wages in postwar America were higher, a foothold already existed in Paterson, and once a few families from a given town had settled, the rest had a reason and a roof to follow. The same chain logic shaped other communities in the city, from its Peruvian neighborhoods to the wider Arab corridor with roots that reach back to places like Bay Ridge in Brooklyn.
South Paterson Today
The corridor is smaller than it was and busier than its critics expect. On a Saturday the bakeries sell out of simit, the kebab houses fill at midday, and license plates from Bergen, Morris, and Rockland counties line Main Street as the children of the enclave drive back to shop. The Turkish American Day Parade still steps off near Main Street and Madison Avenue each year and runs to a park on the Clifton line, drawing thousands and, in good years, a consul general or two.
The homeland bond is anything but faded. When the February 2023 earthquakes devastated southern Turkey, South Paterson mobilized within days. Mayor Andre Sayegh helped lead the relief effort, the Turkish American actress Jennifer Aydin lent her name to a fund, and nightly fundraisers in the neighborhood pulled in thousands at a time, with the Dominican community and a local hospital pitching in alongside the Turks. A community accused of scattering proved, in a week, exactly how tightly it still holds.
Second and third generations now run the registers their grandparents once stood behind, and they answer in English and Turkish without thinking about it. The simit is still warm, the match is still on, and Main Street still smells like home. The story did not end when the numbers dropped. It just learned to live in two places at once.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Turks settle in Paterson, New Jersey?
The first Turks in Paterson arrived in the 1950s, drawn by cheap housing and empty storefronts left behind when the city’s silk industry declined. A foothold near New York City, plus chain migration from the Black Sea region, turned South Paterson into the largest Turkish American enclave in the country.
Is Paterson still a Turkish neighborhood today?
Yes, though smaller than at its peak. The Turks in Paterson now number roughly 20,000, down from about 60,000 fifty years ago, as families moved to nearby suburbs. Main Street remains the corridor’s anchor, with Turkish bakeries, restaurants, and mosques still operating.
What are the most famous Turkish landmarks in Paterson?
Ulu Cami on Knickerbocker Avenue, founded in 1978, is one of the oldest Turkish-founded mosques in the United States. Taskin Bakery on Hazel Street is known for brick-oven simit and pide, and Main Street kebab houses like Toros anchor the dining scene.
Where did the Turks in Paterson come from?
Most families trace their roots to Turkey’s Black Sea coast, especially the hazelnut-growing region around Giresun. The earliest arrivals also included Karachay and Azeri families, and a later wave came after Turkey’s 2001 financial crisis in search of work.
When did Turks first arrive in Paterson?
Turkish-speaking families began settling in South Paterson in the 1950s, alongside small Azeri and Karachay communities. Their numbers grew sharply through the 1960s and 1970s, and by 1978 the community was large enough to build the Ulu Cami mosque.
If your family’s story passed through the ovens and shopfronts of Little Istanbul, or any street where a homeland was rebuilt loaf by loaf, it deserves to be remembered with the same care.