On a Saturday morning in Tenafly, the parking lot off Grove Street fills early. Children in puffer coats are walked into a three-storey building where they will spend the morning learning Korean, while their parents linger over coffee and the week’s news in their first language. The Koreans in Tenafly, New Jersey have made this affluent Bergen County borough one of the most quietly Korean small towns in America, and the proof is not a strip of restaurants but something harder to build: a place families chose for the schools and stayed for each other.
The Place
Tenafly sits in the Northern Valley of Bergen County, a few miles north of the George Washington Bridge and just inland from the Hudson Palisades. Dutch settlers named it in the late 17th century from “Tiene Vly,” meaning roughly “ten swamps,” and the borough was incorporated on 24 January 1894 during the wave of municipal splintering that Bergen County remembers as “boroughitis.”
It is a town of large lots, mature trees, and a compact downtown clustered around the old rail line. By the 2013 to 2017 American Community Survey its median household income was $153,381, ranking it among the highest in New Jersey and more than double the statewide figure.
What draws people here, more than the money, is the school district. Tenafly High School won a National Blue Ribbon Award in 2005 and has ranked among the strongest public high schools in the state. For a certain kind of family, that ranking is a destination in itself.
How It Became Korean
The Korean story in this corner of Bergen County did not begin in Tenafly. It began down the hill, along the corridor that runs from Fort Lee through Palisades Park and Englewood Cliffs, where Korean immigrants began settling in the 1970s and arrived in larger numbers through the 1980s and 1990s.
The corridor at the bridge
Proximity to Manhattan was the first pull. Korean families could reach jobs and businesses across the George Washington Bridge while living more affordably and among neighbours who spoke the same language. The result was one of the densest Korean commercial strips in the United States, anchored by the restaurants and grocers of Fort Lee’s Main Street and the all-Korean signage of the Korean community in Palisades Park.
Bergen County now holds the highest concentration of Korean ancestry of any county in the United States. In 2022 roughly 6.5 percent of the county’s residents reported Korean ancestry, a share unmatched anywhere else in the country, according to census tallies of Bergen County. The corridor below the Palisades had become, by any measure, the Korean capital of the East Coast.
Moving up the valley
As that corridor matured, families who had built businesses and careers began looking north and uphill, toward larger houses and quieter streets. Tenafly, Englewood Cliffs, Demarest, Closter and Cresskill became the second act of the corridor, the towns you moved to once you could.
For Korean families the decision was rarely abstract. It came down to the school district. A Tenafly address meant a child could walk into one of the best public systems in New Jersey, and that single fact reorganised where a generation of Korean professionals chose to live.
A school-driven settlement
By 2010 Korean Americans made up about 15.4 percent of Tenafly’s population, and the borough’s Asian share had climbed from roughly 19 percent in 2000 to more than 30 percent by the 2020 census. At Tenafly High School, where Asian students account for roughly a third of enrolment, the largest single group is Korean.
That concentration created its own gravity. Families moved to Tenafly because other Korean families were already there, because a friend’s child had thrived in the schools, because the Korean churches and grocers of the corridor were a short drive back down the hill. The community grew not through a single founding event but through thousands of individual decisions that all pointed the same direction.
The weekend infrastructure
Around the public-school week, Korean Tenafly built a parallel calendar. Saturday Korean schools, weekend church services, and the after-hours tutoring culture of the hagwon filled the hours the district did not. The point was twofold: to keep the language and the faith alive in American-born children, and to push academically in a town where academic pressure was already high.
The clearest monument to that effort is the Korean Community Center on Grove Street. What began in 2000 as a small nonprofit for Korean seniors, founded in Fort Lee by Dr Kye-Eun Ma under the name Friends of Grace Seniors, grew into a full cultural institution. After moving to Englewood in 2004, the organisation bought land in Tenafly in 2013 and opened a purpose-built centre in 2015.
The hagwon culture, imported from Korea, deserves its own mention. After-school and weekend tutoring academies, some clustered in the corridor and some run informally, push children in mathematics, writing and test preparation beyond the demands of even a strong public district. For Korean parents who grew up inside that system in Seoul, it was less an indulgence than a default setting, and it helped make Tenafly’s already high-achieving schools more competitive still.
The Landmarks
Korean Community Center, 100 Grove Street. A modern three-storey, 21,000-square-foot building that opened in 2015, the KCC is the civic heart of Korean Tenafly. It runs language classes, programmes for young children and seniors, and welfare and cultural services for the wider corridor, and on weekends its parking lot is the busiest in town.
The Korean School of New Jersey, 10 Sunset Lane. A weekend school where American-born children learn to read, write and speak Korean, meeting on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings. For many families it is the institution that keeps a grandparent’s language inside the next generation.
Tenafly High School, 19 Columbus Drive. The reason a great many Korean families are in Tenafly at all. A National Blue Ribbon school where roughly a third of students are Asian, it is both the draw and the proving ground, the place where the community’s emphasis on education meets the American transcript.
Migam, 7 West Clinton Avenue. A Korean restaurant in the heart of the small downtown, the kind of unflashy neighbourhood spot that signals a community has put down roots rather than simply passing through on the way to Fort Lee.
Ah Suh Won, 33 Highwood Avenue. A Korean-Chinese restaurant serving jjajangmyeon and jjamppong, the comfort food of the diaspora. Korean-Chinese cuisine is a cultural marker in its own right, and finding it in a suburb like Tenafly is a reliable sign of a settled Korean population.
The Tenafly downtown rail corridor, along County Road. The compact centre where the old station and the shops cluster gives the borough a walkable core, and Korean-owned businesses and bakeries have woven themselves into a streetscape that still reads, on the surface, as classic suburban New Jersey.
The Fort Lee and Palisades Park corridor, a short drive south. Not in Tenafly, but inseparable from it. The grocers, banks, churches and round-the-clock restaurants down the hill are where Tenafly families do their bigger shopping and find the density a quiet borough cannot supply on its own.
Where They Came From
The Koreans of Tenafly are overwhelmingly a post-1965 immigration, drawn from South Korea after the Hart-Celler Act reopened the United States to large-scale Asian migration. Many arrived first in New York City or the dense corridor below the Palisades before moving up to Bergen County’s quieter towns.
They came as professionals, business owners and corporate families, including employees of Korean firms with American operations clustered around the New York metropolitan area. The common thread was less a single home region than a shared ambition for their children, the conviction that an American education in a top district was an inheritance worth relocating for.
That is why Tenafly’s Korean community looks different from older ethnic enclaves built around a factory or a parish. It was assembled by families reading school rankings, comparing notes at church, and following each other up the hill from the Korean community in Fort Lee and the Korean families of Englewood Cliffs.
Tenafly Today
Today Tenafly is a borough where the Korean presence is woven through daily life rather than announced by a commercial strip. There is no Koreatown sign at the town line, because the heart of Korean commerce remains down the hill in Fort Lee and Palisades Park. What Tenafly has instead is the residential and institutional core: the homes, the community centre, the weekend schools, the churches that fill on Sundays.
That quietness is partly generational. The children who were carried into Saturday Korean school are now grown, some staying in Bergen County, some scattered across the country, navigating American and Korean names and identities. The community has reached the stage where its founding immigrants are ageing into the senior programmes the KCC was first built to serve.
What endures is the original logic. Korean families still arrive in Tenafly for the schools, still drive down to the corridor for the food and the groceries, and still gather on Grove Street on weekends. The pattern that built this community is the same one still bringing new families in, much as it has in the Korean community in Annandale, Virginia.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Koreans live in Tenafly, New Jersey?
Korean Americans made up about 15.4 percent of Tenafly’s population as of the 2010 census, one of the highest shares of any town in the United States. The borough’s overall Asian population rose above 30 percent by 2020, with Koreans the largest group within it.
Why did so many Koreans move to Tenafly?
The single biggest reason is the school district. Tenafly High School is a National Blue Ribbon school and consistently ranks among New Jersey’s best, and the Koreans in Tenafly, New Jersey are largely families who relocated for that education after building lives in the Fort Lee and Palisades Park corridor.
Is there a Koreatown in Tenafly?
Not in the commercial sense. The dense Korean business strips are down the hill in Fort Lee and Palisades Park. Tenafly is the residential and institutional side of the same community, home to the Korean Community Center, weekend Korean schools and many Korean churches.
What is the Korean Community Center in Tenafly?
The KCC at 100 Grove Street is a three-storey, 21,000-square-foot cultural centre that opened in 2015. It grew from a nonprofit founded in 2000 for Korean seniors and now offers language classes, children’s and senior programmes, and welfare services for the wider Bergen County Korean community.
How is Tenafly connected to Fort Lee and Palisades Park?
They are stages of one migration. Korean families settled the Fort Lee and Palisades Park corridor near the George Washington Bridge from the 1970s onward, then many moved north and uphill to quieter, more expensive towns like Tenafly, Englewood Cliffs and Demarest as they prospered.
Where do Koreans in Tenafly eat and shop?
Tenafly has Korean restaurants such as Migam on West Clinton Avenue and the Korean-Chinese spot Ah Suh Won on Highwood Avenue. For larger Korean grocery shopping and the full range of restaurants, the Koreans in Tenafly, New Jersey typically drive a few minutes south to the Fort Lee and Palisades Park corridor.
If your family’s story passed through Tenafly, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a first apartment in the Fort Lee corridor to a house up the hill near the Tenafly schools, to wherever you are now.