On Court Street, a gray stucco tower rises into the upstate sky, topped not by a cross but by a slender minaret. Look closer and the round windows hold a crescent moon and star where stained glass once told a different story. This was Central Methodist, a church the city had given up on, its congregation gone by the 1990s and a wrecking ball penciled into the budget. Then a community that had lost almost everything arrived, paid a thousand dollars, and spent four years putting it back together with their own hands. The Bosnians in Utica did not just rent a corner of a fading mill town. They rebuilt it.
East Utica: The Place
Utica sits on the Mohawk River in the center of New York State, roughly halfway between Albany and Syracuse along the old Erie Canal and the New York State Thruway. East Utica is the city’s dense grid of two- and three-story wood-frame houses, built for the textile workers who once filled the mills. The blocks run tight and walkable, anchored by Bleecker Street, the historic commercial spine that has fed wave after wave of newcomers. Housing here was cheap, plentiful, and in 1993, mostly empty.
How East Utica Became a Bosnian Town
Before the Bosnians
Utica made cloth. By 1919 two-thirds of working Uticans were employed in textiles, and the city called itself the knit goods capital of the world, with more than twenty mills running day and night. The labor was Italian, Polish, German, Irish, Welsh, the families who had filled East Utica’s houses and crowded its parish churches.
Then the work left. After World War II the mills moved south, chasing cheaper, non-union labor and the new air-conditioned plants of the Carolinas and Georgia. General Electric opened a plant on French Road in 1951 and held the line for a while, but the long slide had begun. By the 1980s and 1990s, GE and Lockheed Martin were closing facilities too. People followed the jobs out. The houses emptied, the tax base shrank, and Utica became a textbook Rust Belt city, losing population for forty years.
The Bosnians Arrive
The first Bosnian refugees reached Utica in 1993, while the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was still raging. They came through the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, a resettlement agency founded in 1979 under its first director, Roberta Douglas, with backing from local clergy, the school superintendent, the county, and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. The agency had cut its teeth on Vietnamese and other arrivals in the 1980s. The Bosnians would become the largest group it ever resettled.
The numbers climbed fast. The center placed 79 Bosnians in the first year of the program, then 1,145 in 1997 alone, the most people it had ever settled in a single year. By 2006, when the last refugee-status arrival from the former Yugoslavia came through the door, the agency had assisted just over 4,500 people from the Balkans, the great majority of them Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks.
What made it stick was chain migration. A family settled, found that Utica had work and houses they could actually afford, and called the relatives still in camps in Germany or back home. Cousins followed cousins, neighbors followed neighbors, until whole streets in East Utica filled with people who had known one another in another country. It is the same pattern that drew Bhutanese refugees to Akron, Ohio and Burmese families to Fort Wayne, Indiana, each community pooling toward a place where the first arrivals had found a foothold.
East Utica at Its Peak
The Bosnians bought hundreds of the run-down houses nobody else wanted, often for a few thousand dollars, and went to work. They tore out kitchens and rebuilt them, added bedrooms, raised garages, built decks, and planted gardens in yards that had gone to weeds. Many bought two-family homes, lived in one half, and rented out the other while they fixed it.
It helped that so many of them already knew how. They had been machinists, masons, electricians, and tradespeople in Bosnia before the war scattered them, people with educations and middle-class lives that had been interrupted rather than absent. In 2005 the United Nations refugee agency put Utica on the cover of its magazine and called it the town that loves refugees, a phrase that stuck to the city for good.
By day the men worked the remaining factories and construction sites; by evening East Utica filled with the smell of grilled meat and the strong coffee Bosnians drink slowly and socially. Bleecker Street picked up its old polyglot rhythm again, Bosnian signs going up beside the Italian pastry shops that had been there a century.
The Change
The refugees who arrived as children grew up American. The second generation went to Utica’s schools, then to college, and came back as doctors, nurses, physical therapists, contractors, police officers, firefighters, and restaurant owners. Their first language is English; some now study Bosnian as a heritage language to keep it from slipping away.
Not everyone stayed. As in every immigrant story, some of the young moved on to bigger cities and warmer states. But enough remained, and enough kept arriving through family ties, that the Bosnian presence became permanent rather than provisional, woven into the fabric of the city’s slow comeback.
The Landmarks of Bosnian Utica
Bosnian Islamic Association of Utica (306 Court Street) is the community’s heart and its most visible monument. The building had been Central Methodist, abandoned by the late 1990s and slated for a demolition that would have cost the city roughly a million dollars. In 2008 the Bosnians bought it for one thousand dollars and spent the next four years converting it themselves, covering the old red brick in stucco and turning the steeple into a minaret. Sakib Duracak, a contractor who served as the association’s president, became one of the public faces of that effort.
Ruznic is the Bosnian restaurant Uticans send visitors to for the real thing: cevapi, the little grilled minced-meat sausages served with raw onion and bread, and burek, the coiled meat pie that anchors every Bosnian table. The dining room leans into it, with Bosnian television playing and prices kept low enough that it feels less like a restaurant than someone’s front room.
Tarik’s, a small Bosnian cafe on Bank Street just off the downtown drag, is the kind of place where the coffee comes the proper way and the pastries and desserts are the ones people grew up on. It is built for sitting, which is the whole point of Bosnian coffee.
Dragons Cafe at 249 Bleecker Street captures how blended the neighborhood has become: a single counter serving both Japanese and Bosnian food on the same street where Italian bakeries have stood for generations. It is East Utica in one storefront.
Bleecker Street itself is the living landmark. Running from downtown out into East Utica, it threads together Bosnian, Lebanese, Syrian, Asian, Latino, and old Italian businesses block by block, the commercial corridor that has absorbed every group the city has taken in.
The Bosnian Community Center of Central New York, opened in downtown Utica in 2025, is the newest chapter. Founded by Elvisa Alikadic, it offers programs including Bosnian-language instruction for the children of refugees, a sign of a community now investing in keeping its culture alive rather than simply finding its feet.
Where the Utica Bosnians Came From
Most of Utica’s Bosnians are Bosniaks, the country’s Muslims, driven out during the 1992 to 1995 war and the campaign of ethnic cleansing that emptied much of northern and eastern Bosnia. The hardest-hit places, the towns whose names recur in any account of the conflict, lie in that arc: Prijedor in the northwest, Zvornik and Bijeljina in the east, Doboj in the north, and Srebrenica, where the 1995 massacre became the worst single atrocity in Europe since the Second World War.
Utica is home to families who survived Srebrenica, and the community marks July 11, the date of the genocide, with an annual remembrance walk. Many arrived not directly from Bosnia but after years in refugee camps and waystations across Germany and elsewhere in Europe, carrying the war with them and choosing, in a quiet mill town in central New York, to put it down. The same displacement seeded the larger Bosnian enclave around Bevo Mill in St. Louis, the two cities now the best-known Bosnian American communities in the country.
Bosnian Utica Today
The Bosnians are widely described as the most successful of the groups Utica has resettled, and the evidence is in the houses. Whole stretches of East Utica that were collapsing in the early 1990s are now occupied, repaired, and on the tax rolls, fixed by families who had every reason to give up and did not.
Their economic reach runs past the city limits. Many Uticans, Bosnians among them, work at the Chobani yogurt plant in nearby New Berlin, founded by Hamdi Ulukaya, himself an immigrant who reached the United States in 1994 and built a company that has made a point of hiring refugees. The factory is one more thread tying the region’s revival to the people the rest of the country was slower to welcome.
The mosque is full, the restaurants are open, the new community center has its doors up, and a generation that speaks unaccented English is choosing to learn the language of grandparents who arrived with little more than their trades. Utica did not save the Bosnians and the Bosnians did not save Utica. They rebuilt each other, one house at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Bosnians settle in Utica, New York?
The Bosnians in Utica were resettled there from 1993 onward by the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, which had decades of experience placing newcomers. The city’s collapsing economy meant cheap, empty houses in East Utica, and once early families found work and affordable homes, chain migration brought relatives and neighbors to join them.
Is Utica still a Bosnian community today?
Yes. East Utica remains a center of Bosnian life, with the Bosnian Islamic Association mosque on Court Street, Bosnian restaurants and cafes, and a new Bosnian Community Center that opened downtown in 2025. A US-born second generation now studies Bosnian as a heritage language to keep the culture alive.
What are the most famous Bosnian landmarks in Utica?
The best known is the Bosnian Islamic Association of Utica at 306 Court Street, a former Methodist church the community bought in 2008 and converted into a mosque. Others include the restaurant Ruznic, the cafe Tarik’s on Bank Street, and the international stretch of Bleecker Street through East Utica.
Where did the Utica Bosnians come from?
Most are Bosniaks, Bosnian Muslims displaced during the 1992 to 1995 war from the heavily affected towns of northern and eastern Bosnia, including Prijedor, Zvornik, Bijeljina, Doboj, and Srebrenica. Many reached Utica after spending years in refugee camps elsewhere in Europe.
When did Bosnians first arrive in Utica?
The first Bosnian refugees arrived in Utica in 1993, during the war. Arrivals peaked in 1997, when 1,145 Bosnians were resettled in a single year, and by 2006 just over 4,500 people from the former Yugoslavia had been resettled in the area, making the Bosnians in Utica the largest group the city took in.
If your family’s story passed through East Utica, a rebuilt house on a quiet street or a coffee that takes an hour to drink, that history deserves to be remembered with care.