Walk north on what the street signs now call Dominican Republic Way, and the air carries fried plantain, the snap of a barber’s clippers, and bachata leaking from a car with the windows down. This is Paterson, the old Silk City of New Jersey, and the Dominicans in Paterson have remade its centre into something that feels, on a Saturday afternoon, like a stretch of Santiago transplanted to the banks of the Passaic.
The Place
Paterson sits in Passaic County, fifteen miles northwest of Manhattan, built around the Great Falls of the Passaic River, a seventy-foot cascade that once powered the largest concentration of silk mills in the United States. It was conceived in 1791 as one of America’s first planned industrial cities, chartered by the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures and named for William Paterson, a framer of the Constitution and governor of New Jersey.
For a century it was a factory town of immigrants: English and Irish weavers, Italians, Germans, Jews, and later Puerto Ricans. By the 1880s Paterson held more than a third of all the silk factories in the country. The mills are mostly silent now, their brick shells lining the river, but the city they built still draws people who arrive with little and intend to make something.
How It Became Dominican
The story of Dominican Paterson begins, by the community’s own account, in 1947, with the arrival of the Mendoza family. They came when Paterson was still a working textile city, and they came to a place that already knew how to absorb newcomers and put them to work.
From the mills to the warehouses
The first Dominican arrivals reached a Paterson whose silk era was ending. As the textile industry declined through the middle of the twentieth century, the new Latino residents, Puerto Ricans first and then Dominicans, found work in processing plants, warehouses, the surviving textile remnant trade, and service jobs. It was not glamorous labour, but it was steady, and it anchored families in the city’s eastern and central wards.
Dominican migration to the United States accelerated sharply after 1965, when the death of the dictator Rafael Trujillo and changes in American immigration law opened the door. Most of those early migrants headed first for New York, and Washington Heights in upper Manhattan became the unofficial capital of the diaspora. Many Dominicans who settled in Paterson came as secondary migrants, crossing the Hudson from the Dominican enclave of Washington Heights in search of cheaper rents, a yard, and a quieter street to raise children.
Paterson offered something New York could not: room. The mill housing and three-family homes that had once held silk weavers were affordable, and a working family could buy rather than rent. The city’s long history as an immigrant gateway also meant the institutions were already there, the churches, the corner stores, the informal networks that help a newcomer find a job and a room. Dominicans slotted into a pattern Paterson had repeated for two centuries.
From renters to owners
What set Paterson apart was the speed with which Dominicans moved from tenancy to ownership. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Dominican entrepreneurs took over storefronts along Park Avenue and Market Street, many of them spaces previously run by Puerto Rican merchants who were moving on. Bakeries, bodegas, barbershops, restaurants and clothing stores changed hands, and the commercial spine of the east side became, block by block, a Dominican high street.
By the turn of the century the community had grown into the city’s largest Hispanic group, roughly 45,000 strong. Paterson today is about 64.5 percent Hispanic, and its Dominican population now ranks third in the United States, behind only New York City and the Dominican community in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The Dominican Republic eventually opened a satellite consular office in the city, a quiet acknowledgement of how many of its citizens had made Paterson home.
Claiming the map
The community’s confidence became literal on 8 October 2016, when a stretch of Park Avenue between Straight and Summer Streets was officially renamed Dominican Republic Way. Nearly two hundred people gathered for the unveiling at Juan Pablo Duarte Park, named for a founding father of the Dominican Republic. The renaming was championed by councilmen Luis Velez and Alex Mendez, the culmination of years of effort. An earlier attempt to honour Duarte on the same street had failed four years before, so the success felt earned.
The Sandy Hill neighbourhood, on the city’s east side, became the densest concentration. Census figures put its Dominican share at around 55.7 percent, with nearly half of all residents born abroad. It is the kind of place where you can live an entire day in Spanish, pay your bills, buy your groceries, get your hair cut, and eat three meals, without crossing a single threshold that is not run by someone from the island.
The Landmarks
Dominican Republic Way (Park Avenue, between Straight and Summer Streets). The renamed corridor is the symbolic heart of the community, a working high street of Dominican-owned bakeries, salons and restaurants. The green street signs, posted in 2016, doubled as a declaration that this part of Paterson belongs to the people who rebuilt it.
Juan Pablo Duarte Park, Paterson. The small park hosted the 2016 street-renaming ceremony and carries the name of the man who led the movement for Dominican independence in 1844. It functions as a civic anchor for a community that takes its national history seriously.
La Parrilla Dominicana Restaurante, 106 Park Avenue. A neighbourhood institution serving the dishes that taste of home, mofongo, fried fish, picaderas and the grilled meats the name promises. It is the sort of place where the menu needs no translation for the regulars.
Mini’s Restaurant, 251 Park Avenue. One of the steady-state Dominican kitchens along the avenue, the kind that keeps a steam table of stewed chicken, rice and beans ready for the lunchtime trade of workers and shoppers.
Elsa La Reina del Chicharron, 516 Park Avenue. The name translates as “Elsa, the Queen of Chicharron”, and the speciality is exactly what it advertises: crackling fried pork, a Dominican comfort food served by the pound to crowds who know the difference between good and great.
Mamajuana Cafe, Paterson. Named for the spiced rum infusion that is practically the Dominican national drink, this restaurant has built a reputation for a more polished take on Latino cuisine, pairing traditional recipes with a kitchen confident enough to update them.
The Great Falls of the Passaic, Paterson. The seventy-foot waterfall that built the city is now a national historical park, and on weekends Dominican families spread out on its lawns for cookouts, the roar of the falls behind the dembow on the speakers. The old engine of the Silk City has become a gathering place for the people who inherited it.
Where They Came From
The great majority of the early Dominican migration to the northeastern United States came from the Cibao, the fertile northern valley around the cities of Santiago and Salcedo. It is a region of tobacco, coffee and small towns, and its towns gave their names to dozens of hometown associations that knitted the diaspora together. Places like Moca, Tamboril and Baní recur again and again in the family stories of the northeast.
Paterson’s Dominican community is, in large part, a child of New York’s. The classic path led from a Cibao town to Washington Heights, where Dominicans called the neighbourhood “El Cibao” out of homesickness, and then, a generation later, west across the river to New Jersey. That double migration explains why Paterson Dominicans often have cousins in upper Manhattan and a grandmother still in Santiago, three points on a single family map.
Paterson Today
Paterson is not an affluent suburb, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. It is a dense, hard-working post-industrial city that has wrestled with poverty, with the long shadow of its lost mills, and with the question of who gets to lead a place that is now overwhelmingly Latino. In a city that is roughly 70 percent Hispanic, the gap between the population and its political leadership has been a live debate for years.
But the Dominican imprint is unmistakable and growing. Dominicans sit on the city council, run the businesses along Dominican Republic Way, coach the youth baseball leagues, and fill the streets every August for the Dominican parade and festival of New Jersey, a tradition that grew out of Paterson’s Dominican Week and was formalised in 1989 to commemorate the country’s War of Restoration. The festival began under clubs like the Ramon Matias Mella Club and the Dominican Club House of Paterson, and it remains one of the largest Dominican celebrations in the state.
Baseball threads through it all. The island’s national obsession is Paterson’s too, and on summer evenings the diamonds fill with children in the colours of Dominican teams while parents trade gossip from the bleachers in Spanish. Radio stations broadcast in the language of the island, the consular office handles the paperwork of two countries, and the bakeries sell the same dense bread and three-milk cake you would find in Santiago. It is a community that has stopped thinking of itself as visiting.
The city’s Dominicans share their corner of Paterson with other communities who arrived on similar terms, the Peruvians of Paterson’s Little Lima, the Palestinians of South Paterson, and the long-rooted Turkish community nearby. Across the county line, the older European enclaves endure too, from the Hungarians of Passaic to the Poles of Wallington. But the centre of Paterson now beats to a Dominican rhythm, and on a summer evening, with the smell of chicharron in the air and the falls roaring a few blocks away, it is hard to imagine it any other way.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Dominicans live in Paterson, New Jersey?
The Dominican community in Paterson numbers roughly 45,000 people, making it the city’s largest Hispanic group. The Dominicans in Paterson form the third-largest Dominican population of any American city, behind only New York City and Lawrence, Massachusetts.
When did Dominicans first settle in Paterson?
By the community’s own tradition, Dominican settlement in Paterson began in 1947 with the arrival of the Mendoza family. Migration accelerated after 1965 and again through the 1980s and 1990s, when many Dominicans crossed from Washington Heights in New York to Paterson in search of cheaper housing.
Why is part of Park Avenue called Dominican Republic Way?
On 8 October 2016, the city renamed the stretch of Park Avenue between Straight and Summer Streets as Dominican Republic Way, honouring the Dominicans in Paterson who had transformed it into a thriving business corridor. The effort was led by councilmen Luis Velez and Alex Mendez, and the unveiling took place at Juan Pablo Duarte Park.
Which neighbourhood is the heart of Dominican Paterson?
Sandy Hill, on the city’s east side, is the densest Dominican neighbourhood, with census figures putting its Dominican share at around 55.7 percent. The commercial spine runs along Park Avenue, now Dominican Republic Way, and Market Street.
Where in the Dominican Republic do Paterson’s Dominicans come from?
Most trace their roots to the Cibao, the northern valley around Santiago and Salcedo, with towns such as Moca, Tamboril and Baní heavily represented. Many families arrived by way of Washington Heights in Manhattan before settling across the Hudson in New Jersey.
Where can you eat Dominican food in Paterson?
Park Avenue is lined with Dominican kitchens, including La Parrilla Dominicana at 106 Park Avenue, Mini’s Restaurant at 251 Park Avenue, and Elsa La Reina del Chicharron at 516 Park Avenue. For a more contemporary take, Mamajuana Cafe blends traditional Dominican recipes with a modern kitchen.
If your family’s story passed through Paterson, or any of the places Dominicans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a town in the Cibao valley to a storefront on Dominican Republic Way, to wherever you are now.