They called it the Magyar Mile. Not officially. But for most of the twentieth century, if you got off the train at New Brunswick station and walked the stretch of French and Somerset where the two streets cross, you were in Hungary. The smell of paprika drifting from a butcher’s doorway. Csárdás music threading out of a social club. Mass said in Magyar on a Sunday morning at St. Ladislaus. By the 1930s, one in three New Brunswick residents was Hungarian, and the city had earned a nickname that stuck for generations: the Hungarian capital of America.
The Place Itself
New Brunswick sits on the south bank of the Raritan River in Middlesex County, half an hour by train from New York Penn Station on the Northeast Corridor line. The old Hungarian quarter ran through the Fifth and Sixth Wards, anchored by the long diagonal of Somerset Street and the parallel run of French Street.
The housing is mostly two and three-storey frame and brick, built tight to the sidewalk, with the river and the old factory district to the north. Today Rutgers University dominates the skyline a few blocks west, but the heart of the Magyar Mile stayed where it was. You can still walk it.
How It Became Hungarian
Before the Magyars
New Brunswick was already an old city before the Hungarians arrived. Dutch and English settlers founded it in the 1680s on the Raritan River crossing, the colonial seal still names it. By the late nineteenth century it had become an industrial town, with cigar factories, rubber works, and a young company called Johnson & Johnson that had opened its doors on George Street in 1886.
The Fifth Ward, the low ground near the river, was where the factories needed workers. That is where the Hungarians went.
The First Wave: 1888 to 1914
The first Hungarian known to have settled in New Brunswick arrived in 1888. Within a decade, hundreds more had followed, then thousands. Most were rural Magyars from the eastern and northern reaches of the Hungarian Kingdom, leaving small farms and falling rye prices for the promise of factory pay in New Jersey.
Word travelled back home by letter. A cousin in New Brunswick was making good wages at the bandage factory. Someone’s brother had taken a room above a saloon on French Street. The chain pulled tight, village by village, and by 1910 there were 2,463 Hungarians in New Brunswick, more than ten per cent of the city.
By 1915, that share had nearly doubled. At the peak, Hungarian workers made up roughly two-thirds of the Johnson & Johnson factory floor. The United Cigar Company hired them by the hundreds. Hungarian-owned grocery stores, taverns, butchers, and bakeries lined French Street to feed and water them.
New Brunswick at Its Peak
The community founded its first institutions almost immediately. The Magyar Reformed Church organised in 1903. St. Ladislaus, the Hungarian Roman Catholic parish, followed in 1904 on Plum Street. Over the next two decades, Hungarians in New Brunswick built twenty-two societies, six churches, and a synagogue, plus the parochial schools and burial societies that held a working-class diaspora together.
Daily life ran on Magyar. Children learned Hungarian at home and parish school. Adults read Hungarian-language newspapers printed in town. By the 1930s, one in three New Brunswick residents was Hungarian, and a quarter of all the Hungarians in New Jersey lived inside the city limits.
The 1956 Refugees
The second great wave arrived in a hurry, and not for jobs. When the Hungarian Revolution against Soviet rule collapsed in November 1956, around 200,000 people fled across the Austrian border. Under Operation Safe Haven, the United States flew and shipped tens of thousands of them to Camp Kilmer, a former military base in Edison, a few miles up the road from New Brunswick.
About 30,000 Hungarian refugees were processed at Camp Kilmer between late 1956 and June 1957. Roughly a thousand of them stayed put, settling in New Brunswick because there was already a Hungarian-speaking city waiting for them: a parish, a butcher, a fraternal hall, neighbours who knew the words.
The fifty-sixers, as they came to be called, were politically and culturally distinct from the factory-wave Magyars who had arrived two generations earlier. Many were students, intellectuals, professionals. Their politics were sharper, shaped by Soviet occupation. They added a new layer of Hungarian life on top of the old, more bookish, more Cold War, just as fiercely Magyar.
The Change
From the 1960s on, the second and third generations did what working-class American children did everywhere. They went to college on the GI Bill, then on student loans. They bought houses in Highland Park, North Brunswick, South Brunswick, Edison. The Hungarian addresses moved out of the city and into the surrounding suburbs.
The Fifth Ward did not empty. It changed hands. Puerto Rican families arrived in the 1960s and 1970s. Mexican migration into New Brunswick accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s, especially from the state of Oaxaca. French Street, where Hungarian taverns once outnumbered everything else, is now lined with Mexican bakeries, Oaxacan restaurants, and Spanish-language storefronts.
The Hungarian community did not disappear. It dispersed. The institutions stayed.
The Landmarks
The Hungarian Heritage Center, 300 Somerset Street. The American Hungarian Foundation opened the Heritage Center here in 1989, in the old Potter Needle Factory building at the corner of Somerset and Bethany. It is the only facility in the United States that combines a Hungarian museum, library, and archive under one roof, with everything from fifteenth-century books to immigrant-family photographs. The Foundation itself moved to New Brunswick in 1959 and has been the keeper of the city’s Magyar story ever since.
Magyar Reformed Church, 175 Somerset Street. Founded in 1903, the oldest Hungarian Protestant congregation in the city. Services are still bilingual, Hungarian and English, and the building remains a working anchor on Somerset Street. Generations were baptised, married, and buried out of this church.
St. Ladislaus Church, 40 Plum Street. The Hungarian Catholic parish, founded in 1904 and named for the medieval Hungarian king and saint László. The parish school opened in 1914. The church marked its 110th anniversary in 2014 and still offers a Hungarian-language Mass. It is now part of Holy Family Parish under the Diocese of Metuchen.
The Hungarian American Athletic Club. A working fraternal hall and athletic club, locally known as the Magyar Klub, descended from one of the original Hungarian fraternal societies of the early twentieth century. The kind of place where the older men still play cards on a Friday night and the kitchen smells of paprika and onions.
The Hungarian Festival, Somerset Street. Held on the first Saturday in June since 1975, the festival closes Somerset Street between Bethany and Division and turns it into Little Hungary for a day. Folk dance, Magyar music, paprikás, lángos, kolbász, palacsinta. Tens of thousands come, many of them descendants of the factory-wave and refugee-wave Magyars, driving in from the suburbs to the street their grandparents walked.
Camp Kilmer. Not in New Brunswick proper, but in Edison and Piscataway just to the north. The barracks where 30,000 Hungarians spent their first American winter, and from which 1,000 walked into New Brunswick and stayed. Most of the site is now Rutgers’ Livingston campus and a national reserve centre, but the role it played in the Cold War story of New Brunswick’s Hungarians is hard to overstate.
Where They Came From
The first wave came from the Kingdom of Hungary as it existed before the First World War, which was a much larger country than the Hungary on a modern map. They came from villages in what are now southeastern Slovakia, Transylvania in present-day Romania, Bácska and the Vojvodina, and the Hungarian-speaking counties of what is now Ukraine. Many were rural Reformed Protestants from the eastern lowlands, others were Roman Catholics from the north, a smaller number were Hungarian Jews from larger towns.
After 1920, when the Treaty of Trianon redrew Hungary’s borders and stripped it of two-thirds of its territory, many of those home villages were no longer in Hungary at all. New Brunswick became a place where Magyar identity lived more durably than the borders of the homeland.
The 1956 émigrés were different again. They came mostly from Budapest and the major towns, and many were urban, educated, and politically anti-communist. They were the writers, the engineers, the students who had marched on the radio station. New Brunswick absorbed both: the rural factory hand and the Budapest intellectual, in the same parishes, at the same festival.
New Brunswick Today
You can still find the Magyar Mile if you know where to look. The Heritage Center is open Wednesday through Sunday. Magyar Reformed and St. Ladislaus still ring their bells. The festival fills Somerset Street every June. But the day-to-day Hungarian neighbourhood is gone. Most of the families with Hungarian surnames are out in Highland Park, North Brunswick, Piscataway, Edison, South Brunswick, raising the fourth and fifth generations.
The streets that used to be Hungarian are now largely Mexican and Central American, in particular along French Street. New Brunswick is roughly half Latino today. The Oaxacan community has done in two generations what the Magyars did in three: built churches, opened bakeries, made the city sound and smell like home.
The Hungarians did not lose New Brunswick. They built it, lived it, and moved on. Once a year, on a Saturday in June, they come back.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Hungarians settle in New Brunswick, New Jersey?
Hungarians settled in New Brunswick from the late 1880s onward because Johnson & Johnson, the United Cigar Company, and other factories along the Raritan River were hiring. Chain migration did the rest: each new arrival pulled siblings and cousins across, until two-thirds of the Johnson & Johnson workforce was Hungarian. A second wave came after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, when refugees were processed at Camp Kilmer and many chose to settle in a city that already spoke their language.
Is New Brunswick still Hungarian today?
Not in the way it was a century ago. Most Hungarian American families moved to the surrounding suburbs of Highland Park, North Brunswick, Edison, and Piscataway during the second half of the twentieth century. The institutions stayed: the Hungarian Heritage Center, the Magyar Reformed Church, St. Ladislaus, the Hungarian American Athletic Club, and the annual Hungarian Festival on Somerset Street. New Brunswick itself is now roughly half Latino, with a large Mexican and Oaxacan community.
What are the most famous Hungarian landmarks in New Brunswick?
The Hungarian Heritage Center at 300 Somerset Street, the Magyar Reformed Church at 175 Somerset Street, and St. Ladislaus Roman Catholic Church at 40 Plum Street are the three core institutions. The Hungarian Festival, held on the first Saturday of June since 1975, closes Somerset Street and remains the most visible Hungarian event on the East Coast.
Where in Hungary did the New Brunswick Magyars come from?
The first wave came from rural villages across the old Kingdom of Hungary before the First World War: parts of present-day Slovakia, Transylvania in Romania, the Bácska and Vojvodina region, and the Hungarian-speaking counties of modern Ukraine. The 1956 refugees came predominantly from Budapest and other major Hungarian cities, and tended to be more urban, educated, and politically active.
When did Hungarians first arrive in New Brunswick?
The first known Hungarian settler arrived in 1888. By 1910 there were 2,463 Hungarians in New Brunswick, around ten per cent of the city. By 1915 that share had nearly doubled, and by the 1930s one in three New Brunswick residents was Hungarian, making the city the most Hungarian in America.
What happened to the Hungarian community after 1956?
The 1956 refugees added a new and distinct wave to the existing factory-era community. From the 1960s on, both groups moved increasingly out of the city into the surrounding suburbs, while keeping their churches, festival, and Heritage Center in New Brunswick. The result is a Hungarian community that no longer fills the Fifth Ward but still returns to it every June and every Sunday.
If your family’s story passed through New Brunswick, or any of the places the Magyars made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in old Greater Hungary to the corner of French and Somerset, to wherever you are now.