On a Saturday morning along Washington Road in Parlin, the line outside a Gujarati temple housed in a former YMCA stretches into the car park, while a few minutes east on Route 9 the smell of dosa batter drifts out of a strip-mall kitchen. This is the quiet centre of gravity for Indians in Sayreville, a Middlesex County borough that was built on brick and has, over a single generation, become home to one of central New Jersey’s steadiest South Asian communities.
The Place
Sayreville is a borough of roughly 45,000 people in Middlesex County, wrapped around a bend in the Raritan River that early settlers called Roundabout. It spans about 18.66 square miles and folds in several older neighbourhoods, among them Parlin, Morgan and Melrose, each with its own character.
It sits in good company. Sayreville borders Edison, East Brunswick and Old Bridge, three of the towns most associated with Indian life in the state. That position, close to everything yet quieter and more affordable than its famous neighbours, is much of the reason Indian families have chosen it.
How It Became Indian
Sayreville’s first fortune came out of the ground. The clay banks along the Raritan made it one of the great brick-making centres of the United States, and the company that defined the town was Sayre and Fisher.
Brick, clay and a company town
James R. Sayre Jr. and Peter Fisher founded the Sayre and Fisher Brick Company in 1850. The firm grew into one of the largest brickworks in the world, lifting output from 54 million bricks a year in 1878 to 178 million by 1913, and producing some 6.2 billion bricks in its first century. The borough took its name from Sayre, was incorporated as a township in 1876 and reincorporated as a borough in 1919.
For decades Sayreville was a working town of kilns, clay pits and the immigrant labourers who manned them. Before it was renamed for Sayre, the area was known simply as Roundabout, after the loop the Raritan makes as it runs to the bay. Generations of Polish, Irish, German and Hungarian workers passed through the company houses near the river, so that long before the Indian families arrived, Sayreville already knew how to absorb newcomers.
The clay industry held on until around 1970, by which time the borough had become a place of modest postwar houses and easy highway access rather than a company town. The kilns went cold, the workforce scattered into other trades, and the waterfront that had shipped bricks down the river fell quiet. It was into that second, post-industrial Sayreville, cheaper and more open than its glory years, that the next wave of arrivals would come.
The first Indian arrivals
The Indian story in Sayreville is younger than the brick story, and it is inseparable from the wider Middlesex County migration. After the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 reopened the United States to Asian arrivals, engineers, doctors and pharmacists from India began settling across central New Jersey, drawn by the pharmaceutical corridor and the technology firms strung along the highways.
Edison and Iselin became the visible heart of that world, with the shops and restaurants of Oak Tree Road’s Little India. Sayreville, just to the south, was where some of those same families went looking for a house they could actually afford, with a yard and a short commute. You can read the fuller version of the Edison chapter in our piece on the Indians in Edison, New Jersey, and the Iselin half of that corridor in the Indians in Iselin, New Jersey.
What made Sayreville workable was the highway. Route 9 runs straight up through the borough and on into the heart of the Little India strip, so a family settling in Parlin or Melrose was never more than a short drive from the temples, sari shops and supermarkets that had grown up to the north. You could keep the price of a Sayreville house and the reach of an Edison address at the same time.
The community puts down roots
A community announces itself when it builds a place to pray. In 1990 a group of Gujarati families established Shri Bhanktinidhi Inc. and acquired a former YMCA property in the Parlin section of Sayreville, turning it into the Dwarkadhish Temple. For a town with no historic temple, that conversion of a community building into a Vaishnav shrine was a small landmark in itself.
Through the 1990s and 2000s the pattern deepened. Asian residents, the large majority of them of Indian origin, climbed past 16 percent of the borough’s population, a figure that puts Sayreville firmly in the band of central Jersey towns reshaped by South Asian settlement. Grocers and restaurants followed the families, clustering along Route 9 and Washington Road where the rents were lower than on Oak Tree Road.
A satellite of Little India
Crucially, Sayreville never tried to become Edison. It became a comfortable satellite of it. Families could live in Parlin or off Ernston Road, send their children to the borough schools, and drive ten minutes north to Oak Tree Road for a sari, a sweet box or a full weekly shop. That arrangement, an affordable home in a quieter borough within reach of a major Indian commercial strip, is the same logic that built the Indian presence in nearby East Brunswick and South Brunswick.
The Landmarks
Dwarkadhish Temple, 717 Washington Road, Parlin. The spiritual anchor of Indian Sayreville, founded in 1990 by Gujarati Pushtimarg Vaishnav families in a converted YMCA building. Dedicated to Shri Dwarkadhish, a form of Krishna, it runs daily darshan and the elaborate seva of the Pushtimarg tradition, from Mangal to Shayan.
Dimple’s Bombay Talk, 999 Route 9, Sayreville. A long-running vegetarian Indian restaurant and chaat house on the highway, the kind of place families stop at after temple for pav bhaji and dosa. Its location on Route 9 makes it a natural meeting point for the borough’s Gujarati and wider Indian crowd.
Royal Indian Restaurant, 2909 Washington Road, Parlin. A neighbourhood curry house close to the temple end of Parlin, serving the North Indian standards that anchor most Sayreville celebrations and takeaway orders.
The Route 9 corridor. Not a single address but a string of them. The stretch of Route 9 through Sayreville carries the Indian grocers, sweet shops and restaurants that serve the eastern side of the borough, sparing residents the trip up to Edison for everyday needs.
Sayreville War Memorial High School. The borough’s public high school, with around 1,750 students, is where many of the community’s second-generation children pass through, and a frequent feeder into the engineering and pharmacy tracks that drew their parents to New Jersey in the first place.
Oak Tree Road, Edison and Iselin. The mile-and-a-half commercial spine of central Jersey’s Little India lies just north of the borough line. For Sayreville’s Indian families it functions as the regional high street, the place for festival shopping, gold and the largest grocery runs.
Sayreville Riverfront Park. Built on the old industrial waterfront where the brickworks once stood, the riverside park is now a shared civic space, as likely to host an evening walk by a Gujarati family as a brick-town old-timer.
Where They Came From
The community’s centre of gravity is Gujarati. The founding of the Dwarkadhish Temple by Pushtimarg Vaishnav families points to roots in Gujarat, and Gujarati networks have long been strong across this corner of Middlesex County.
But Sayreville, like the wider region, draws on more than one origin. The pharmaceutical and IT migration that built central Jersey’s Indian population brought Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi and Hindi-speaking families too, many arriving by way of professional work in the corridor’s labs and software firms. Chain migration did the rest, as early settlers sponsored relatives and recommended the borough to friends.
Middlesex County holds the largest Asian Indian population of any county in New Jersey, and the state itself counts Indians as the single largest Asian-origin group. Sayreville is one small, affordable node inside that much larger map.
Sayreville Today
Today Sayreville is neither a Little India nor an ordinary commuter borough. It is a place where the two histories sit side by side: the brick-town families whose grandparents worked the kilns, and the Indian families who arrived in the last thirty years and now make up a visible share of the population.
The community here is practical rather than showy. There is no Oak Tree Road within the borough, and that suits people who wanted the value and quiet of Sayreville while keeping Edison’s shops a short drive away. The temple, the Route 9 restaurants and the grocers do the day-to-day work of keeping the culture close.
What you see now is a second generation moving through the borough’s schools and on into the same professions, and a steady, unspectacular growth that mirrors the broader story of Indian New Jersey. Sayreville did not set out to become an Indian town. It simply became a good place to be an Indian family, and that, in the end, is its own kind of landmark.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Sayreville, New Jersey?
Sayreville’s 2020 census population was about 45,345, of whom roughly 16.9 percent, or close to 7,600 people, were Asian. The large majority of that Asian population is of Indian origin, making Indians in Sayreville one of the borough’s most significant communities, though the Census does not publish a separate borough-level Indian figure.
Is there a Hindu temple in Sayreville?
Yes. The Dwarkadhish Temple at 717 Washington Road in the Parlin section was founded in 1990 by Gujarati Pushtimarg Vaishnav families in a converted former YMCA building. It is dedicated to Shri Dwarkadhish, a form of Krishna.
Why did Indians settle in Sayreville rather than Edison?
Many Indian families chose Sayreville because it offered more affordable houses and a quieter setting than Edison while remaining only a short drive from Edison and Iselin’s Oak Tree Road. It became, in effect, a comfortable satellite of central Jersey’s Little India.
Where do Indians in Sayreville shop and eat?
Within the borough, Indian restaurants such as Dimple’s Bombay Talk on Route 9 and Royal Indian Restaurant in Parlin serve the community, alongside grocers along the Route 9 corridor. For larger festival and grocery shopping, families typically drive north to Oak Tree Road in Edison and Iselin.
What part of Sayreville has the most Indian residents?
Parlin, in the eastern part of the borough, is the most associated with the Indian community, anchored by the Dwarkadhish Temple on Washington Road and Indian businesses along nearby Route 9. Indian families live throughout Sayreville, but Parlin is the recognisable hub.
Where did Sayreville’s Indian community come from?
The community has a strong Gujarati core, reflected in the founding of its Pushtimarg Vaishnav temple, but also includes Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi and Hindi-speaking families. Most arrived through the professional migration that built central New Jersey’s Indian population, working in the region’s pharmaceutical and technology industries.
If your family’s story passed through Sayreville, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a temple founded by Gujarati families on Washington Road, to a brick town reborn as a quiet centre of Indian New Jersey, to wherever you are now.