On any Saturday morning, the line at Gencarelli’s on Broad Street folds out the door, and the smell of warm semolina and almond paste carries half a block. This is the everyday liturgy of the Italians in Bloomfield, New Jersey: a township of more than fifty thousand people in Essex County where, by one count, roughly a quarter of residents still claim Italian descent. The accents have softened across three generations, but the bread is the same.
The Place
Bloomfield sits just north of Newark, incorporated as a township on 23 March 1812 from a slice of old Newark Township. It was named in honour of Joseph Bloomfield, the New Jersey governor and general who led state troops in the Whiskey Rebellion.
For most of the nineteenth century it was a mill town, with several miles of the Morris Canal cutting through it and the Oakes woollen mill supplying the Union Army. By the twentieth century the canal was gone and the factories had changed hands: General Electric, Westinghouse, Schering and the Charms Candy Company all built here. Those plants are what pulled the Italians out of Newark and put them on Bloomfield’s payrolls, a short bus ride from the two-family houses they were starting to buy.
Today four interchanges of the Garden State Parkway touch the township, which tells you most of what you need to know about how it became a suburb. Bloomfield is the commuter belt made solid: brick two-families, a green at its centre, and Bloomfield Avenue running like a spine through the middle of it.
How It Became Italian
The Italians did not arrive in Bloomfield first. They arrived in Newark, and then they walked, drove and saved their way north.
The First Ward, and the road out of it
Newark’s Little Italy filled the old First Ward beginning in the 1870s. The first Italian settler is usually named as Angelo Maria Mattia, who reached Newark in 1872 with twenty-seven men from Calabritto. At its height the First Ward packed more than thirty thousand Italian immigrants into a few crowded blocks, and Newark held the fifth-largest Italian population of any American city by the turn of the twentieth century.
Most of them came from Campania, from inland Avellino towns such as Teora, Caposele, Calabritto and Monocalzati. They were stonemasons, labourers and seamstresses who had left a hard hill country for a hard industrial one. The First Ward gave them a parish, a feast and a place to be among their own. It was crowded and loud and poor, but it was theirs, and for a generation it was the whole world.
What the bulldozers started
In 1953 the city and its developers cleared the heart of the First Ward for public housing, bulldozing in a matter of days what had taken eighty years to build. The neighbourhood that had held the community together was gone, and the families who could leave did.
Many did not go far. Bloomfield, neighbouring Nutley and Belleville sat directly to the north along the same streetcar and then highway lines, close enough to keep visiting the old grocers and the old church, far enough to own a yard. The move from Newark to Bloomfield was measured in a few miles and an entire change of life.
Bloomfield Avenue as a second Little Italy
By the pre-war years and accelerating after it, Bloomfield Avenue had become a commercial street that an immigrant from Avellino would have understood instantly. It was lined with Italian-owned bakeries, butcher shops, shoemakers, tailors, restaurants and social clubs, one trade beside another. A family could be christened, dressed, fed and buried without leaving the avenue, and most of the transactions happened in dialect across the counter.
The institutions followed the families. The township’s chapter of UNICO, the national Italian-American service organisation, is around sixty-five years old, raising money for scholarships and charities under the banner of an immigrant generation that had wanted, above all, to be seen as good citizens. The Bloomfield Mandolin Orchestra, an ensemble of the kind that immigrant musicians founded across industrial New Jersey, has been playing for roughly three quarters of a century, a living survival of the parlour music that came over from the south of Italy in steamer trunks.
The pattern is the classic one for Italian New Jersey, the same arc that built the communities of nearby East Hanover and Lyndhurst: leave the dense city ward, buy the two-family in the next town up, keep the parish, the bakery and the club, and let the children become the first to go to college. Three generations on, the surnames in Bloomfield’s town hall and its school rosters still read like an Avellino phone book.
The Landmarks
Holsten’s Brookdale Confectionery, 1063 Broad Street. The most famous storefront in town opened in 1939, first as Strubbe’s, and became Holsten’s in the 1950s, still making its own chocolate and ice cream by hand. In 2007 it became television history as the diner where Tony Soprano ordered onion rings in the final, cut-to-black scene of The Sopranos. The booth itself was auctioned in 2024 for more than eighty thousand dollars.
Gencarelli’s Bakery, 446 Broad Street. Opened in 1975 by Rosaria and Ernesto Gencarelli, this is the everyday Italian bakery the town runs on: lobster tails, sfogliatelle, seeded loaves and trays of cookies for every christening and funeral. Half a century in, it remains a family operation and a Saturday-morning institution.
Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, corner of Broad and Liberty Streets. Founded in 1878 with the Reverend Joseph M. Nardiello as its first pastor, the parish opened a parochial school the same year, and the present church was built in 1892. For the Italian families moving up from Newark, it was the parish that received them.
Saint Thomas the Apostle Church and School. A second Roman Catholic anchor in the township, its parish school has served Bloomfield’s families for more than eighty-five years. For Italian-American Bloomfield, the parochial school was as much a fixture of childhood as the dinner table.
Church of Saint Valentine, 125 North Spring Street. Founded in June 1898 by the Saint Valentine’s Mutual Benefit Society, originally to serve Bloomfield’s Polish residents, it is a reminder that the Italians shared these streets with other Catholic immigrants who arrived alongside them in the same decades.
Watsessing Park. Spanning roughly seventy acres mostly within Bloomfield, this is the fourth-largest park in Essex County and the southern, denser end of town nearest Newark and Belleville, where many of the First Ward families first landed when they crossed the city line.
Brookdale Park. Established in 1928 and covering more than 120 acres across Bloomfield and Montclair, the county’s third-largest park gives its name to the Brookdale neighbourhood, the leafier northern section of the township and the source of Holsten’s full name.
Where They Came From
The Italians of Bloomfield are overwhelmingly southern Italian, and within that, heavily Campanian. The thread runs back through Newark’s First Ward to the Avellino hill towns: Teora, Caposele, Calabritto, Monocalzati and their neighbours, places of stone houses and thin soil that sent their young men to the masonry yards and factories of Essex County.
That origin shaped everything that followed. Chain migration meant a man from Calabritto sent for his brothers, who sent for cousins, until whole streets in Newark and then whole blocks in Bloomfield held families from a single province. The food, the feast-day saints and the dialect that survived longest in Bloomfield kitchens are Campanian ones. The tomato sauce simmered all Sunday, the Easter pies layered with cheese and cured meats, the suspicion of anything too far north of Naples: these were Avellino habits carried intact across an ocean and then across the Passaic.
Bloomfield Today
Bloomfield is no longer the homogeneous Italian suburb it was at mid-century. The 2020 census counted more than fifty-three thousand residents, with Hispanic and Latino residents now the largest group, and the township is among the more diverse in Essex County. The bakeries on Broad Street now share the avenue with Caribbean, Latin American and South Asian businesses.
Yet the Italian presence is still the township’s deepest civic layer. Around a quarter of residents identify as Italian-American, the UNICO chapter and the Mandolin Orchestra still meet, and the parishes founded for those Newark refugees still ring their bells. Mayor Michael J. Venezia, a third-generation resident first elected at thirty-one, is the kind of name that has run this town for decades, and the town hall, the school board and the volunteer fire companies are still thick with grandchildren of the First Ward.
What endures is less a neighbourhood than a habit of belonging, the same quiet persistence you find in older Italian strongholds like Hoboken: the standing order at Gencarelli’s, the family that has worshipped at Sacred Heart for four generations, the tour buses that still pull up outside Holsten’s. The First Ward is gone, but a good deal of it simply moved a few miles north and stayed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Bloomfield, New Jersey?
The Italians in Bloomfield, New Jersey came largely from Newark’s First Ward, the city’s old Little Italy, which was settled from the 1870s and then cleared by urban renewal in 1953. Families moved a few miles north into Bloomfield, Belleville and Nutley, keeping their parishes and bakeries while gaining suburban homes.
What part of Italy did Bloomfield’s Italians come from?
Most trace back to Campania in southern Italy, especially the Avellino province hill towns of Teora, Caposele, Calabritto and Monocalzati. They first settled Newark’s First Ward through chain migration before moving north to suburbs like Bloomfield.
What percentage of Bloomfield is Italian-American?
By one widely cited figure, roughly 26 percent of Bloomfield residents identify as Italian-American, which makes the Italians in Bloomfield, New Jersey one of the township’s largest ancestry groups even as the population has grown more diverse.
Is Holsten’s from The Sopranos actually in Bloomfield?
Yes. Holsten’s Brookdale Confectionery sits at 1063 Broad Street in Bloomfield and was the setting for the final scene of The Sopranos in 2007. It has made its own ice cream and chocolate since 1939 and remains a working ice cream parlour.
What are the historic Italian Catholic parishes in Bloomfield?
Sacred Heart Church at Broad and Liberty Streets, founded in 1878, and Saint Thomas the Apostle were the Roman Catholic anchors for Italian families. The nearby Church of Saint Valentine, founded in 1898 for Polish Catholics, shows that Bloomfield’s Italians shared these streets with other immigrant communities.
Where can you still find Italian food in Bloomfield?
Gencarelli’s Bakery at 446 Broad Street, open since 1975, is the township’s best-known Italian bakery, and Bloomfield Avenue has carried Italian groceries, delis and restaurants for generations. The wider area, including neighbouring Montclair and Caldwell, adds long-running Italian bakeries and markets.
If your family’s story passed through Bloomfield, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a stone house in the Avellino hills, through the crowded blocks of Newark’s First Ward, to a two-family on a quiet street north of the city, to wherever you are now.