Drive the winding roads off Franklin Lake Road on a Sunday morning and you can read the whole story in the parking lots. The cars outside Most Blessed Sacrament. The families filing into a pizzeria that still makes the gravy the old way. The Italians in Franklin Lakes did not arrive here in steerage or settle in a tenement. They arrived in station wagons, a generation or two removed from Paterson and Newark, and they built lives on land their grandparents could only have imagined owning.
The Place
Franklin Lakes sits in northwestern Bergen County, a borough of wooded hills, reservoirs, and large homes set well back from the road. It was incorporated on 11 March 1922, carved out of Franklin Township, and named for William Franklin, the Loyalist son of Benjamin Franklin and the last colonial governor of New Jersey.
For most of its history this was Dutch farm country. Families named Van Winkle, Van Houten, Ackerman, and Van Blarcom worked the land, and mills turned along the creeks. The 1876 atlas counted roughly 100 houses, five mills, a tannery, and a couple of hotels.
What it became is something else entirely. By the 2014 to 2018 figures the median household income here ran near $159,883, more than double the New Jersey median, and the ZIP code routinely lands on lists of the most expensive in America. The Italians who moved out here were not joining old money. In large numbers, they became it.
How It Became Italian
The cities they left
To understand Franklin Lakes you have to start thirty minutes south, in the brick row houses of Paterson and the First Ward of Newark. Italians were the largest immigrant group in New Jersey by 1920, and Newark held the fifth-largest Little Italy in the nation. At its peak the city’s old First Ward packed in more than 30,000 Italian immigrants.
Paterson had its own dense Italian quarter, built around the silk mills and the machine shops. These were neighbourhoods of saints’ feast days, basement wine, and front stoops, where everyone knew which family came from which province back home.
The first generation worked. The second generation went to school, opened businesses, served in the war, and started to do the arithmetic that every striving family eventually does: the children could have a yard.
The road out
The exodus to the suburbs was slow at first, then sudden. As the mills closed and the cities changed through the 1950s and 1960s, second and third generation Italian-American families followed the new highways north and west into Bergen County.
Franklin Lakes was waiting. In the years around incorporation, developer J. Nevins McBride had bought up land around Franklin Lake and laid out a planned community he called Urban Farms, named for the Urban family who had farmed the hills for generations. When the state extended Route 208 to nearby Oakland in 1959, the borough suddenly sat within commuting reach of the whole region.
The parish that anchored them
For Italian Catholic families, a town without a parish was not yet home. That changed in 1960 and 1961, when the Archdiocese of Newark established a new church in Franklin Lakes. The first Mass was celebrated in July 1961 in the cafeteria of Ramapo Regional High School, the congregation worshipping among the lunch tables until a building of their own could rise.
They named it Most Blessed Sacrament. A school followed, and decades of christenings, first communions, weddings, and funerals. By the time the borough had filled in, the parish counted more than 2,000 families, a great many of them carrying surnames that ended in vowels.
The arrival, decade by decade
The growth was steady. The population passed 8,500 by 1980, and the completion of Interstate 287 in the early 1990s pushed development further. Each wave brought more of the same families: the contractor whose father had laid brick in Paterson, the doctor whose grandmother had sewn in a Newark sweatshop, the restaurateur who had decided the kitchen could move to the suburbs too.
By the 2000 census the pattern was unmistakable. Some 29.8 percent of Franklin Lakes residents reported Italian ancestry, the highest share of any municipality in the state. Nearly one resident in three traced a line back to Italy, and most of them by way of New Jersey’s old industrial cities first.
The Landmarks
Most Blessed Sacrament Church, 787 Franklin Lake Road. The spiritual centre of Italian Franklin Lakes since 1961. The original church burned in a 2019 arson, a wound the parish felt deeply, and the community broke ground on an $18 million replacement in September 2022. The rebuilding has been, in its way, a portrait of the congregation that pays for it.
Indian Trail Club, 830 Franklin Lake Road. Born in 1959 when Urban Farms turned an old barn into the focal point of a family community. Today its Lake House, pools, and courts host the graduation parties, anniversaries, and summer weekends of Franklin Lakes families, the kind of club an immigrant grandparent would have found unimaginable and a grandchild now takes for granted.
Urban Farms Shopping Center, Franklin Lake Road and High Mountain Road. The borough’s everyday gathering place, with family-owned shops and restaurants. For generations of local families it has played the role the old corner stores of Paterson once did, the place you run into your neighbours without planning to.
Trovato’s Due, 4 Barbara Lane, Oakland. Just over the borough line in Oakland, this white-tablecloth Italian restaurant draws Franklin Lakes families for the kind of red-sauce-and-veal Sunday dinners that the suburbs were supposed to make impossible and somehow did not. It is a short drive that locals treat as part of their own town.
High Mountain Golf Club, 845 Ewing Avenue. Built in 1966 as the borough was filling in, the public course threads through the same wooded ridges the Dutch once farmed. On a summer weekend its tee times are a fair census of the borough’s Italian-American professional class.
Becton Dickinson headquarters, Franklin Lakes. The medical technology giant, founded in 1897, anchors its global operations here. Its presence is a reminder that the borough is not only estates and country clubs but a place of serious corporate weight, the kind of employer that helped make a town like this affordable to ambitious second-generation families.
The estates of Urban Farms. The custom homes along Urban Club Road and the lanes around Franklin Lake are the physical proof of the whole arc. Roads first cut by wagon wheels now run past houses that the families who built them measure in their parents’ and grandparents’ terms: a long way from a cold-water flat in the First Ward.
Where They Came From
The Italians of Franklin Lakes are overwhelmingly children and grandchildren of the great migration that filled New Jersey’s cities between roughly 1880 and 1920. Their families came from the Mezzogiorno, the south of Italy, and from Sicily, the regions that sent the bulk of Italian emigrants to America in those years.
They landed first in the dense Italian quarters of Newark, Paterson, and Jersey City, where the men found work in the mills, on the docks, and in the building trades. Those quarters were where the language was kept, the food was cooked, and the savings were slowly assembled.
So the journey to Franklin Lakes was really two migrations stitched together. First the ocean crossing of the grandparents. Then, decades later, the shorter and in some ways prouder crossing of their descendants, out of the old neighbourhood and up the hill into Bergen County.
Franklin Lakes Today
Italian Franklin Lakes is not loud about itself. There is no festival arch over the main road, no formal Little Italy. The heritage shows up instead in the texture of ordinary life: the parish calendar, the names on the youth-sports rosters, the restaurants that still treat Sunday dinner as a sacrament of its own.
The borough has also become, for a national audience, a kind of shorthand for Italian-American suburban success, thanks to the Bravo cameras that followed several Real Housewives of New Jersey cast members, among them Melissa Gorga, Kathy Wakile, and Jacqueline Laurita, through their Franklin Lakes homes. The show traded on a stereotype, but the underlying fact was real enough: this is a place where the great Italian arrival ended in something very much like arrival.
The community is changing, as all of Bergen County is, with a growing Asian-American population and new families of every background drawn by the schools and the quiet. But walk into Most Blessed Sacrament on a holy day, or into a family pizzeria on a Friday night, and the older story is still right there at the centre of the table, told in the easy, lowered voices of people who have nothing left to prove.
For readers tracing related Italian-American suburban journeys, the pattern repeats across the region. You can follow the same arc among the Italians who settled Nutley, New Jersey, the Italian families who moved out to Wayne in neighbouring Passaic County, and across the state line among the Italians of Garden City, New York and the Italian community of Massapequa on Long Island. Each is a variation on the same suburban dream.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Italians live in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey?
At the 2000 census, 29.8 percent of Franklin Lakes residents reported Italian ancestry, the highest share of any municipality in New Jersey. That means roughly one resident in three traces a line back to Italy, making the Italians in Franklin Lakes the single largest ancestry group in the borough.
Why did so many Italian families move to Franklin Lakes?
Most arrived as second and third generation families leaving the older Italian quarters of Paterson, Newark, and Jersey City. As the mills closed through the 1950s and 1960s and new highways like Route 208 and Interstate 287 opened the area, ambitious Italian-American families followed them north into Bergen County’s open land.
What is the main Italian Catholic parish in Franklin Lakes?
Most Blessed Sacrament Church at 787 Franklin Lake Road, established by the Archdiocese of Newark in 1960 and 1961. It has long been the spiritual anchor of the Italian community in Franklin Lakes, serving more than 2,000 families, and it is rebuilding after a 2019 fire.
Is Franklin Lakes an affluent town?
Yes. Its median household income has run near $159,883, more than double the statewide figure, and its ZIP code regularly appears among the most expensive in the country. For many of the Italians in Franklin Lakes, that prosperity represents the culmination of a family climb that began in the tenements of New Jersey’s industrial cities.
Where did Franklin Lakes Italians originally come from?
Their ancestors came overwhelmingly from southern Italy and Sicily during the great migration of roughly 1880 to 1920. They settled first in Newark, Paterson, and Jersey City before their descendants moved out to the suburbs.
Is Franklin Lakes connected to the Real Housewives of New Jersey?
Yes. Several cast members of Bravo’s Real Housewives of New Jersey, including Melissa Gorga, Kathy Wakile, and Jacqueline Laurita, have lived in Franklin Lakes, which gave the borough a national reputation as a centre of Italian-American suburban success.
If your family’s story passed through Franklin Lakes, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a cold-water flat in Paterson or Newark’s First Ward, to a house on the hills above Franklin Lake, to wherever you are now.