Stand on Ridge Road on a Saturday morning, somewhere between the pastry shop and the deli, and you can read the whole story of the Italians in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, in the smell of semolina and espresso. The cannoli are filled to order. The men outside St Michael’s argue about the Yankees in two languages. This is one of the most Italian towns in America, and it has been for the better part of a century.
The Place
Lyndhurst sits in southern Bergen County, a compact township of just over 22,500 people pressed between the Passaic River and the wide reed-grass flats of the New Jersey Meadowlands. It was incorporated as Union Township in 1852 and renamed Lyndhurst in 1917, after Lord Lyndhurst, when it came into its own as an industrial town of machine shops and metalworks.
The eastern edge dissolves into the uninhabited wetlands of the Meadowlands, while the spine of the town is Ridge Road, a long commercial street that runs the length of the township. Newark lies a few miles south across the river, and New York City glitters on the skyline. The geography matters, because it explains everything about how Lyndhurst became Italian.
How It Became Italian
The Italians did not arrive in Lyndhurst from across the ocean. Most of them arrived from across the river, one moving van at a time, carrying the memory of older and denser Little Italys with them.
The cities came first
The great Italian migration to northern New Jersey landed first in the cities. Newark’s First Ward, the original Little Italy of the region, took shape from the 1870s onward and grew into one of the densest Italian quarters in America, a warren of tenements, social clubs, and saints’ societies clustered around the church of St Lucy.
Hoboken, on the Hudson, did the same on its own waterfront, packing Sicilians and southern Italians into rowhouses within walking distance of the docks where many of them worked. These were the entry points: crowded, poor, intensely social, and built around the parish and the paesani network of people from the same home village.
The move to the meadows
Beginning in the 1940s and accelerating through the 1950s and 1960s, the children and grandchildren of those city immigrants began looking for something the First Ward and Hoboken could not give them: a yard, a driveway, a two-family house they could own. Southern Bergen County, just across the Passaic, offered exactly that within sight of the old neighbourhood.
Lyndhurst, with North Arlington and Belleville beside it, became a natural landing place. The factories that had drawn the first generation still hummed nearby, the commute back to Newark or across to Manhattan was short, and a working man’s wage could buy a house on a Lyndhurst street. The move was not a break with the old community so much as its rehousing.
The end of Newark’s First Ward sharpened the trend. The heart of the old Little Italy was condemned and cleared for public housing in the early 1950s, scattering families who had lived shoulder to shoulder for two generations. Many of them carried their parish loyalties and their feast-day traditions a few miles north into towns like Lyndhurst.
A town remade in its own image
What is striking about Lyndhurst is how completely the newcomers became the town rather than a quarter of it. By the 2000 census, 33.8 percent of township residents reported Italian ancestry, the nineteenth-highest share of any municipality in the United States. A 2005 report from the New Jersey Italian and Italian American Heritage Commission put the figure even higher, near 40.8 percent, the highest in all of Bergen County.
That share did not come from a single sealed enclave. It came from a town where the bakery, the butcher, the corner deli, the pizzeria, the funeral home, and three Catholic parishes were all run by, and for, Italian families. The result was a place where being Italian was simply the default setting of daily life.
The Landmarks
Lyndhurst Pastry Shop, 256 Ridge Road. Opened in 1948 by the three Lanzerotti brothers, Jerry, Anthony Jr, and Joseph, whose father Anthony came through Ellis Island in 1915 from Catania, Sicily. More than 75 years and three generations later it is still in the family, still turning out sfogliatelle, struffoli at Christmas, and zeppole for Saint Joseph’s Day from the same Sicilian recipes.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish, 149 Copeland Avenue. Established as a parish in 1966, with the church building itself dating back to 1909, this is the parish whose very name binds the town to the Italian devotional calendar. Its Mount Carmel Society and July festivities around the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel keep alive a tradition carried out of the old city neighbourhoods.
St Michael the Archangel, on Page Avenue. One of Lyndhurst’s three Roman Catholic parishes and a centre of community life, where Mass, sacraments, and feast-day processions have long anchored the calendar. In June, its parishioners join those of Sacred Heart and Mount Carmel for a shared Corpus Christi procession through the streets.
Sacred Heart Parish, 324 Ridge Road. Standing on the main commercial spine of the town, Sacred Heart is the third of Lyndhurst’s Catholic parishes and the most visible, its presence on Ridge Road a daily reminder of how thoroughly Catholic faith and Italian identity are woven together here.
Trattoria Il Cafone, 7 Ridge Road. Opened in 1997 by chef and owner Roberto Oliveri, who trained in some of the better Italian kitchens of New York and New Jersey before going out on his own. It has roughly doubled in size since, a fixture at the southern end of Ridge Road just below the Route 3 overpass.
Appetizzio’s Italian Deli, 5 Ridge Road. A neighbourhood Italian specialty deli and market at the very foot of Ridge Road, the kind of counter where the cold cuts are sliced to order and the shelves hold imported tins, oils, and dry goods that turn a weeknight dinner into something a grandmother would recognise.
Lyndhurst Pizza, 446 Ridge Road. A working pizzeria on Ridge Road, one of the everyday institutions that give the street its character. In a town this Italian the pizzeria is less a restaurant than a public utility, the place a slice and a folded paper plate are simply part of the rhythm of the week.
Where They Came From
The Lyndhurst story runs back, through the cities, to the Italian south. The overwhelming majority of the region’s Italians traced their roots to the Mezzogiorno: Sicily, Campania, Calabria, Naples and its hinterland, and the villages of the deep south that sent so many of their sons and daughters to America between the 1880s and the 1920s.
You can hear it in the kitchens. A bakery founded by a family from Catania. The struffoli and the zeppole, the Saint Joseph’s Day pastries, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel: these are southern Italian traditions, carried first to Newark and Hoboken and then, intact, across the Passaic to Lyndhurst.
The immediate origin point, for most Lyndhurst families, was not a town in Italy at all but a block in Newark’s First Ward or a street in Hoboken. The town is, in a real sense, the suburb those neighbourhoods built. The same surnames, the same parishes, the same feast-day societies, just rehoused in single-family homes with driveways. For more on those source communities, see our portraits of the Italians in Hoboken and the wider Bergen County story in the Italians in Nutley.
Lyndhurst Today
Lyndhurst remains, by any honest measure, one of the most Italian places in the United States. The pastry shop is still family-run after three quarters of a century. The three Catholic parishes still mark the feast days. Ridge Road still smells of espresso and fresh bread on a Saturday morning, and the old-school trattorias still draw diners from across the county.
But the township is changing, as every American town does. The 2020 census counted about 27 percent of residents as Hispanic or Latino, and roughly 59 percent as non-Hispanic white. New families, many of them Latino, Brazilian, and South Asian, have moved onto streets that were once almost uniformly Italian, drawn by the same things that drew the Italians: a short commute, a sound house, a good place to raise children.
This is not the end of Italian Lyndhurst so much as its next chapter. The grandchildren of the First Ward have themselves begun to move further out, to Wayne and Franklin Lakes and beyond, even as the institutions they built stay put. What remains is a town that wears its Italian identity not as nostalgia but as ordinary life, a place where, if your people passed through Newark or Hoboken on their way to a better street, you can still walk into the bakery and be recognised. The same northern Bergen pattern shaped places like the Italians in Cresskill and the Italians in Franklin Lakes, and the same New England echo runs through the Italians in Cranston, Rhode Island.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Lyndhurst, New Jersey?
The Italians in Lyndhurst arrived mainly as second and third generation families moving out of Newark’s First Ward and Hoboken from the 1940s onward, seeking single-family homes within reach of the same factories and city jobs. Southern Bergen County, just across the Passaic River, offered affordable houses close to the old neighbourhoods, and Lyndhurst became one of the main landing places.
What percentage of Lyndhurst is Italian?
According to the 2000 census, 33.8 percent of Lyndhurst residents reported Italian ancestry, the nineteenth-highest share of any municipality in the United States. A 2005 report from the New Jersey Italian and Italian American Heritage Commission put the figure closer to 40.8 percent, the highest in Bergen County.
What is the main Italian street in Lyndhurst?
Ridge Road is the commercial spine of Lyndhurst and the heart of its Italian life. Along it you will find the Lyndhurst Pastry Shop, Italian delis, pizzerias, the trattorias, and Sacred Heart parish, a continuous run of Italian-American institutions.
What Italian churches are in Lyndhurst?
Lyndhurst has three Roman Catholic parishes deeply tied to its Italian community: Our Lady of Mount Carmel on Copeland Avenue, St Michael the Archangel, and Sacred Heart on Ridge Road. They share feast-day traditions including a joint Corpus Christi procession each June.
Where did Lyndhurst’s Italian families originally come from in Italy?
Most traced their roots to southern Italy, the Mezzogiorno, including Sicily, Campania, Calabria, and the Naples region. The Lyndhurst Pastry Shop, for instance, was founded by a family from Catania, Sicily, and southern Italian traditions like Saint Joseph’s Day zeppole and the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel remain part of local life.
Is Lyndhurst still an Italian town today?
Yes, the Italians in Lyndhurst still define much of the town’s character through its bakeries, parishes, and restaurants, though the population is diversifying. The 2020 census recorded about 27 percent of residents as Hispanic or Latino, reflecting newer waves of Latino, Brazilian, and South Asian families drawn by the same affordable, well-located housing.
If your family’s story passed through Lyndhurst, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a tenement in Newark’s First Ward or a rowhouse in Hoboken, to a two-family house on Ridge Road, to wherever you are now.