On a Saturday morning, the line at Lepore’s Italian Market on Westwood Avenue spills onto the pavement: men in windbreakers waiting on fresh mozzarella, a grandmother pointing at the prosciutto, a kid clutching a numbered ticket. This is the everyday rhythm of the Italians in Westwood, the Bergen County borough that calls itself the Hub of the Pascack Valley and has, for three generations, been one of North Jersey’s quiet Italian-American strongholds.
The Place
Westwood sits in the centre of Bergen County, roughly ten miles north-northwest of the George Washington Bridge and about seven miles south of the New York state line. It is a compact borough, just 2.3 square miles, ringed by Emerson, Hillsdale, River Vale and Washington Township.
Its downtown is unusually intact for the suburbs: a walkable spine of Westwood Avenue and Center Avenue lined with delis, bakeries, restaurants and an old art deco movie house. The Pascack Valley Line still runs commuters straight into Hoboken and Manhattan, the same reason families came here in the first place.
How It Became Italian
Westwood was not founded as an Italian town. For most of the nineteenth century it was Dutch-descended farmland in Washington Township, and its modern shape was set by the railroad and the borough charter, not by immigration.
The railroad town, 1870 to 1894
The first wave of real development arrived with the Hackensack and New York Railroad in 1870. On 5 March 1870, service began between Westwood and New York City, by way of Jersey City and a ferry. The depot turned scattered farms into a commuter village.
Westwood was incorporated as a borough on 8 May 1894, carved from Washington Township during the “Boroughitis” wave in which Bergen County spawned twenty-six boroughs in a single year. By the 1905 state census it held just 1,044 people in 234 dwellings. The Italians were not here yet in numbers; they were still in the cities.
Out of the Bronx and Hudson County
The Italian story in Westwood is a second-move story. The first generation off the boat, mostly between 1900 and 1924, landed in the dense Italian quarters of New York and the Hudson waterfront: East Harlem and the Bronx, and across the river in Hoboken and the rest of Hudson County.
It was their children and grandchildren, the American-born ones with steady wages, who looked north up the rail line for a lawn and a parish and a school. Westwood, already a commuter borough on the Pascack Valley Line, was an obvious landing spot. You could keep the city job and lose the tenement. The same pull reshaped the Italians of Hoboken, the Hudson County port city that sent many of these families north in the first place.
The postwar boom
The decisive shift came after the Second World War. The borough had grown slowly through the early century, from 1,044 people in 1905 to 2,597 by 1923, but the postwar years changed its pace entirely. Westwood’s population, estimated at about 6,100 in 1948, climbed steadily through the 1950s and 1960s as returning GIs and young families filled in the borough’s modest Cape Cods and colonials. Italian-American families were a large share of that arrival.
They came for the obvious suburban reasons: the schools, the train, the safety of a small borough where you knew the butcher by name. But they also rebuilt the texture of the old neighbourhood in miniature. The bakery, the deli, the pizzeria and the parish reappeared on Westwood Avenue, scaled down to a downtown a few blocks long. It is a pattern repeated across Bergen County, from the Italians of Nutley to the smaller Pascack Valley enclave of Cresskill just to the east.
Becoming the first ancestry
By the twenty-first century, Italian had become the single largest reported ancestry in Westwood. Census tabulations put Italian ancestry at roughly 15.9 percent of the borough, ahead of German, Irish and Polish. In the older blocks near the borough centre the share runs higher still, above one in five residents.
That did not happen by accident. It is the accumulated weight of seventy years of chain migration up one rail line, family following family, a cousin telling a cousin that there was a two-family for sale near St. Andrew’s. The same chain built the affluent Italian-American suburbs further south in the county, including Franklin Lakes.
The Landmarks
You will not find a Mulberry Street arch or a festival banner over the road in Westwood. The Italian presence here is not announced; it is simply woven into the working downtown. The landmarks are a deli, a pizzeria, a parish, a movie house and a train station, the ordinary furniture of a suburb that an Italian-American generation made its own.
Lepore’s Italian Market, 267 Westwood Avenue. The anchor of the borough’s Italian table, a deli and prepared-foods counter known across the Pascack Valley for fresh mozzarella, imported salumi and Sunday trays. On a weekend the ticket line is its own kind of community meeting.
Luciano’s Pizzeria and Baked Goods, 301 Center Avenue. A neighbourhood pizzeria and bakery that mixes its own bread and pizza dough on site. It is the unglamorous everyday end of the Italian downtown: a slice after school, a loaf on the way home.
St. Andrew Parish, 120 Washington Avenue. The Roman Catholic parish at the centre of Westwood’s church life, part of the Archdiocese of Newark. For generations of Italian-American families it has been the place of the baptism, the First Communion and the funeral, and its Sunday Spanish Mass now marks the borough’s newer arrivals too.
Westwood Cinema, 182 Center Avenue. The art deco movie house that opened on 30 August 1928 as the Pascack Theatre, complete with a Wurlitzer organ and a balcony seating 1,750. Restored in the late 1990s and now a six-screen house, it is the kind of downtown fixture that gave borough kids, Italian and otherwise, somewhere to go.
Westwood Avenue downtown. The walkable retail spine that earned the borough its “Hub of the Pascack Valley” nickname. The mix of delis, bakeries, pizzerias and restaurants along it is the living trace of the Italian families who settled the surrounding blocks.
The Westwood station, Pascack Valley Line. The commuter depot whose 1870 opening created the town, and whose trains carried the city-job, suburb-home generation that made Westwood Italian. The line still runs to Hoboken Terminal and, at peak, to Penn Station New York.
Westwood Regional High School. The shared regional high school serving Westwood and Township of Washington students. For Italian-American families the local schools were a large part of the draw north, the reason a borough lawn beat a Bronx walk-up.
Where They Came From
Westwood’s Italians did not arrive directly from Italy. They arrived from New York and Hudson County, one generation removed from the ports. But behind that intermediate stop lies the same southern-Italian origin that shaped almost all of the region’s Italian America.
The great migration that filled the Bronx, East Harlem and Hoboken between the 1880s and 1924 drew overwhelmingly from the Mezzogiorno: Campania around Naples, plus Calabria, Sicily, Abruzzo and Puglia. Those were the villages left behind by sharecroppers and labourers chasing American wages.
The families that later moved up to Westwood carried that inheritance with them, softened by a generation of city life. By the time they reached Bergen County the dialect was fading and the surnames were Americanising, but the food on the Sunday table and the saints on the parish calendar still pointed back to the south of Italy.
Westwood Today
Westwood today is a borough of about 11,300 people, still anchored by the train and the downtown, still the commercial hub for the smaller towns around it. Italian remains the most common ancestry, but the borough is changing in the way most North Jersey suburbs are.
The Hispanic or Latino share has roughly doubled since 2000, to around fifteen percent, and the Asian population has grown as well. St. Andrew’s Spanish-language Mass is one quiet marker of that shift. The Italian-American presence is now less a majority than a foundation, the layer everything else was built on.
There is also a generational question hanging over the borough, the same one facing every suburban Italian America. The grandparents who came up from the Bronx are gone or going, and their grandchildren may have moved further out, to other counties or other states. What holds is the downtown itself, the deli and the bakery and the parish, the institutions sturdy enough to outlast any one family.
You still feel it most on Westwood Avenue on a Saturday. The market line, the smell of the bakery, the men arguing good-naturedly about the Sunday sauce: this is not a museum-piece Little Italy but a working downtown where the Italian inheritance is simply the way things are done. It is the suburban version of the old neighbourhood, and it has held up better than most.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there a lot of Italians in Westwood, New Jersey?
Yes. Italian is the single largest reported ancestry in Westwood, at roughly 15.9 percent of the borough, ahead of German, Irish and Polish. In the older blocks near the borough centre the share is higher, above one in five residents.
Why did Italians move to Westwood?
Most Italians in Westwood came as a second move, not directly from Italy. Their families had first settled the Italian quarters of the Bronx, East Harlem and Hudson County, then moved up the Pascack Valley rail line after the Second World War for the schools, the lawn and the easy commute back to city jobs.
Where did Westwood’s Italian families originally come from?
Behind the intermediate stop in New York and Hoboken, almost all trace to southern Italy: Campania around Naples, along with Calabria, Sicily, Abruzzo and Puglia. These were the regions that supplied the great Italian migration to the New York area between the 1880s and 1924.
What is the Italian food scene like in Westwood?
It is centred on Westwood Avenue and Center Avenue downtown. Lepore’s Italian Market at 267 Westwood Avenue is the best-known deli and prepared-foods counter, and pizzerias and bakeries such as Luciano’s at 301 Center Avenue fill out the everyday Italian table.
Which Catholic parish serves Westwood?
St. Andrew Parish at 120 Washington Avenue is the Roman Catholic parish in Westwood, part of the Archdiocese of Newark. For generations of Italian-American families it has been the centre of church life, and it now also offers a Spanish-language Mass for newer arrivals.
What is Westwood, New Jersey known for?
Westwood is known as the Hub of the Pascack Valley, a Bergen County borough with an unusually intact, walkable downtown and a Pascack Valley Line train into Hoboken and Manhattan. It is also one of North Jersey’s longstanding Italian-American suburbs, with Italian its largest ancestry group.
If your family’s story passed through Westwood, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Campania to a tenement in the Bronx, to a two-family near St. Andrew’s and a Saturday line at the market, to wherever you are now.