On a Saturday morning on South Fulton Avenue, the queue outside Royal Caribbean Bakery runs out of the door, and almost nobody in it is buying one patty. Two dozen, three dozen, boxed for a christening in Yonkers. The Jamaicans in Mount Vernon have been buying bread on this street for close to forty years, in a small Westchester city where Jamaican is not one ancestry among many. It is the single most reported ancestry there is.
The Place
Mount Vernon sits directly on the Bronx line, just over four square miles of dense street grid at the bottom edge of Westchester County. Settled in 1664 as part of Eastchester, it grew out of a home-building cooperative that sold plots to New York City tradesmen in the 1850s, and it took its name from George Washington’s estate in Virginia.
The New Haven Line railway cuts the city in half, and that cut did more to shape Mount Vernon than any decision ever made in City Hall. North of the tracks lies Fleetwood and the leafier streets. South of them is the older, denser half that runs down to the Bronx.
At the 2020 census Mount Vernon had 73,893 residents, the eighth largest city in New York State and the largest majority-Black city in it. What that figure hides is the passport history underneath it.
How It Became Jamaican
The tracks, and what happened on either side
Through the first half of the twentieth century Mount Vernon was a commuter town for New York clerks and shopkeepers, heavily Italian and Irish on both sides of the railway. That changed across the 1960s and 1970s. As Black families arrived from the American South and from the Bronx, the population south of the tracks became predominantly Black while the north side stayed largely white. The pattern is familiar from a dozen suburbs around New York. What is less familiar is what arrived next.
Independence, and a door that closed in London
Jamaica became independent on 6 August 1962. For most of the previous fifteen years, Jamaicans leaving the island had gone to Britain, recruited to drive London buses and staff a young National Health Service. That route narrowed the same year, when Britain’s Commonwealth Immigrants Act imposed a voucher system on the very citizens it had spent a decade inviting.
Three years later the United States moved the other way, scrapping the national-origins quota system with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. A generation that had been packing for Brixton began packing for Brooklyn instead.
The Bronx staircase
Almost nobody landed in Mount Vernon first. They landed in the Bronx, in Wakefield and Williamsbridge and along White Plains Road, and they rented. Then, eight or twelve years later, with two incomes and a nursing licence, they crossed a line that on the map is nothing more than a street.
That street is the whole story. Mount Vernon’s south-west corner touches the Bronx directly, and Jamaican families moved into it exactly as earlier arrivals had moved out of Manhattan into Westchester: for a two-family house with a driveway, for a school district, for somewhere to plant a mango tree that would not survive the winter. It is the same suburban step taken a generation earlier by the Irish who moved up into Yonkers, by the Italians who settled New Rochelle and by the families who reached Rye and Chappaqua further up the county.
Today Mount Vernon holds the largest West Indian population in Westchester County, concentrated in that south-west corner. Jamaican ancestry alone accounts for around 12,900 residents, roughly 17.7 per cent of the city, ahead of every other reported ancestry.
Ronald Blackwood takes City Hall
Ronald Alexander Blackwood was born in Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica, on 19 January 1926, and came to the United States at twenty-eight. He settled in Mount Vernon, took a management degree from Iona College, and spent more than thirty years in Honeywell’s medical electronics division up in Pleasantville.
He then did something no Jamaican immigrant in New York had done. After four terms on the city council and service on the Westchester County Board of Supervisors, Blackwood took office as mayor on 4 February 1985, the first Black person elected mayor of a municipality anywhere in New York State. He held it until 31 December 1995 and died in 2017 at ninety-one.
For the Jamaican families then filling the south side, Blackwood was less a symbol than a piece of practical information. A man with a Jamaican accent had the keys to the building at Roosevelt Square. You could look him up, and people did.
The bakery economy
Vincent Getchum HoSang was born in Saint James, Jamaica, on 5 August 1940. In February 1978 he and his wife Jeanette bought a small fried-chicken shop in the west Bronx called Kingsbridge Delight and began quietly adding oxtail, curried goat and beef patties to a menu of ribs and chips. In December 1980 they bought a bakery on Dyre Avenue and renamed it Royal Caribbean Bakery.
By 1984 the patty side had outgrown the shop, and the HoSangs incorporated Caribbean Food Delights as a frozen-food division in a 15,000 square foot Bronx plant. In 1987 both companies moved north across the city line into a 20,000 square foot facility in Mount Vernon. That is the year the bakery became a Mount Vernon institution rather than a Bronx one. Manufacturing moved to a far larger site in Tappan in 1993, but the retail bakeries stayed.
A Jamaican-owned food company employing Jamaicans changed what a young person here could picture doing. HoSang founded a family foundation in 2002 that funds scholarships at both ends of the migration.
Moneyearnin’ Mount Vernon
Dwight Arrington Myers was born in Mandeville, in the parish of Manchester, on 24 May 1967. His family brought him to Mount Vernon in the early 1970s, and by the late eighties he was Heavy D, frontman of Heavy D & the Boyz alongside DJ Eddie F, Trouble T Roy and G-Wiz.
In 1988 he put out a single from the debut album Living Large called “Moneyearnin’ Mount Vernon” and filmed the video at the group’s own hangouts around the city. The nickname stuck so hard that people who have never set foot in Westchester still use it. In a city that also raised Denzel Washington and DMX, it was Heavy D, who died in 2011 at forty-four, who took a Jamaican boyhood in a Westchester suburb and made it the name of the place.
The Landmarks
Royal Caribbean Bakery, 620 South Fulton Avenue. The HoSang family business, in Mount Vernon since 1987, turning out hard dough bread, coco bread, spiced bun, bulla, black fruit cake and the patties half of Westchester buys by the box. A second shop stands at 158 South Fourth Avenue.
Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery & Grill, 67 South Fourth Avenue. The Mount Vernon outpost of the chain the Hawthorne family started in the Bronx in 1989. It stands a short walk from a Royal Caribbean shop on the same avenue, which tells you how much appetite the neighbourhood has.
Caribbean Supermarket, 223 West First Street. Open since 1997, and the sort of shop where the fish counter is the reason people come. Ackee, saltfish, scotch bonnets, green banana, yam, callaloo, and the seasoning brands that make a pot taste like somebody’s mother made it.
Ripe Kitchen & Bar, 151 West Sandford Boulevard. The sit-down restaurant that took Mount Vernon jerk beyond the takeaway counter, drawing national food television attention and a crowd from well outside the city. Oxtail and Rasta pasta on tablecloths, which was not always an option here.
Mount Vernon City Hall, 1 Roosevelt Square. Where Ronald Blackwood took office on 4 February 1985 as the first Black mayor elected in New York State, a Saint Andrew man running a city he had reached in his late twenties. The building is unremarkable. What happened in it was not.
Boys & Girls Club of Mount Vernon, 350 South Sixth Avenue. The club opened in 1912 for the immigrant boys of the day and moved into this South Side building in 1956, past which Denzel Washington walked to Nathan Hale elementary. Generations of Jamaican-born parents have since handed children over at this door after school.
Mount Vernon Seventh-day Adventist Church, 230 South Columbus Avenue. Organised as a church in 1939, after missionary work in the city began in 1932. Adventism has an unusually deep hold in Jamaica, and Saturday morning worship on this street carries a good deal of that island practice with it.
Where They Came From
The Mount Vernon Jamaican community is not drawn from one parish, which is itself telling. Blackwood came from Saint Andrew, which wraps around Kingston and supplied a huge share of the mid-century emigration. HoSang came from Saint James on the north coast. Heavy D’s family came from Mandeville in Manchester, up in the cool interior hills.
Kingston and Saint Andrew, Saint Catherine, Clarendon and Manchester account for most of the movement, because that is where the schools, the training hospitals and the emigration agents were. The chain then worked the way chains always do. One nurse got a visa, sponsored a spouse, then a sibling, then a parent to mind the children, and within fifteen years a whole district back home had cousins on the same four or five Mount Vernon streets.
Much of it came second-hand, from Jamaicans who had already spent a decade in New York City, which is why Mount Vernon feels less like a first-landing enclave than a second-stage destination. The Jamaicans of Flatbush supplied a good deal of it, in the way Greenpoint once fed the Polish suburbs, and the same instinct built the Jamaican community in Hartford up the line in Connecticut.
Mount Vernon Today
Mount Vernon is not an easy city. It has fought over its finances, its water bills and its school buildings in public and at length, and the divide across the railway tracks has never closed. The south side still carries more of the burden and less of the tax base.
But the Jamaican presence here has stopped being an immigrant story and become simply the story. Councilman Andre Wallace has run a Jamaican Independence Day celebration with a local radio station, and the flag goes up on cars in early August without anyone needing to explain why.
What has not changed is the shape of the place. Mount Vernon is still the first stop over the Bronx line, still four square miles of tight streets and porches, still the suburb you reach when the city has done what it can for you. A two-family house a nurse bought here in 1979 is now a middle-class inheritance. The oddity is right there in the public record: a small New York city where the most commonly claimed ancestry belongs to an island of under three million people.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Jamaicans live in Mount Vernon, New York?
Around 12,900 residents report Jamaican ancestry, roughly 17.7 per cent of a population of 73,893. That makes Jamaican the most commonly reported ancestry in Mount Vernon, ahead of American, Puerto Rican, Italian and Dominican.
Which part of Mount Vernon is the Jamaican neighbourhood?
The Jamaicans in Mount Vernon are concentrated on the South Side, below the New Haven Line railway tracks, and particularly in the south-west corner closest to the Bronx boundary. South Fulton Avenue and South Fourth Avenue are its commercial spine.
Who was Ronald Blackwood?
Ronald Blackwood was born in Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica, in 1926 and emigrated at twenty-eight. After four terms on the Mount Vernon city council he took office as mayor on 4 February 1985, the first Black person elected mayor of any municipality in New York State, and served until the end of 1995.
Why did Jamaicans settle in Mount Vernon rather than New York City?
Most did both. Families typically arrived in the Bronx or Brooklyn after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, rented for a decade, then bought a two-family house across the city line. Mount Vernon offered Westchester schools and a driveway while staying minutes from Bronx family and jobs.
Where can I eat Jamaican food in Mount Vernon?
Royal Caribbean Bakery, founded by the HoSang family and in Mount Vernon since 1987, has shops at 620 South Fulton Avenue and 158 South Fourth Avenue. Golden Krust sits at 67 South Fourth Avenue, and Ripe Kitchen & Bar at 151 West Sandford Boulevard is the best-known sit-down Caribbean restaurant.
Which famous Jamaicans came from Mount Vernon?
Heavy D, born Dwight Arrington Myers in Mandeville in 1967, was raised in Mount Vernon and named his 1988 single “Moneyearnin’ Mount Vernon” after the city. Vincent HoSang, born in Saint James, built Royal Caribbean Bakery from a Mount Vernon base, and Mayor Ronald Blackwood came from Saint Andrew Parish.
If your family’s story passed through Mount Vernon, or any of the places Jamaicans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a district in Saint Andrew or a hillside in Manchester, to a two-family house on the South Side, to wherever you are now.