Stand on the edge of Englewood Cliffs at dusk and you can see two worlds at once. Below the basalt face of the Palisades, the Hudson slides past Manhattan’s glittering wall. Behind you, in a borough of barely five thousand people, almost half of your neighbours are Korean, and the smell of grilling galbi drifts out of a restaurant on Sylvan Avenue. The story of Koreans in Englewood Cliffs is the story of how a sleepy Bergen County cliff-top became one of the most quietly Korean addresses in America.
The Place
Englewood Cliffs sits atop the Hudson Palisades in Bergen County, New Jersey, a thin shelf of land looking straight across the river at upper Manhattan and the George Washington Bridge. It was incorporated on 10 May 1895, breaking away from Englewood Township during the wave of borough-making that locals later nicknamed Boroughitis.
For most of the twentieth century it was a leafy, low-density suburb of large lots and winding lanes. Today it is something rarer: a town of roughly 5,300 residents that also houses the North American headquarters of LG Electronics and the world headquarters of CNBC, a place where corporate glass towers and quiet cul-de-sacs share the same cliff.
How It Became Korean
Korean Englewood Cliffs did not appear overnight. It grew out of a larger movement that reshaped the whole northern edge of Bergen County, and it arrived comparatively late and comparatively wealthy.
From Queens to the Cliffs
The first Korean immigrants to the New York region after the landmark 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act mostly settled in Manhattan and Queens. Beginning in the 1980s, wealthier Korean families started crossing the George Washington Bridge to the suburbs of Bergen County, drawn by space, safety, and schools.
The numbers tell the rest. In 1990 about 16,000 Koreans lived in Bergen County. By 2000 that had jumped roughly 130 percent to around 37,000, and by 2010 to about 58,000. The bridge had become a conduit, and the towns at its western foot, Fort Lee and Palisades Park first, filled with Korean families.
The pull was practical as much as cultural. Bergen County’s public schools outperformed the city’s, its streets felt safer, and its towns offered the detached houses and gardens that apartment-bound families in Queens had gone without. For Korean parents in particular, the calculus of schools was decisive, and it pointed steadily north and west across the river.
The corridor reaches the cliff
Englewood Cliffs sits just north of that first landing zone. As nearby Palisades Park became the densest Korean enclave in the Western Hemisphere and Fort Lee’s Korean community grew toward a third of the town, families who prospered looked uphill for bigger houses and a smaller, more exclusive school district.
The borough’s census figures track that arrival precisely. Asian residents were 29.7 percent of the population in 2000, 38.4 percent in 2010, and 47.4 percent by the 2020 census, when 2,534 of the borough’s residents were Asian. Korean Americans alone made up an estimated 20.3 percent of the town in 2010.
The corporate magnet
What sets Englewood Cliffs apart from its neighbours down the hill is the corporate dimension. Korean business had long clustered in Bergen County: through the 1990s, Manhattan branches of Korean firms moved west to escape soaring rents, and their staff settled nearby.
That logic reached its grandest expression in LG. The Seoul electronics giant broke ground on its North American headquarters at 111 Sylvan Avenue and, after a long fight over the building’s height against critics who wanted to protect the Palisades skyline, opened a 350,000-square-foot campus there at the end of the 2010s. For Korean executives and their families on assignment in America, an Englewood Cliffs address put work, an established Korean community, and Manhattan all within a few minutes of one another.
The result is a population unusually layered for a small town: long-settled Korean American homeowners, second-generation professionals, and a rotating cohort of corporate expatriates posted to LG and the wider Korean business cluster along Route 9W and Sylvan Avenue.
That expatriate layer gives Englewood Cliffs a texture you do not find in older Korean enclaves. Some families arrive for a three-year posting and treat the borough as a temporary American berth, keeping ties to Seoul and enrolling children in the local school for a season. Others, having come on assignment, decide to stay. The borough holds both kinds at once, which is part of why its Korean character can feel both deeply rooted and freshly arrived.
The Landmarks
LG Electronics North American Headquarters, 111 Sylvan Avenue. The borough’s most visible Korean institution is also its largest employer-tenant. The low, glass campus that LG eventually built, after agreeing to scale back an earlier tower design, anchors the corporate Korean presence on the cliff and has hosted community science programmes for the local school district.
The Kalbi, 150 Sylvan Avenue. An upscale Korean barbecue house that opened in late 2023, just up the road from LG. Its tables of marinated short rib, prime ribeye, and pork belly make it a local gathering point, the kind of place where a borough this small can still eat Korean without driving down the hill.
Sylvan Avenue (Route 9W). The spine of the borough doubles as its Korean main street in miniature, lining up corporate offices, restaurants, and services along the route that connects Englewood Cliffs to the larger Korean strips of Fort Lee and Palisades Park to the south.
H Mart, Linwood Plaza, Fort Lee. The Korean supermarket chain rings Englewood Cliffs with stores in Fort Lee, Leonia, Little Ferry, and Ridgefield. The Fort Lee branch at 112 Linwood Plaza is the everyday pantry for Englewood Cliffs households, a short drive down the Palisades for banchan, fresh tofu, and Korean produce.
Englewood Cliffs Public Schools. The borough runs a small PreK-8 district of a few hundred pupils, prized by Korean families for its size and results. As far back as 2013, Korean was the most common language other than English spoken by its students, a quiet marker of who had moved up the hill.
Saint Peter’s University, Englewood Cliffs campus. The Jesuit university has operated a campus in the borough since 1975, on the leafy plateau above the river, part of the institutional fabric that drew families seeking education close to home.
The Palisades and Henry Hudson Drive. The cliffs that give the borough its name are also its front garden. The Palisades Interstate Parkway and the scenic Henry Hudson Drive run along the river’s edge, and the views across to Manhattan are the reason much of this land was protected and much of it became so expensive.
Where They Came From
The Koreans of Englewood Cliffs trace back, like most of the metropolitan area’s community, to South Korea after 1965, and especially to the urban professional and business classes of Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi region. The path here was rarely direct.
Many families landed first in Queens or in Manhattan’s Koreatown around 32nd Street, then moved across the river as they prospered, settling in Fort Lee and Palisades Park before some climbed to Englewood Cliffs. Layered on top of that older migration is a newer, corporate stream: executives and engineers posted to LG and other Korean firms, for whom Bergen County is the natural American base.
It is a pattern echoed in other affluent Korean suburbs, from Annandale outside Washington to the vast original heart of Korean America in Los Angeles. Englewood Cliffs is the small, wealthy, north-eastern variant of the same story.
The faith that travelled with them mattered too. The Korean church has long been the connective tissue of immigrant life in Bergen County, organising not just Sunday worship but language classes, elder care, and the introductions that knit a scattered community together. Englewood Cliffs families belong to congregations that sit mostly down the hill, Presbyterian and Methodist churches with deep roots in Fort Lee and Palisades Park, and they drive to them the way they drive to the supermarket: as part of the rhythm of the corridor.
Englewood Cliffs Today
Today Englewood Cliffs is one of New Jersey’s most expensive ZIP codes and one of its most Korean small towns, and those two facts are bound together. The borough’s median home values run well into seven figures, and its character is residential and discreet rather than commercial. There is no Korean shopping strip here the way there is on Broad Avenue in Palisades Park.
Instead the Korean life of the cliff is spread between the home, the corporate campus, the small public school, and the restaurants and supermarkets just down the hill. The community sustains Korean churches across the corridor, from Presbyterian to Methodist congregations rooted in Fort Lee and Palisades Park, and the Korean language fills the aisles of the nearby H Marts on a Saturday morning.
What Englewood Cliffs offers is a particular kind of Korean American arrival: quiet, prosperous, professional, with a global corporation as a neighbour and the Manhattan skyline as a view. It is the top of the hill in every sense, the place the corridor climbs toward.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Koreans live in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey?
Korean Americans made up an estimated 20.3 percent of Englewood Cliffs in 2010, and the borough’s Asian population reached 47.4 percent, around 2,534 residents, by the 2020 census. In a town of roughly 5,300 people, Koreans are one of the largest single groups.
Why are there so many Koreans in Englewood Cliffs?
Koreans in Englewood Cliffs are part of a larger movement of prosperous Korean families from New York City into Bergen County that began in the 1980s. The borough’s small, high-performing schools, its affluence, and the presence of Korean corporations including LG made it a natural destination as families moved up from Fort Lee and Palisades Park.
Does LG really have its headquarters in Englewood Cliffs?
Yes. LG Electronics built its North American headquarters at 111 Sylvan Avenue, a roughly 350,000-square-foot campus, after agreeing to a lower-profile design to protect views of the Palisades. CNBC and Unilever also keep major offices in the borough.
Where do Koreans in Englewood Cliffs shop and eat?
Korean residents shop at the H Mart supermarkets that ring the area in Fort Lee, Leonia, Little Ferry, and Ridgefield, and dine at spots such as The Kalbi on Sylvan Avenue. The dense Korean restaurant strips of nearby Fort Lee and Palisades Park are only minutes down the hill.
How is Englewood Cliffs related to Fort Lee and Palisades Park?
The three towns form a single Korean corridor at the western foot of the George Washington Bridge. Fort Lee and Palisades Park were settled first and most densely, and Englewood Cliffs sits just north of them, the wealthier, quieter, more residential top of the same community.
When did Koreans start moving to Bergen County?
Wealthier Korean families began crossing into Bergen County from New York City in the 1980s, and the population grew sharply through the 1990s and 2000s. The county’s Korean population rose from about 16,000 in 1990 to roughly 58,000 by 2010, with Englewood Cliffs filling later than its southern neighbours.
If your family’s story passed through Englewood Cliffs, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a first foothold in Seoul or Queens, to a house above the Palisades and a view of Manhattan, to wherever you are now.
Sources include the Englewood Cliffs entry on Wikipedia and the article on Koreans in the New York metropolitan area.