On a weekday night on Broad Avenue, the storefronts glow in two alphabets at once. Steam rolls off a charcoal grill behind a plate-glass window, a bakery case fills with red-bean buns shaped like fish, and a karaoke sign blinks above a stairwell where someone is already murmuring into a microphone. This is Palisades Park, a borough barely a mile and a quarter across in Bergen County, New Jersey, and on most measures the Koreans in Palisades Park form the most concentrated Korean American community anywhere in the United States.
Cross the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan and you can be standing here in fifteen minutes. People did exactly that, by the thousands, over four decades. What they built is a small American town that runs on Korean rhythms, where a late dinner of tofu stew and a 2 a.m. bowl of ox-bone soup are simply what the neighborhood does.
Palisades Park: The Place
Palisades Park sits in southeastern Bergen County, hard against Fort Lee and the western approach to the George Washington Bridge. The borough covers about 1.28 square miles of modest two-family houses and a long commercial spine, Broad Avenue, that doubles as U.S. Routes 1 and 9. Incorporated in 1899 from part of old Ridgefield Township, it spent most of the twentieth century as a quiet, working-class town. Its housing stock, dense and affordable, is exactly what made the next chapter possible.
How Palisades Park Became Korean
Before the Koreans
For most of the 1900s, Palisades Park was an overwhelmingly white commuter town. The families were Italian, Croatian, German, and Greek, blue-collar workers and clerks who took the bus into the city and came home to small frame houses on narrow lots. Broad Avenue had a diner called Gino’s, a movie house, the ordinary furniture of mid-century American main streets.
By the early 1980s the town had begun to fade. The Park Lane Theater was boarded up in 1986. Shopfronts sat vacant and rents fell, and that combination, cheap commercial space within sight of New York, would soon read very differently to a different set of arrivals.
The Koreans Arrive
The Korean presence began as a trickle. In 1980 only about 136 Koreans lived in Palisades Park. The larger story had started in 1965, when the Hart-Celler Act ended the old national-origin quotas and opened the door to immigrants from Asia, favoring the educated, the professional, and family members of those already here.
Most of those Koreans first landed in New York City. They built a commercial Koreatown around West 32nd Street in Manhattan and a residential one in Flushing, Queens, full of restaurants, churches, groceries, and banks. As families saved and had children, the city’s density and schools began to chafe.
The move to Bergen County followed a clear ladder. Manhattan’s K-town gave way to Flushing, and Flushing gave way to the New Jersey suburbs just across the bridge. Wealthier and more settled families led the way in the 1980s, drawn by safer streets, better-rated public schools, and a commute to Manhattan that was shorter than the one from Queens. It was a quieter, suburban version of the same impulse that built the Koreans of Koreatown in Los Angeles into a community on the other coast.
Through the 1990s the trickle became a current. Korean entrepreneurs bought up the empty Broad Avenue storefronts one after another, and Manhattan branches of Korean firms and wholesale businesses relocated across the river. By the 2000 census, Koreans were already about 36 percent of the borough, roughly 6,200 people, and the commercial street had filled with some 120 Korean-owned shops.
Palisades Park at Its Peak
By the 2010 census the tipping point had arrived. Koreans made up 51.5 percent of the borough’s roughly 19,600 residents, the highest share of any municipality in the country, and the figure has held above half ever since, reaching about 53.7 percent in 2022. Korean became a language you could live your whole day in here, from the dry cleaner to the pediatrician to the notary.
Broad Avenue had by then earned its nickname as a Korean restaurant row, claiming the densest concentration of Korean restaurants within a one-mile radius in the United States. The street ran late and lit, packed with barbecue houses, tofu specialists, bakeries, banks, and karaoke rooms. Korean civic life arrived alongside the storefronts, with church networks anchoring weekends and Korean-language ballots introduced in 2012 to serve the electorate.
The growth surfaced in local politics, sometimes sharply. A 1996 ordinance had already required that storefront signs give English equal billing with Korean, one of several Bergen towns to legislate the question. In 2015 the Korean-American Association of Palisades Park proposed adding a second, honorary name to Broad Avenue, something like Korea Way, a proposal that stirred debate and was put toward a public vote rather than simply adopted.
The Change
The most consequential moment came not from a restaurant or a shop but from a small bronze plaque. In 2010, Palisades Park dedicated the first memorial in the United States to the so-called comfort women, the women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. Designed by local artist Steven Cavallo, it was placed on the grounds of the public library.
The memorial drew an extraordinary response from abroad. In May 2012 two delegations from Japan, including a visit involving the Japanese ambassador, asked the borough to take it down, and Palisades Park refused. The episode turned a 20,000-person town into a fixture of international news and a point of pride for Korean Americans far beyond New Jersey.
Korean political representation followed. Christopher Chung was sworn in as mayor in January 2019, the first Korean American mayor in Bergen County and, by most accounts, the second in New Jersey history. In 2022 he was unseated in a Democratic primary by Chong “Paul” Kim, another Korean American, a sign of just how thoroughly the community now ran its own civic contests.
The Landmarks of Korean Palisades Park
So Gong Dong Tofu & BBQ, 118 Broad Avenue. Up a flight of stairs above the street, this is the kind of place that built Broad Avenue’s reputation, a soft-tofu specialist where the soondubu jjigae arrives still boiling and a raw egg goes in at the table. It does barbecue too, but the tofu stew is the reason regulars climb the steps.
So Moon Nan Jip, 238 Broad Avenue. One of the busiest barbecue houses on the strip, with charcoal-fired tabletop grills and servers threading hot coals between tightly spaced tables. It is the sort of room that stays loud and full late into the night, a hub of the avenue’s reputation for round-the-clock dining.
Grand Shilla Bakery, 234 Broad Avenue. The roots here run deep: the bakery grew from what the family describes as the first Korean bakery in Palisades Park, opened by the founder’s mother roughly three decades ago, and is now run by her son Sam Kim. The cases hold homemade red-bean paste and boong-uh-bbang, the fish-shaped pastries that turn a walk down Broad Avenue into a dessert crawl.
Paris Baguette, 408 Broad Avenue. The South Korean bakery-cafe chain plants its familiar pastel storefront on the avenue, selling cream cakes, milk bread, and Lavazza coffee from early morning. Its presence is a small marker of how a homegrown Seoul brand can find a second home on a New Jersey main street.
King Spa & Sauna, 321 Commercial Avenue. A few steps off the main drag stands one of the largest Korean spas on the East Coast, a full jjimjilbang with a row of themed sauna rooms, a body-scrub menu, and a cafeteria serving Korean food to people wrapped in cotton spa clothes. For many suburban families it is a weekend ritual rather than a luxury.
The Comfort Women Memorial, Palisades Park Public Library. The bronze plaque set on stone is small and easy to miss, and that understatement is part of its weight. As the first such memorial in the country and the one that drew Japan’s diplomats to ask in vain for its removal, it remains the borough’s quietest and most-discussed landmark.
H Mart, 315 Broad Avenue. The Korean American supermarket giant runs a Broad Avenue store stocked with banchan, fresh seafood, and aisles of imported pantry goods. It is the everyday engine of the neighborhood, the place where the food culture of the restaurants gets carried home in shopping bags.
Where the Palisades Park Koreans Came From
The Koreans who reshaped Palisades Park came overwhelmingly from South Korea’s cities, and from its urban middle class. Post-1965 Korean immigration to America drew heavily on educated, professional, and largely Christian families, many from Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi region, the metropolitan heart of the country. They were people accustomed to city life, not villagers, and that shaped the kind of place they would build.
Few of them came straight to Bergen County. The far more common path ran through New York first, a stint in Manhattan or Flushing while a business found its feet, then a move across the George Washington Bridge once there were children to raise and a down payment to make. Palisades Park was the rung of the ladder where the city commuter became a suburban homeowner, close enough to keep one foot in New York and Korean enough to never feel far from home.
Palisades Park Today
The community has not peaked and receded so much as spilled outward. Koreans still make up a majority of the borough, but the same families and businesses now fill neighboring Fort Lee, Leonia, and Ridgefield, extending the Korean presence well beyond Palisades Park’s mile-and-a-quarter borders. It echoes the way other immigrant capitals of North Jersey grew, from the Cubans of Union City to the Portuguese of Newark’s Ironbound. Broad Avenue remains the dense, glowing center of all of it.
The makeup of the town is changing in other ways too. A growing Hispanic population now forms the majority in the public schools, even as Korean signage still defines the commercial street, a reminder that an enclave is a living place rather than a fixed exhibit. Many in the second generation, raised here and educated in American universities, commute back across the bridge to careers in Manhattan, returning at night to the bakeries and barbecue houses they grew up with.
What endures is the rhythm. The grills still fire up at dusk, the spa still fills on weekends, the fish-shaped pastries still come out warm, and the memorial still sits in its quiet corner of the library lawn. Whatever Palisades Park becomes next, it will carry the imprint of the Koreans who made a faded commuter town into a capital.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Koreans settle in Palisades Park?
The Koreans in Palisades Park were drawn by cheap two-family housing, safer streets, well-regarded public schools, and a fifteen-minute commute across the George Washington Bridge to Manhattan. Most arrived after first living in New York City’s Koreatown or in Flushing, Queens, and moved to the suburbs as their families grew. Affordable empty storefronts on Broad Avenue let the first arrivals open businesses cheaply.
Is Palisades Park the most Korean town in America?
Yes, by the usual measures it is. The Koreans in Palisades Park give the borough the highest percentage and density of Korean Americans of any municipality in the United States, with Koreans making up 51.5 percent of residents in the 2010 census and about 53.7 percent in 2022. No other American town comes close on a per-capita basis.
What are the famous Korean landmarks and foods in Palisades Park?
Broad Avenue is the heart of it, lined with Korean barbecue houses, soft-tofu specialists, bakeries like Grand Shilla and Paris Baguette, and an H Mart supermarket. Off the main strip, King Spa & Sauna is one of the largest Korean spas on the East Coast. The comfort women memorial at the public library, the first of its kind in the country, is the borough’s most significant civic landmark.
Where in Korea did the Palisades Park Koreans come from?
Most came from South Korea’s cities and urban middle class, with many tracing back to Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi region. Post-1965 Korean immigrants to America were generally educated, professional, and largely Christian. They typically settled in New York first and only later crossed into Bergen County.
When did Koreans first arrive in Palisades Park?
A small number of Koreans lived in Palisades Park by 1980, only about 136 people. The community grew quickly through the 1990s as immigrants bought up Broad Avenue storefronts, and by the 2000 census Koreans were roughly 36 percent of the borough. They became the majority by 2010, cementing the town’s status as a Korean American capital.
Every enclave is a story of one family arriving, then sending word back home. If you want to trace the path your own people took, from the village they left to the street where they finally settled, that is the work we love.