On a Saturday morning in Ridgefield, the parking lot off Broad Avenue fills before the bakeries finish baking. Grandmothers steer carts toward the Super H Mart doors, teenagers drift toward the food court, and the smell of fresh red-bean buns carries out into the June air. The Koreans in Ridgefield, New Jersey, have made this small Bergen County borough one of the densest Korean communities in America, a quiet town on a ridge that now keeps Seoul’s hours.
The Place
Ridgefield is a borough of just over eleven thousand people in southeastern Bergen County, tucked between the Hudson cliffs and the Overpeck meadows. It takes its name from the long ridge that runs through it, a spine of higher ground that early settlers prized for its views and its drainage.
The borough sits in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge, minutes from Fort Lee and Palisades Park, with US Route 1/9 and Route 46 cutting through its edges. That position, close to Manhattan but cheaper and greener, has shaped its entire modern history.
Today roughly 29 percent of Ridgefield’s residents are Asian, the overwhelming majority of them Korean. It is a town where the welcome at the supermarket comes in Korean first, English second.
How It Became Korean
Ridgefield’s story did not begin with Korea. Long before the borough existed, the Hackensack band of the Lenape kept a large village near Overpeck Creek. In 1642 a Dutch colonist, Myndert Myndertsen, received a land grant here and called his holding Achter Kol, “the rear mountain pass,” part of the New Netherland colony.
For centuries this was farm and orchard country. The borough was formally incorporated on 26 May 1892, carved from the older Ridgefield Township as railroads pushed suburban growth out from the river towns. One stretch, the Morsemere section, still carries the name of Samuel F. B. Morse, the telegraph inventor, who once owned land here.
It was an unremarkable choice for the families who first came, and that ordinariness was the point. Ridgefield offered cheaper houses than Fort Lee, fewer crowds than Palisades Park, and the same short hop to the bridge. For Korean parents weighing a budget against a school district, it was an easy calculation.
An Italian and German town
Through most of the twentieth century, Ridgefield was a working- and middle-class borough of Italian, German, and Eastern European families. They built the modest frame houses that still line its streets, raised children at the parish churches, and shopped at the ShopRite and the hardware store on Broad Avenue. As late as 2000, fewer than one resident in five was Asian.
The Korean arrival across the bridge
The change came from the south side of the George Washington Bridge. Korean immigration to the United States surged after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act lifted national-origin quotas, and by the 1970s a first wave of Korean families had settled in New York City, many of them in Queens. Drawn by safer streets, strong public schools, and an easy commute back into Manhattan, they began crossing the bridge into Bergen County.
The numbers tell the story plainly. In 2000, Asian residents made up about 17 percent of Ridgefield. A decade later that figure had jumped to 29 percent, and it has held there since. In a single generation the borough went from a European suburb to one of the most Korean towns in the United States.
Palisades Park became the anchor. Through the 1980s and 1990s a continuous stream of Korean immigrants bought homes and businesses there, turning Broad Avenue into the densest Korean commercial district on the East Coast. The same Broad Avenue runs north through Ridgefield, and as Palisades Park filled, families spilled into the adjoining boroughs. You can read that overflow in the story of the Koreans in Palisades Park and the Koreans in Fort Lee, the two poles between which Ridgefield sits.
A supermarket changes everything
The decisive moment for Ridgefield came when the old Inserra ShopRite and Rickels home centre at 321 Broad Avenue, a sprawling site of more than 120,000 square feet, was reborn as a Super H Mart shopping centre. H Mart, the national chain whose name comes from the Korean Han Ah Reum, “one armful of groceries,” turned the plaza into an indoor Korean mall: groceries, a food court, a bakery, restaurants, and services all under one roof.
That anchor pulled the rest of the corridor with it. Korean bakeries, barbecue houses, pubs, and pharmacies opened along Broad Avenue, and Korean professional families bought into Ridgefield’s quiet residential streets. By 2010 Korean Americans made up 25.7 percent of the borough, ranking Ridgefield third in all of Bergen County for the share of Korean residents, behind only Palisades Park and Leonia.
Bergen County now holds more than 60 percent of New Jersey’s entire Korean population, and the towns with the highest Korean shares in the whole country are nearly all here, clustered around this single stretch of Broad Avenue. Ridgefield is one of its quieter, more residential links, the place families move when they want the schools and the houses as much as the restaurants.
The Landmarks
Super H Mart, 321 Broad Avenue. The gravitational centre of Korean Ridgefield. A former big-box ShopRite reborn as a 120,000-square-foot Korean grocery and indoor mall, with banks of kimchi, a seafood counter, a bakery, and a food court that on weekends draws families from across northern New Jersey.
Soram, 321 Broad Avenue. A homestyle Korean restaurant in the H Mart complex, the kind of place where soft tofu stew and banchan arrive without ceremony and the room fills with multigenerational tables on a Sunday.
Food Avenue, 321 Broad Avenue. Another fixture inside the centre, serving the everyday Korean dishes, noodle bowls, and rice plates that make the plaza a daily stop rather than a special occasion.
Paris Baguette, 321 Broad Avenue. The Korean-French bakery chain that has become shorthand for the community itself: glass cases of sweet and savoury breads, cakes for birthdays and ancestral rites, and coffee that keeps the corridor caffeinated.
Duri Pocha, 441 Broad Avenue. A pocha, the Korean late-night pub, where soju, fried chicken, and small plates carry the table well past midnight, a reminder that the corridor stays awake long after the grocery closes.
Karden, 630 Broad Avenue. A Korean restaurant further up the avenue, part of the unbroken ribbon of Korean signage that runs north from Palisades Park through Ridgefield.
Tree of Life Korean Church, 845 Broad Avenue. One of the Korean congregations that line the corridor, the spiritual counterpart to the commerce. For first-generation immigrants especially, the Korean church has long been the place where language, food, and community are kept alongside faith.
Where They Came From
Ridgefield’s Korean families are part of the post-1965 emigration from the Republic of Korea, a movement that accelerated through the 1970s and 1980s as South Korea industrialised and its educated middle class looked abroad. Many came by way of Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi region, the country’s dense urban heartland, before passing through New York City.
The chain that brought them here is unusually short and clear. A family settles in Queens or upper Manhattan, crosses the George Washington Bridge for the Bergen County schools, lands first in Palisades Park or Fort Lee, then moves a few blocks north into Ridgefield or one of the neighbouring boroughs as they put down roots.
That pattern ties Ridgefield to a constellation of Korean towns along the Hudson cliffs, from the Koreans in Leonia to the Koreans in Closter further north. They are less separate communities than stations on the same route up from the bridge.
Ridgefield Today
Ridgefield today is a bilingual borough that wears its transformation lightly. The houses are the same modest twentieth-century frames the Italian and German families built, but the names on the mailboxes and the menus on Broad Avenue tell a different story. Korean is spoken in the supermarket aisles, at the church coffee hour, and across the dinner tables of streets that were once entirely European.
The public schools, Shaler Academy, the Bergen Boulevard School, Slocum-Skewes, and Ridgefield Memorial High School, now serve a student body in which Korean American children are a defining presence, and the academic ambition that drew their parents across the bridge shows in the results. For many families, the schools were the whole point.
It is not a flashy place. Ridgefield lacks the dense neon of Palisades Park’s commercial core, and that is part of its appeal: a residential town where you can walk to a Korean bakery in the morning and still have a quiet street to come home to. The Koreans in Ridgefield built that balance deliberately, and it is why the borough keeps drawing the next family across the bridge.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Korean residents live in Ridgefield, New Jersey?
As of the 2010 census, Korean Americans made up about 25.7 percent of Ridgefield’s population, and Asian residents overall were close to 29 percent in 2020. That ranks the Koreans in Ridgefield, New Jersey, among the highest concentrations of Korean residents in Bergen County and the nation.
Why did so many Koreans settle in Ridgefield?
Korean families crossed the George Washington Bridge from New York City through the 1980s and 1990s, drawn by Bergen County’s schools, safety, and short Manhattan commute. As nearby Palisades Park filled, families spilled north into Ridgefield along the Broad Avenue corridor.
Where is the centre of Korean life in Ridgefield?
Broad Avenue is the spine of the community, anchored by the Super H Mart shopping centre at 321 Broad Avenue. Korean restaurants, bakeries, pubs, and churches line the avenue, which runs continuously through Palisades Park, Ridgefield, and on toward Leonia.
What is the Super H Mart in Ridgefield?
Super H Mart is a large Korean supermarket and indoor mall at 321 Broad Avenue, built inside a former ShopRite and Rickels site of more than 120,000 square feet. It includes a grocery, bakery, food court, and restaurants, and serves as the daily gathering point for Korean Ridgefield.
Is Ridgefield part of a larger Korean area in New Jersey?
Yes. Ridgefield sits in the heart of Bergen County’s Korean corridor, between the Koreatowns of Palisades Park and Fort Lee. More than 60 percent of New Jersey’s Korean population lives in Bergen County, clustered along this stretch of the Hudson cliffs.
When was Ridgefield founded?
Ridgefield was incorporated as a borough on 26 May 1892, from portions of the older Ridgefield Township. Its name comes from the ridge of high ground that runs through the town, and its Korean character is a development of the past four decades.
If your family’s story passed through Ridgefield, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a town in Gyeonggi to a house on a quiet street above Broad Avenue, to wherever you are now.
Sources include the borough’s recorded history and U.S. Census figures via Wikipedia and reporting on the Bergen County Korean corridor.