On a Sunday afternoon in late August, the green and white of Pakistan’s flag rises over a stretch of road that most of the country thinks of as Indian. The Pakistanis in Edison, New Jersey, have made their home along the same celebrated South Asian corridor as their neighbours, and for one weekend a year the Halwa Puri is free, the speeches are bilingual, and Oak Tree Road belongs to them.
The rest of the year, the Pakistani presence here is quieter but no less real. It is a banquet hall on Jackson Avenue, a barbecue counter sending charcoal smoke into the parking lot, a grocer’s freezer stacked with zabiha halal meat, a mosque off Route 27 that started in a rented room. This is the story of how a town built on Thomas Edison’s name became home to one of central New Jersey’s largest Pakistani communities.
The Place
Edison is a township of roughly 100,000 people in Middlesex County, the fifth largest municipality in New Jersey. It was called Raritan Township until 1954, when residents renamed it for the inventor whose Menlo Park laboratory, opened in 1876, sat within its borders. Thomas Edison chose the spot, the story goes, because it was the highest point on the Pennsylvania Railroad between New York and Philadelphia.
It is a comfortable, educated place. The median household income is about $125,000, well above the national figure, and roughly 60 percent of adults hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, nearly double the American average. That prosperity, paired with good schools and a fast train into Manhattan, is exactly what drew immigrant families willing to work for it.
And running through the township’s southern edge, shared with neighbouring Iselin, is Oak Tree Road: the largest South Asian commercial district in the United States.
How It Became Pakistani
To understand the Pakistanis in Edison, you have to start with the road, and the road did not begin as anyone’s idea of a destination.
A rural strip becomes a market
Oak Tree Road, designated County Route 604, has carried commerce since the Revolutionary War era, when it was named for a large oak that stood at a crossroads where a market was held. For most of the twentieth century it stayed rural, and by the 1980s the strip near the Edison and Iselin line was a run of biker bars and shuttered storefronts.
South Asian entrepreneurs began arriving in the early 1990s. The pioneers were largely Indian, opening sari shops, sweet houses and restaurants, and they faced vandalism and hostility in the early years before the neighbourhood turned. The first Navratri festival in New Jersey was held here in 1991. Within a decade the abandoned buildings had become a thriving market, packed with pedestrians on weekends. That transformation is the subject of its own story in the Indian community of Edison, whose entrepreneurs built the corridor first.
Pakistani families find their footing
Pakistani immigration to central New Jersey ran alongside this growth rather than behind it. The same forces that pulled the wider subcontinent to Middlesex County, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, professional visas for doctors and engineers, and then chains of family sponsorship, brought Pakistani families to Edison, Woodbridge, Piscataway and Old Bridge.
By the 2010 census, Edison counted 1,192 residents of Pakistani origin, placing it among the top municipalities in the state. Neighbouring Woodbridge, which includes the heavily South Asian community of Iselin, counted 1,382. Piscataway and Old Bridge added several hundred more. Together these adjoining towns form one of the densest Pakistani settlements in the New York metropolitan area outside the city itself.
Building their own institutions
Where the early Indian arrivals built temples and the businesses to serve them, Pakistani families built restaurants, banquet halls and mosques. Shahnawaz, a family-run kitchen on Jackson Avenue, opened its banquet facility in 2001 and billed itself as the first authentic Pakistani banquet hall in the Northeast, a place where a wedding of four hundred guests could eat halwa puri and haleem under one roof.
Worship followed the same pattern of starting small and growing into permanence. The Edison Muslim Community Center, known also as Jamia Musallah, was established in 2008 and now anchors Friday prayers for Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other Muslim families on Jefferson Boulevard. Older congregations in the area, including the Muslim Community of New Jersey, had drawn worshippers for decades before that.
The parade that planted a flag
The clearest sign that Pakistanis had claimed a place of their own came when the Pakistan Day Parade arrived on Oak Tree Road. Held each August, it begins with a flag-raising near Middlesex Avenue and Oak Tree Road in Iselin and processes down to Wood Avenue in Edison.
The Pakistani and American flags go up together. There are speeches from elected officials, the kind that bring out a sitting governor, traditional song and dance, and free halwa puri handed out to the crowd. On a road famous for being Indian, it is a deliberate, joyful statement: we are here too.
The Landmarks
Tabaq Restaurant and BBQ, 1625 Oak Tree Road. A Pakistani barbecue institution on the corridor’s busiest stretch, Tabaq draws crowds for charcoal-grilled seekh kebab, karahi and fresh naan. It sits among the Indian sweet shops and sari stores as proof that the road is more than one nation’s.
Shahnawaz Palace, 159 Jackson Avenue. The family opened its banquet hall here in 2001, calling it the first authentic Pakistani banquet facility in the Northeast. For more than two decades it has hosted the weddings, mehndis and Eid dinners that knit the community together, with a sweets table that locals swear is the most generous around.
Edison Muslim Community Center, 91 Jefferson Boulevard. Established in 2008 and also known as Jamia Musallah, the centre serves as a hub for daily and Friday prayers, Quran classes and community gatherings for the township’s Muslim families, many of them Pakistani.
Good Food by Uzma, Edison. One of the most frequented halal kitchens in town, known for cooking the way a dish would arrive at a Pakistani family table rather than scaled down for a buffet. It is the kind of small, trusted place that tells you a community has put down roots.
Subzi Mandi, Oak Tree Road area. A large South Asian grocery stocking fresh produce, spices and zabiha halal meat, the everyday backbone of cooking at home. For Pakistani households, a grocer that carries the right cuts and the right masalas is as essential as any restaurant.
The Oak Tree Road corridor, Edison and Iselin. The road itself is the landmark: more than 400 South Asian businesses spanning dining, halal groceries, jewellery, apparel and electronics, the largest concentration of its kind in the country. Pakistani-owned shops and eateries are woven through it, sharing pavement and customers with their Indian neighbours.
Where They Came From
Edison’s Pakistanis trace back to the broad sweep of the country: Punjab above all, the most populous province and the source of many of the families who run the corridor’s kitchens and banquet halls, alongside arrivals from Karachi and the wider Sindh, from Kashmir, and from the cities where professional emigration was common.
The first wave were often the educated and the credentialed, doctors, engineers and pharmacists who came on professional visas in the 1970s and 1980s and settled where work and good schools coincided. It is the same professional-and-small-business pattern that shaped Pakistanis in Plano, Texas and Pakistanis in Sugar Land, Texas, suburbs chosen for the same reasons. Once they were established, family reunification did the rest, bringing parents, siblings and spouses into the same few Middlesex County towns until the community reached the critical mass that supports a mosque, a butcher and a parade.
Edison Today
Today the Pakistanis of Edison live the dual life common to settled immigrant communities: thoroughly American in their work, their schools and their suburbs, and unmistakably Pakistani in their kitchens, their mosques and their August parade. The children who grew up bilingual on these streets are now the doctors, accountants and shop owners keeping the corridor running.
The community remains smaller and more dispersed than Edison’s large Indian population, with which it shares Oak Tree Road, the same supermarkets and a great deal of food. That overlap is real and mostly easy, but the Pakistani story here is its own: a separate parade, its own banquet halls, its own mosques, its own provincial roots. It is a suburban counterpart to the dense urban enclave of Pakistanis in Little Pakistan, Brooklyn, the same heritage settled into a different kind of American place.
What it adds up to is a community that no longer needs to explain itself. The flag goes up every August, the kebab counters stay busy every weekend, and a township named for an American inventor counts among its residents thousands of families who carry Pakistan with them, comfortably, in plain sight.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Pakistanis live in Edison, New Jersey?
The 2010 census counted 1,192 residents of Pakistani origin in Edison, among the highest totals of any municipality in New Jersey. Counting the adjoining towns of Woodbridge, which includes Iselin, plus Piscataway and Old Bridge, the Pakistanis in Edison and central New Jersey form one of the larger Pakistani settlements in the New York metropolitan area.
Where do Pakistanis live and gather in Edison?
Pakistani families are spread across Edison and the neighbouring towns, but their commercial and cultural life centres on the Oak Tree Road corridor shared with Iselin. Restaurants, banquet halls, grocers and the Edison Muslim Community Center serve as the main gathering points.
What is Oak Tree Road and is it Indian or Pakistani?
Oak Tree Road is the largest South Asian commercial district in the United States, with more than 400 businesses. It was built primarily by Indian entrepreneurs starting in the early 1990s and remains predominantly Indian, but Pakistani restaurants, shops and the annual Pakistan Day Parade have given the community a clear presence there.
What is the Pakistan Day Parade in Edison?
It is an annual celebration held each August along Oak Tree Road, beginning with a flag-raising near Middlesex Avenue in Iselin and processing to Wood Avenue in Edison. It features speeches from elected officials, traditional music and dance, food vendors and free halwa puri, and is a centrepiece of the year for the Pakistanis in Edison.
Where can I find Pakistani food and halal groceries in Edison?
Pakistani restaurants on or near Oak Tree Road include Tabaq Restaurant and BBQ at 1625 Oak Tree Road and the long-running Shahnawaz on Jackson Avenue, alongside smaller halal kitchens such as Good Food by Uzma. South Asian grocers in the corridor carry zabiha halal meat, fresh produce and spices for home cooking.
What is the difference between the Pakistani and Indian communities in Edison?
The two communities share Oak Tree Road, many supermarkets and a great deal of cuisine, but they remain distinct. Edison’s Indian population is far larger and built the corridor’s earliest institutions, while the Pakistani community maintains its own mosques, banquet halls and the separate Pakistan Day Parade.
If your family’s story passed through Edison, or any of the places Pakistanis have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Punjab or a street in Karachi, to a banquet hall on Jackson Avenue, to wherever you are now.