On a Saturday morning in Garfield, the queue at Piast Meats & Provisions on Passaic Street can run out the door, families waiting for kielbasa pulled fresh from the wood-fire smoker and for pierogi folded by hand. The Polish in Garfield, New Jersey have made this small mill city one of the densest Polish enclaves in the state, a place locals affectionately call Poland on the Passaic. The accents are real, the rye bread is still warm, and the parish bulletins are printed in two languages.
The Place
Garfield is a compact, working city of just 2.19 square miles wedged into the south-eastern corner of Bergen County, hard against the Passaic River. Across three bridges sit Passaic and Clifton; the Saddle River traces its border with Wallington. With 32,655 residents recorded in the 2020 Census, it is one of New Jersey’s more crowded municipalities, and one of its most foreign-born: nearly half of all residents were born outside the United States.
It is not an affluent suburb, and it has never pretended to be. Garfield is a city built by mills and the people who staffed them, a brick-and-frame town of two-family houses, corner delis and church steeples. What it offers, and what has drawn wave after wave of immigrants, is honest housing within commuting distance of Manhattan and a community that already speaks your language.
How It Became Polish
To understand the Polish in Garfield, you have to start with the river and the looms.
The mills that built the town
In the 1860s the Dundee Dam was thrown across the Passaic just south of the present city, and the water power it created drew textile manufacturers to the riverbanks. By the first decade of the twentieth century the Passaic and Garfield district had become one of the great worsted and woollen centres of the United States, home to firms like Forstmann, Gera Mills, New Jersey Worsted and Samuel Hird.
Julius Forstmann chose a forty-acre site fronting the Saddle River in Garfield, and his original mill buildings, the sorting, scouring, carding and spinning departments, rose in 1905 and 1906. By 1927 the Forstmann plant ran tens of thousands of worsted and wool spindles. The work was unskilled, relentless and available, and that combination rewrote the town’s population almost overnight.
Garfield held 1,028 people in 1890. By 1900 it held 3,504, and by 1910 it had reached 10,213. The new arrivals came from Hungary, Russia, Slovakia, Italy and, in large and lasting numbers, from partitioned Poland.
Building parishes and a foothold
Polish immigrants did what Polish immigrants did across industrial America: they bought houses, opened shops, and built churches. The Fourth Ward, near the river and the mills, became the heart of Polish Garfield, and the Fifth Ward filled in alongside it.
Catholic faith organised the community. St. Stanislaus Kostka, the Polish parish on Ray Street, became and remains the spiritual centre of Polish life in the city, its calendar still ordered around Polish-language Masses. Our Lady of Sorrows, raised from a mission to a full parish on 9 September 1930 with Father James Orsini as its first pastor, served the growing Catholic population from its original chapel on Jewel Street; a new church and school were dedicated on 22 December 1957.
These were not symbolic institutions. They ran the schools, the funerals, the weddings and the festivals that held a transplanted nation together while its members learned a new country.
The strikes and the lean decades
The mills that built Garfield also broke their workers’ patience. The 1926 Passaic textile strike, which swept the worsted plants of the surrounding district, drew tens of thousands of immigrant labourers into one of the bitterest industrial confrontations of the era. Polish, Hungarian and Italian families lived through months of lost wages and police lines.
Across the middle of the twentieth century the American woollen industry declined, and the Garfield mills emptied with it. The town did not disappear, but it settled into the quieter rhythm of an older industrial city, its Polish families staying put in the two-family houses their grandparents had bought.
The post-1989 wave
What might have become a fading heritage community was renewed instead. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of communist Poland, a fresh stream of Polish immigrants arrived in the United States, and many of them found their way to Garfield, settling especially in the Fourth and Fifth Wards where the parishes, the shops and the language already waited for them.
By the 2000 Census, an adjusted 22.9 per cent of Garfield’s residents reported Polish ancestry, the third-highest share of any municipality in New Jersey, behind only Manville and neighbouring Wallington. That is the story of Garfield in a single figure: not a relic, but a living chain stretching from the mill years to people who stepped off a plane within recent memory.
The Landmarks
St. Stanislaus Kostka, 184 Ray Street. The Polish parish at the centre of it all, served today by Salvatorian priests of the order abbreviated S.D.S. Its Sunday schedule still alternates Polish and English Masses from before seven in the morning until seven at night, the surest sign that Polish Garfield is a present tense and not a memory.
Our Lady of Sorrows, Jewel Street. Raised to parish status in 1930, with a newer church and school dedicated in 1957. The original chapel still hosts weekday and holy-day services, a quiet survivor among the city’s Catholic institutions.
Piast Meats & Provisions, 1 Passaic Street and 800 River Drive. Founded in 1991 by Henry and Maria Rybak, Polish emigres with agricultural engineering degrees, Piast is the gold standard of Garfield’s Polish food. More than eighteen varieties of handmade kielbasa, hand-folded pierogi, stuffed cabbage and cherry-and-cheese babka draw shoppers from across the region. Henry died in 2020; Maria and son Martin carry it on.
Golden Eagle Delicatessen, 452 Lanza Avenue. A neighbourhood Polish deli on the Fifth Ward’s main artery, the kind of counter where the pierogi and kielbasa are weighed out by people who grew up eating them. It anchors the everyday, unglamorous side of Polish Garfield.
Polonia Bakery, 204 Monroe Street. A Polish bakery turning out rye breads, poppyseed cake and the doughnuts and pastries that mark a Polish holiday table. In a town this size, a dedicated Polish bakery is a measure of how many customers still want one.
The Dundee Dam, Passaic River. Built in the 1860s, the dam created the water power that drew the mills, and the mills drew the Poles. It is the literal source of Poland on the Passaic, still spanning the river at the city’s edge.
Garfield City Hall, Passaic Street. The civic heart of a city whose council meetings and street life have, for generations, been conducted partly in Polish. It is the institutional centre of a place where being foreign-born is the majority experience.
Where They Came From
The first Garfield Poles came in the great pre-1914 emigration from the partitioned homeland, when there was no independent Polish state and millions left the Russian, Prussian and Austrian partitions for American factories. They were drawn from rural Poland by the promise of mill wages and the pull of relatives and parish networks already forming along the Passaic.
The second great current is far more recent. The immigrants who arrived after 1989 left a Poland emerging from four decades of communist rule, an economy in upheaval, and they came as a modern migration of skilled and educated people. The Rybaks of Piast, agricultural engineers who became master butchers and bakers, are the perfect emblem of that wave.
What both groups shared was a reason to choose Garfield specifically: it already had Polish parishes, Polish shops and Polish neighbours. Chain migration is rarely about a city’s grandeur. It is about landing somewhere you are not alone, and Garfield has offered that to Poles for more than a century.
Garfield Today
Polish Garfield is unusual in America because it is not, primarily, a heritage story. The 2020 figures show a city where 47.1 per cent of residents were born abroad, and where Polish remained one of the largest reported ancestries even as Albanian, Italian and Macedonian communities grew alongside it. The delis are busy because real Polish-speaking customers shop there, not because nostalgia has propped them up.
That said, Garfield is changing, as every working-class river town does. The mills are long gone, the population is more mixed than it was a generation ago, and the children of the post-1989 arrivals are growing up American with Polish grandparents. The Polish-language Masses at St. Stanislaus Kostka are full now; whether they will be full in thirty years is the open question every immigrant parish eventually faces.
For the moment, though, the evidence is in the queue at Piast, the rye on the shelves at Golden Eagle, and the bulletins printed in two languages. Garfield remains a place where you can spend a Saturday entirely in Polish, ten miles from Manhattan, and never feel far from home. Bergen County has its share of wealthy suburbs. This is not one of them, and that is exactly why the Poles stayed.
For more on Polish America’s industrial heartlands, see our portraits of the Polish in Slavic Village, Cleveland, the Polish on the South Side of Milwaukee and the Polish of Broadway-Fillmore in Buffalo. For another East Coast parish-anchored enclave, read about the Polish in Fells Point, Baltimore. And for Garfield’s New Jersey neighbours, see the Ukrainians of Whippany and the Estonians of Lakewood. The broader industrial backdrop is documented in the 1926 Passaic textile strike and in the history of Garfield, New Jersey.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Garfield, New Jersey so Polish?
The Polish in Garfield, New Jersey first arrived to work the worsted and woollen mills that lined the Passaic River from the early 1900s, drawn by available factory jobs and the parishes their countrymen built. A second large wave arrived after 1989, settling near the existing Polish shops and churches, which kept the community renewed rather than fading.
What share of Garfield is of Polish ancestry?
As of the 2000 Census, an adjusted 22.9 per cent of Garfield’s residents reported Polish ancestry, the third-highest share of any municipality in New Jersey, behind Manville and neighbouring Wallington. Polish remains one of the city’s largest reported ancestries today.
Where can I buy Polish food in Garfield?
Piast Meats & Provisions, founded in 1991 and located at 1 Passaic Street and 800 River Drive, is the best-known Polish deli, famous for handmade kielbasa and pierogi. Golden Eagle Delicatessen at 452 Lanza Avenue and Polonia Bakery at 204 Monroe Street serve the everyday needs of the Polish in Garfield, New Jersey.
Which church is the Polish parish in Garfield?
St. Stanislaus Kostka at 184 Ray Street is the historic Polish parish, served today by Salvatorian priests and still offering Polish-language Masses throughout the week. Our Lady of Sorrows, raised to parish status in 1930, is another long-standing Catholic congregation in the city.
What is “Poland on the Passaic”?
It is a local nickname for Garfield, reflecting how thoroughly Polish the city’s delis, bakeries and parishes have become, set as it is along the Passaic River. The Dundee Dam, built in the 1860s on that river, created the water power that drew the mills and, with them, the first Polish immigrants.
Is Garfield still a Polish community today?
Yes. Unlike many American heritage neighbourhoods, Garfield’s Polish life is sustained by recent immigrants as well as descendants, with nearly half the city foreign-born as of 2020. Polish-language Masses, busy delis and bilingual parish bulletins remain part of everyday life, though the community now shares the city with growing Albanian, Italian and Macedonian populations.
If your family’s story passed through Garfield, or any of the places Poles have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the partitioned villages of old Poland and the post-1989 cities of a free one, to the mill houses of the Fourth Ward, to wherever you are now.