The Making of an Ethnoburb

Figure 1. Section of Main Street rebranded as “Palestinian Way.” Photograph by Noah Allison, 2025.

At first glance, Main Street in Paterson, New Jersey, is indistinguishable from the Garden State’s hundreds of other commercial corridors. Its low-rise built forms comprise an array of low-density commercial and mixed-use buildings with little unifying adornment. Yet, a closer look reveals its distinction (Figure 1). The restaurants, markets, sweet shops, hookah bars, hair salons, and clothing stores adapting and marking this stretch signal one of the largest Arab and Muslim hubs in the United States (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Palestinian hair salon next to a Turkish restaurant serving “home style comfort food.” Photograph taken by Noah Allison, 2025.

Situated 15 miles west of New York City, Paterson was founded in 1792 by Alexander Hamilton as a predominantly Dutch and English settlement. As one of the first planned industrial towns in North America, Paterson prospered first with its textile and iron mills, and later from its locomotive, machine, and aircraft manufacturing. These opportunities enticed immigrants from around the world, including Irish, German, Italian, and Russian and Eastern European Jews. In the late nineteenth century, Syrian and Lebanese families arrived in Paterson to work in the silk trade.

As the textile economy expanded over the first half of the twentieth century, it attracted other Arab groups, such as Yemenis and Palestinians, as well as Turkish immigrants. Even as deindustrialization shifted Paterson’s economy toward small-scale food processing, garment, and retail enterprises, its cultural infrastructure, proximity to New York, and relative affordability continued to attract people from the Middle East, as well as Latin America, South Asia, and the Caribbean.

Figure 3. Typical strip mall parking signage in English, Arabic, and Turkish, with a Palestinian flag displayed on a light pole in the background. Photograph by Noah Allison, 2025.

Today, nearly half of Paterson’s 160,000 residents were born outside the United States. Its demographic composition reflects what scholars describe as ethnoburbs: suburban clusters of households and businesses comprising diasporic groups with transnational ties. In ethnoburbs, ethnic minorities own a high portion of local businesses and are actively involved in local politics. Desires to assimilate sometimes disguise their presence; more often than not, however, immigrants working and residing in suburbs are made visible by performing and asserting group expressions in the landscape.

Strolling down Main Street, one encounters Arabic signage inscribed on the streetscape, interspersed with Turkish, English, Farsi, and Spanish (Figure 3, above). Business names honor proprietors’ homelands: Jerusalem Jewelry, Istanbul Grill House, Palestine Hair Salon, Sheefa Pharmacy, Mecca Super Market, and Nablus Sweets. Restaurants and butcher shops proudly announce their adherence to Halal (Figure 4, below). Traditional Islamic and Middle Eastern attire, imported from Jordan, is displayed on mannequins neatly arranged in storefront windows (Figure 5, below). Someone has painted an enormous Dome of the Rock simulacra on an apartment building wall over a gas station (Figure 6, below).

Figures 4 and 5. Left, signage indicating foods permitted under Islamic law at Brothers Quality Halal Meats. Right, mannequins donned in traditional Muslim attire at Bent Al Sultan. Photographs by Noah Allison, 2025.

Figure 6. Dome of the Rock poster serves as the backdrop to a Phillips 66 gas station. Photograph by Noah Allison, 2025.

The territorial diversity of this ordinary streetscape has given rise to several colloquial monikers over the years. Some locals refer to it as “Little Istanbul.” Others know it as “Little Ramallah.” However, as Paterson and its neighboring towns have taken in increasing numbers of Palestinians (current estimates are between 10,000 and 20,000), today South Paterson’s identity is most explicitly associated with Palestine. This is most clearly illustrated by the fact that Palestinian flags fly in front of businesses and are officially displayed on the street lighting infrastructure lining the corridor (Figure 7, below). In 2022, the city formally branded the node “Little Palestine” and renamed a section of Main Street to “Palestinian Way” (Figure 8 below).  Paterson also successfully negotiated a sister city agreement with Ramallah in 2023. 

Figures 7 and 8. Left, Palestinian Flag flying over the sidewalk. Right, Little Palestine signage mounted in the Main and Gould Park in the heart of the neighborhood. Photographs by Noah Allison, 2025.

These branding efforts were not only supported by many of the businesses along the stretch but also made possible by André Sayegh, Paterson’s first Arab American mayor, who is of Lebanese descent, and especially by the not-for-profit Palestinian American Community Center. For some, Muslim identity has become so intertwined with Paterson that in 2025, Mayor Sayegh called it the fourth holiest city in the world, after Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina.

While Palestinians are Paterson’s largest Arab group, they are not the city’s largest immigrant population. That belongs to the Spanish-speaking residents from multiple Latin American nations. Their presence is evident just a mile north of “Little Palestine,” where “Little Lima” anchors the largest  concentration of Peruvian people  outside of Peru. In any case, the presence of these ethnic commercial hubs illustrates how multiple groups have carved out spaces by asserting their identities and creating a sense of belonging. And while that should be an essential human right for everyone, in times of war, when territorial sovereignty is on the brink of extinction, centers like “Little Palestine” are more critical than ever. They are the vital sites where dispossessed groups produce and maintain connections to the tastes, languages, customs, and memories of their homeland.

Works Consulted

Allison, N. (2023). Little Arabia: A California Ethnoanchor. Journal of Urban History, 49(1), 111–132. 

Bauder, H., & Shields, J. (2015). Immigrant Experiences in North America: Understanding Settlement and Integration. Canadian Scholars’ Press.

Hall, S. (2013). City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary. Routledge.

 

Li, W. (1998). Anatomy of a New Ethnic Settlement: The Chinese Ethnoburb in Los Angeles. Urban Studies, 35(3), 479–501. 

Lung-Amam, W. (2017). Trespassers?: Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia. Univ of California Press.