Broadway Neighborhood Guide

Broadway is a dense, working-class neighborhood in northern Newark where Italian-American and Latin American communities have built something genuinely their own along the Passaic River. The neighborhood runs from the riverfront west toward Branch Brook Park, giving residents an unlikely combination of industrial grit and parkland, including the park's famous cherry blossom canopy every spring. Red sauce and empanadas share the same commercial strips, bocce courts and bodegas coexist a few blocks apart, and the rhythm of the place is set by bakery runs, Sunday parades, and the ever-present soundtrack of Route 21. It is not a neighborhood that markets itself, which is part of why the people who live here tend to stay.