The short answer: the parade steps off at 1 p.m. on Saturday, October 10, and if you live anywhere near Newark Avenue or Sixth Street, that Saturday afternoon is not a good time to plan a delivery, a moving truck, or a leisurely street-side coffee that assumes normal traffic. But the parade itself is only the last of four dates on a calendar that starts more than a week earlier, and most of what happens on those earlier dates never makes it onto a resident's radar because it happens at City Hall and the courthouse, not on the block.
Here is the full sequence, according to the parade's own event listing:
| Date | Event | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Oct. 1 | Parade Gala Dinner | 6:30 p.m. |
| Oct. 6 | Hudson County Flag Raising Ceremony | City Hall, 280 Grove Street, 3:30 p.m. |
| Oct. 7 | Flag Raising Ceremony | William J. Brennan Courthouse, 583 Newark Avenue, 5:30 p.m. |
| Oct. 10 | Jersey City Columbus Day Parade | 1 p.m. |
That October 7 flag raising happens on Newark Avenue too, several blocks west of the Village's core retail stretch near Bergen Hill, which means the same street name shows up twice on the calendar in one week even though the two events sit far apart on the map.
The Nickname Outlasted the Businesses, Not the Institutions
The Village carries the label "Little Italy" in almost every guide written about it, usually as a historical footnote. Brunswick Street between First and Tenth Streets was once so packed with merchants that people called it Bushel Avenue. St. Anthony of Padua Church on Monmouth Street earned a historic designation back in 2004. That is the version of the neighborhood's Italian heritage that reads like something preserved behind glass.
What the guides tend to undersell is that two of the neighborhood's founding Italian institutions are not preserved, they are operating. Holy Rosary Church, at 344 Sixth Street, was founded in 1885 as the first Italian national parish in New Jersey, and its own January 2026 parish bulletin marks the milestone at 141 years. The parish's La Festa Italiana, a five-day street festival on Sixth and Brunswick with live bands and a feast day procession, already ran August 5 through 9 this year. If your mental model of the neighborhood's Italian calendar ends with that August festival, the October parade week is the piece you're missing. It is a second, separate observance, tied to the parish's civic partner rather than the parish's summer fundraiser, and it runs through the same blocks.
That civic partner is the Dante Alighieri Society of Jersey City, founded in 1909 and still the organization behind the Columbus Day Parade, the Man of the Year Gala, and a Monday night wine club that meets year-round at the society's clubhouse on Summit Avenue. None of this is dormant. It is a functioning social organization that happens to run its biggest public event down streets residents walk every day.
Casa Colombo Is Open Three Days a Week. Most Lists Don't Say When
A few blocks from Holy Rosary sits Casa Colombo, at 380 Monmouth Street, a building put up in 1936 by Italian immigrants who donated their own labor and money to construct it. The exterior hasn't changed much since. The interior now holds two art galleries, a performance space, and a Heritage Hall of artifacts brought over by immigrants who settled in the neighborhood. It's open Wednesday and Thursday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m., and for scheduled events on weekends. That's a real, checkable operating schedule, not a plaque.
Contrast that with Village West Gallery, at 331 Newark Avenue, a name that still turns up in neighborhood roundups as a working exhibition space with an intriguing footnote that it opens to the public only a few times a year. The gallery's own website tells a different story: it closed in March 2020 for the pandemic and remains closed indefinitely. Six years is a long time for outdated information to keep circulating, but it explains why a visitor who shows up at 331 Newark expecting a reception finds a dark storefront instead. For parade week, Casa Colombo at 380 Monmouth Street is the gallery stop with posted public hours, while Village West Gallery is closed indefinitely.
What's Actually Open Along the Route
The food scene around Newark Avenue has held onto some of its old-school anchors while adding newer ones, and parade week is as good a reason as any to know which is which before the crowds arrive.
Roman Nose, at 125 Newark Avenue right at Brunswick Street, does housemade pastas and a pizza menu strong enough to hold its own against the rest of the state, in a dining room with exposed brick that suits a slower Sunday meal as easily as a pre-parade lunch. Choc-O-Pain, on First Street, handles the French end of the neighborhood's food identity, known for pastries and bread that make it a reliable morning stop regardless of what else is happening on the calendar. And on Grove Street, at the Village's eastern edge, Razza has built a reputation for wood-fired pies made with locally sourced ingredients strong enough that neighbors treat it as a destination rather than a fallback.
None of these are new discoveries. What's useful is knowing they're clustered close enough together that a walk from Sixth Street down to Grove Street on parade Saturday passes all three without much of a detour, which matters more than usual on a day when normal routes through the neighborhood get rearranged.
The Week Layers, It Doesn't Repeat
The pattern worth taking away from all four October dates is that they don't duplicate each other. The gala dinner is a ticketed indoor event. The two flag raisings are brief civic ceremonies, one at City Hall and one at the courthouse on Newark Avenue. The parade is the only one that closes streets and draws a crowd big enough to notice from your window. Treating October 10 as the whole story means missing the three days that came before it, and treating the neighborhood's Italian identity as a single August festival means missing the second week in October that follows five weeks later.
Newark Avenue in the Village carries both weeks on the same stretch of pavement. Holy Rosary's feast day procession moved through those blocks in early August. The Columbus Day Parade has historically stepped off at Sixth Street and Newark Avenue before making its way toward City Hall, and this year's route runs on October 10 at 1 p.m.
Anyone deciding whether The Village fits how they actually want to live should know this calendar exists before they know the median listing price. Reach out to The Sutherlin Group if you want a closer look at what's for sale on these same blocks.