Utica has always been a town of immigrants. In the 1800s and early 1900s Italians, Lebanese, Germans and Poles helped to establish it as an important hub in America’s burgeoning northeast industrial heartland. As demographic and industrial patterns changed, Utica fell on hard times, but in recent decades a new wave of arrivals, refugee groups from all corners of the globe, has begun to re-energize the region. In addition to new faces in the workforce, there are Vietnamese restaurants, Russian neighborhood stores, Bosnian coffee shops, pentecostal churches, mosques and temples. This slideshow shows just how the town’s institutions have responded in kind, helping to establish a vivid mosaic of cultural diversity.
