A history of 617-623 Washington Street, from earliest ownership by two men married to women enslaved by the Stevens family, to its changing use, over the course of a century, as stables for horses and carriages, a movie house, a parking lot for an upscale club, and a community bank.

Carlo’s City Hall Bake shop, made famous by the popular cable show “Cake Boss,” may be the best known bakery at this Washington Street location, but it was not the first. Eighty years before Carlo’s opened here, two German bakeries were creating mouth-watering confections.

For almost a century, one family helped Hoboken commemorate its brightest public events, including gala masquerade balls, uproarious political rallies, Hudson River ship dedications, main street store openings, and celebrations of Odd Fellows, Elks, and Moose.

Since its construction in 1883, City Hall has been the center of Hoboken’s political life, headquarters for routine business, witness to riotous elections and occasional visits by movie stars, and, for a time, host to an armory and the longshoremen’s shape up for work on the docks.

When Dora and Henry Schnackenberg bought a confectionary on upper Washington Street during the Great Depression, people didn’t think they’d last long. But Schnackenberg’s became a Hoboken fixture, with two generations of family members serving up cherry cokes, sandwiches, ice cream, and homemade candy for 88 years.

For 47 years customers walked into Giorgio’s Pasticceria Italiana to find traditional Italian cookies and cakes--sweetly scented macaroon amaretti, rich sfogliatelle, and cookies studded with pinoli nuts.

After working for many years as a haberdasher at a men’s clothing store at 404 Washington Street, Charles Lallo had the opportunity opportunity to buy the business, and transformed it over the next half-century into the sartorial palace “Lallo’s House of Charles.”

A traditionalist in his work as a watch repairman and jeweler, and an innovator in the re-design of his main street store in 1954, Nathan Marcus also served as a leader for members of Hoboken’s small Jewish community.

In the early 1900s, two of the era’s most remarkable people lived in a yellow brick complex on Washington Street: financial wizard Hetty Green, and Thomas Wiggins, a blind pianist known as one of the finest African American musicians of the nineteenth century.

In the more than two centuries since Washington Street was established, horse cars have replaced horse-drawn carriages, and busses have replaced trolleys. Even the pedestrian experience has changed in ways unimaginable in 1804.

After purchasing the 96-year-old First Methodist Episcopal Church in 1965, the Mt. Olive Baptist Church congregation faced—and overcame—its greatest challenge: a raging fire in 1977 that destroyed all but the walls of the historic structure.

In the early part of the twentieth century, strollers on Hoboken’s main street could come across theaters offering all manner of entertainment—operas, theatrical performances by local troupes, new-fangled “moving picture exhibitions,” or vaudeville acts featuring displays of super-human strength.

Within a few decades of the birth of photography, Washington Street welcomed professionals ready to capture the proud moments of new immigrants and hosted the convivial salons of amateur photographers.

Visit some of the 19th- and 20th century clubs and fraternal organizations that flourished on Hoboken’s main street.

The Avenue has long hosted festive parades. Here you’ll find out about the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, in which thousands marched in frock coats; President Wilson’s motorcade parade commemorating the end of World War I; and spontaneous bursts of dancing in the city’s Puerto Rican Day Parade.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Hoboken gained a reputation for its many drinking establishments, including those that flourished on the city’s main street, despite temperance activism, taxes, and even Prohibition.

Imagine late-nineteenth century Washington Street, hummingwith activity, as dozens of Mom & Pop shops compete to meet the needs of more than 40,000 residents of the mile-square city. In the newcentury, local entrepreneurs would embrace a new way to entice shoppers: the department store.

Washington Street banks rose up during the period known as the Gilded Age, a time when new money masked society’s inequities, and struggled to guarantee depositors that their savings would be safe from embezzlers and bank panics.

Washington Street has long hosted athletic associations and recreational facilities. Step inside to see the German turn verein club for tumblers, political club sports, a school for circus arts led by two former stars of the Moscow State Circus, and a familiar YMCA.

Artists—visitors and residents alike—have been inspired by Washington Street, first documenting its bucolic vistas in the 1850s, and, as it developed into a lively urban center, recording its child workers, taverns, family-owned shops, and street celebrations.