The Van Buren Branch Library, located in Newark's Ironbound district, first opened its doors on September 23, 1923. For more than eighty years, the branch has been a cultural and educational center within the community, serving over 40,000 children and adults from predominately European and Latin American backgrounds. A newly renovated and expanded Van Buren Branch Library re-opened on November 19, 1997.

Located east of Penn Station, bordered by the Passaic River and surrounded by major highways and the railroad, the Ironbound feels more like a village than a neighborhood of a major city. In the 1820s, German and Irish immigrants first settled the Ironbound and worked in the factories springing up amid the Industrial Revolution. Successive waves of immigrants---including Italians, Poles, Slavs, Jews, Lithuanians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Brazilians, and Latin Americans---followed this pattern, finding jobs and a chance at the American Dream in the Ironbound and Newark.