Introduction
| Eldon "Big John" Johnson feeding the pigeons on Cianci Street. By David Greedy, Courtesy North Jersey Herald & News |
Ironies compose the complexities that form Paterson, the first planned industrial city of the United States. Ironies compose what is found in the history of its rich past, and the daily realities of its waking present. All of which must be raked through somehow whenever the question is asked and, it seems, the question is asked often: What happened to Paterson?
There was once a majestic downtown here with a Main Street to he rivaled by the sterile, internal highway plazas-those new and improved hearts of our worlds. So be it. This city's Main Street is not alone in its nighttime desolation.
Some say it was an exodus for the American Dream of a house away from the growing whispers of fear, an exchange of a seemingly escapable diversity for a separating lawn and picket fence. With it all, the growing need for many to get in the car and drive to the corner mailbox or Home Depot, then to some corporate restaurant chain on the highway, only miles away from the city with "the problems."
Those with a knowledge of history or an interest in memory say that the reasons for imbalances in a city can be traced back even further, here in Paterson to a continuance of a spirit that began when a group of rich men harnessed the Great Falls for profit, founding Paterson as a corporation instead of chartering it as a city in 1792. Industry came to the land of the Lenape Indians and silk became the never-ending fruit, or so it was planned. But there was a catch. The individual spirits of people, viewed as part of the machinery, were radically alive.
Some have said that a "Renaissance" of Paterson's Historic District would help the proverbial Silk City, here in the neighborhood with the brick mills once powered by the Great Falls, where thousands of men, women, and children from diverse backgrounds once worked. Joining forces with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1913, they fought for rights, like the eight-hour workday, against the politically and commercially powerful. In short, they fought a revolution, against great odds, that helped bring us rights we still benefit from today. The eventual decline of the once plentiful mills took jobs with them, unraveling the silk lining of an incendiary past not easily forgotten, in need of solutions not easily found.
After years of watching some of the vacant historic buildings burn down, some say a kind of a "rebirth" may he coming here after all. Current developers, albeit under more than appealing deals for themselves, have restored or are planning to restore the burned-out shells of these mills and other properties into housing, and more development plans seem to be waiting in politically backed wings. In the end, despite some sudden public opposition raised at stormy council meetings, who can truly progressively argue against more affordable housing? In our fragmented philosophical times, any means seem to justify that end. But what will even more people do here at night? The city of 150,000 lacks a hometown daily newspaper to watchdog corruption or report with direct insight on its people, places, and needs. The abundant go-go bars, where women do just about anything for a dollar, remain the main source of nightly entertainment. There is not one movie theater left in Paterson. No youth center is planned for the area or the city at large, although one is desperately neededSo some wisely ask: Is there an identifiable, balanced, overall working plan for Silk City's Historic District that truly and aggressively takes the individual needs of a community under development to heart? Indeed, Paterson has a powerful past, and with it, a pervading continuance of special interests of which we deny ourselves a full holistic recognition, despite the much-touted "history" here.
Some say it is not a "positive thing" to sling arrows, but Cupid did, and besides, what can he the real danger of asking what happened to the quality of life of a place like Paterson? To he able to walk to a theater again or a bookstore along its streets; to walk in safety at night; to again see the beautiful turn-of-the-century architecture of historic buildings downtown, Grand Dames now scathed over with plastic Day-Glo facades that read "99¢ Dream" and "99¢ Reality." Paterson is the perverse product of an epic corporate experiment, a perpetual magnifying lens into complicated, ongoing class struggles
Yet, within the struggle, some will say there are still diamonds to he found here among the shards of glass on these streets. They may appear in the form of a cappuccino made by an old Italian man at the Roma Club on Cianci Street; the Peruvian lady with the beautiful, dark-eyed little girl in the luncheonette on Van Houten, which has the best rice and beans around; or the big man with the gentle heart, originally from South Carolina, who works at the dye factory and feeds the pigeons everyday at noon in the park with the statue of Lou Costello, across from the restored mill I call home.
For there are those who say that the spirit of the individual has always dwelled here, in spite of the still-convenient Silk City corporate image that follows Paterson around like a haunted public relations mirage. As William Carlos Williams wrote in his classic poem Paterson, "A man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody." To defend the heart of the city is in the natural light of that spirit.
Some say it was the malls. Some say it is best to remember that nothing costs 99 cents, with tax. Some say our cities, in reality as well as our dreams, reveal our true hearts at work. And that it may, ironically, serve us all well to take a closer look.
© 1999 June
Avignone
Last modified December 12, 1999
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