A Tour of the Monuments of Paterson, New Jersey

Paterson, New Jersey sits just west of Yonkers across the Hudson River. In 1967 Robert Smithson toured Passiac, the next city south along the much smaller Passaic River, visiting the monumental "ruins in reverse", the growing suburbs and infrastructure lines that surrounded the river.  Today Paterson houses equally monumental ruins in the form of decaying textile and paper mills which to this day push and pull the river through meandering raceways and dams, manipulating its truly monumental force, stretching it like taffy into the the city.  Paterson is home to a massive dam built through the pushing and pulling of glacial ice throughout millions years of geologic history.

The Great Falls, a roughly 70 foot tall basalt formation rushes with water that powered the growth of the city and its mills in the 19th century.

A couple of days ago I drove with a friend 2 hours north of Philadelphia to tour the ruins and geologic rearrangements.  Just south of the Great Falls, now a National Historic Park, lie the ruins of the Colt Mill complex.  Once the economic base for the city, the mill now stands as a wild collection of brick and basalt ruins scattered around the river, raceways weaving in and out of the old buildings. Constructed from the vertical walls of the carved rock, the buildings tell their own geologic history. The line between building and ground is so blurred that it's next to impossible to distinguish the two, particularly along the edge of the water.

 

  Were these great walls formed by the  scraping of glacial till over millions of years, were they carved by our hands in the making of now forgotten industries?  Piles of building rubble lay scattered throughout the site, ruins in reverse; built and then fallen, now waiting a future rearrangement.  This material is a glacial drift of its own right, deposits from a new geologic era.

 It's possible (inevitable?) the park will expand into the mill, which in its current state offers an amazing potential to the imagination of any curious trespasser.  In the face of such sublime, exposed and manipulated geology, I fear any design would miss the mark, even though it would be a huge asset to the community and improvement in the context of public safety.  The rawness of the material of the ground is so profound, and even more pronounced in the presence of a crumbling architecture made from the very material it stands upon. While the place now provokes feelings of danger, it also carries its own charm and abounds with the nature of successional growth (aspen, ailanthus, knotweed).  As you move to the edges, the vegetation is taller, more diverse (maple, locust, sycamore), and even further out to the edges of the urban-domestic cherrys, japanese maples and crabapples. This site is a vault of memories for Paterson, now remaking itself with multi-ethnic restaurants, artist lofts and historical centers.  The industrial and geologic relics, the gradient of growth throughout it, and the new home it supplies to the wild (we saw groundhogs on 3 separate occasions) of post industrial habitat and creative potentials for public space, are powerful agents in the evolution of this riparian edge.

I anticipate that this territory will continue its evolution for the next decade or so, awaiting the funds for redevelopment.  I expect the industrial pollutants are now trapped underground, beneath the cracking pavement and crumbling buildings, slowly seeping into the river. I hope this condition will hinder or delay the complete removal of material from the ground so as not to rapidly expose hazardous elements, but to also allow for the memory of this place to evolve with it.