Continued...

NJCDC, located in a rehabbed factory on the former Rogers Locomotive campus—an area that came close to being bulldozed in the 1970s for an early vision of nearby Route 19—on March 30 completed a successful campaign to protect the Great Falls, part of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act that protects more than 1,000 miles of scenic rivers and streams from commercial development and creates new conservation areas and national parks. The Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park is now established.

This beautiful attraction, while known fairly well (though not nearly well enough) in-state, is completely unknown out of state, despite the role it played in the nation’s industrial birth, and well beyond that. According to the Paterson Friends of the Great Falls the 118-acre industrial historic site is “home to the largest and best example of early manufacturing mills in the United States,” replete with 18th, 19th, and 20th-century waterpower remnants, including a three-tiered water raceway system. The 77-foot Great Falls, the second largest waterfall by volume east of the Mississippi, stands at the center of this site, and “it’s engineered raceways and mills form a complex that is unique and irreplaceable to our nation. It has been described as America’s very first systematic attempt to develop extensive waterpower for manufacturing purposes.”

While Lowell, Mass. is often credited as the first planned Industrial city, Paterson, with the falls system designed by Washington, DC architect Pierre L’Enfant (a close friend of Alexander Hamilton’s), wears that First Industrial City badge around here.

Of course, manufacturing has since left, and while there are still some prominent local businesses, Paterson, the county seat of Passaic, with its 150,000 population, could be described as an urban bedroom community, a Rust Belt city in the heart of New Jersey, and the depressed economy only makes things more challenging.

“This isn’t like the other cities in New Jersey,” NJCDC’s Powell said. “We don’t have any universities or prominent medical facilities, and while there are some long-standing business community partners, they are not large-scale employers.

“How do you leapfrog into the next economy?”