Back from Paterson at last
November 7, 1998
It is Saturday and sunny, and I am better rested than I have been in weeks or months or maybe a year.
The new job, which really an old job to which I have returned, demands less of my weekend time, so that I can get on with the normal chores of living, like laundry and shopping, recycling and bank.
Sharon and I have developed a routine here in Haledon to make up for the lack of opportunity either of us has for doing the ordinary things.
When Sharon worked in Manhattan, she was able to pick up things she needed on her way home from work, something working in Paterson has denied her. Even if the stores downtown could provide her with what she needed, she could hardly stop long enough to shop since her bus schedule often demanded her instantaneous change from one bus to another. To wait was to risk being stranded for hours.
But for a large part, downtown Paterson can't provide what she needs, except for the most superficial things, because of the death of those stores offering a quality product. It also does not allow the luxury of window shopping the way Manhattan does, because Paterson has an unquenchable desperation, and people rush to the stores to make purchases in a frenzy of activity, grabbing what they want or need before rushing back to their homes, the locals fearing the darkness as much as the business and legal people who leave after work is done.
That lazy sense of freedom Paterson had when Hank and I used to wander here is gone, as is Sterns-Quackenbush and Meyer Brothers departments stores, Woolsworth, Grants, and the many other quality shops that used to bring people here.
Part of the problem is Willowbrook Mall which opened its doors on the other side of Wayne in 1969, spelling the doom of Paterson as a shopping district, just as the mall did for town's like Bloomfield where parking is lacking, and the dangers of muggings apparently higher. Willowbrook sold itself as a safer environment (an allusion it has maintained for years, but one people have bought into), and as a more convenient place to shop, with ample parking and highways along two sides to let people come and go with ease.
The parking is real, the coming and going less so, and yet, coming and going from Paterson is far more difficult, and dangerous, and depressing.
Within a few days, Sharon and I take flight from this place, too, the way many whites have, leaving the ruins to those who cannot escape, me, feeling guilty because I wanted Paterson to be the old Paterson, which it can never be again, and without some drastic change, this Paterson with its dying streets will be the Paterson of the future, forever doomed as a Warsaw like Ghetto, taking in refugees from around the world, without realŪ½hope of having any enjoy the American Dream, with taxes so high than even those can afford the houses in sections like Hillcrest cannot afford to keep them long.
We go to Jersey City, with Sharon commuting in and out of the city, and me, working my old beat as a reporter, as if the last year, an experiments in hope, never existed.