A return to Paterson

 

November 22, 1997

 

I anticipate going home, back to Paterson where I wandered as a kid, railroad tracks and housing projects, the enduring images from a time when my feet took me everywhere, when I could climb Garret Mountain and roll down the grassy slopes of East Side Park all in one day. I have walked that world since, of course, a few times taking the same routes I had as a kid, the walk across from the Lakeview section to People's Park, trying to stir up some feeling in 1997 that I had 30 years earlier.

 Most of what I found remained the same, though the bowling alley is closed and the lot where the pool hall stood empty. But the footbridge across route 80 remained, the entrance on each side thick with weeds. I stood in the middle when I crossed it, staring down at eight lanes or roaring traffic, remembering a time when the highway did not exist, remembering the time when the construction crews worked to build the huge elevated section over this city, and we, on our way to sword fight at Lambert's Castle, begged them for sips of water from their coolers. We never thought to bring our own.

 Paterson remains a monument in my life, from the day my parents brought me home to a 21st Avenue apartment, to those days in the late 1980s when I covered town hall for a Wayne weekly newspaper. I worked here as an usher when the city still had a movie theater. I delivered now extinct daily newspapers door to door. I sang in these streets, I ran from police through these streets, and now, over the next few months, I will return to these streets, to a different Paterson, but one still fully alive inside of me.

 At one time, people had a lot of hope for this place. Alexander Hamilton had hoped it would become a model industrial city, and it did, until the unions and the communists gutted it with the 1913 strikes. While other cities produced goods to support the war effort, workers and Silk Barons conducted a revolution here, a revolution from which the city never fully recovered. World War Two helped revive it a little. Lou Costello loved it so much he gave money to build its Boys Club. By the time I was born in 1951, Paterson was decaying again, and though I remember the town thriving, it was dying inside.

 It is not yet dead, but lingers on the edge, men and women in city hall miscalculating their options, at one point, a Republican mayor relying on SETA funds for its salivation, only to get kicked in the teeth by a Republican president who cut those funds off.

 And now, my return takes me to the most painful part, as a new president, a supposedly kinder Democratic president, kicks Paterson in the teeth again, by cutting people off from welfare, perhaps easing in the knife to finally murder this city once and for all.