Recently I was talking with a friend about my 'hometown' of Paterson. Fiercely in my bones, Paterson defined my childhood; my conversation with said friend, however, revealed that I knew very little about it. I felt--just a bit--like a fraud. Upon arriving in NJ for Christmas I mentioned this to my father, who had some vacation days to make up. The rest, as they say, is History.
Our first stop was Lambert Castle on the day after Christmas.
Paterson was home to the silk trade, and this castle was built as a home to one of its barons in the late 1800s.
Designed to also be a home to his art collection,
room after room sprawled before us
as we meandered through,
imagining what life must have been like when its owner meandered there as well.
This guy was no particular help in our quest,
just a part of the Christmas trees and displays sprawled throughout the house as we went.
Some of my favorite discoveries:
This tree,
these antlers,
this chandelier,
this old Paterson made piano,
this view,
and this rotunda.
A few days later found my dad and I at the Paterson museum.
Paterson was a planned industrial city, where many goods were invented, improved, and produced. The city can boast of silk production, locomotive production, plane engine production, submarine production, and Colt revolver production to name the most prominent.
Since my great-grandfather worked in the silk mills, I was particularly interested in the workings of that trade. [What I learned was so interesting that I've decided to make it its own post--more to come!]
Brimming with information (helped along--apparently--by having worked in every building in the city, since at nearly every display he said something along the lines of 'oh, yeah, I worked in that building'), Marlo deftly explained the workings of the machines used in said silk trade,
the plane engines manufactured at--yes--a building he had worked in,
and the first submarine.
When we'd had our fill of all the museum had to tell us, we headed outside to one of the locomotives built in Paterson and used to build the Panama Canal.
There, a very nice man took our picture.
[A picture, I might point out, that solidifies once and for all my personal history: Yup, I'm his daughter.]
Next, we went across the street to Paterson's famed Great Falls, the source of its industrial power and the reason that Alexander Hamilton envisioned a thriving city in the first place.
When we were done exploring all the falls had to offer us [more to come on that too...], we hopped in the truck and my very own tour guide showed me around the city. We found the district of old beautiful houses, built with Spanish tiled roofs and leaded glass windows. And then, we found a house that had particular meaning in our own history:
the house my grandparents lived in until I was four.
Pastor of a city church, my grandparents lived in this parsonage just off of Broadway,
and I spent many pleasant hours in this backyard, being thrown in the air in a blanket by my young and very fun aunts.
We drove home, past the church where I spent many a childhood Sunday enraptured by the black gospel piano playing and singing that occurred there, enchanted by my very own grandfather standing in the pulpit, love for him oozing out of every pore of the people in the pews. I marveled at how small the building is now, since in my four year old mind it stands large and looming. I tried to take a picture, but all I got was blur. I thought, 'perhaps it's for the best'--sometimes historicity is better remembered the way we remember it, and not the way it is today.
Regardless of the changes that time brings, I can--having made my historific tour of this place brimming with all kinds of historicity--claim without question my rightful heritage as a child of Paterson!
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