Word: patersons
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...best thing about About Paterson, Christopher Norwood's first book, is that it is a work of inspiration and commitment. Norwood, for two years a reporter for a Paterson television station, writes with a refreshing admiration for the city, and a tenacious desire to get at the spirt of Paterson...
...flit from one city to the next, never lighting on one specific locale. What American "urban studies" lacks is a real urban history, a sympathetic study and analysis of specific communities and neighborhoods. Not until we know more about the growth and development of places like Rochester, Framingham or Paterson will we be able to make informed judgments on urban problems. About Paterson is not a great book--it leaves out a lot of necessary information, and tends to make easy points out of complicated issues--but it is a start towards the kind of urban history that we must...
...Paterson is a middle-sized city (150,000 pop.), described in the '30s WPA New Jersey State Guide as "one of the few cities in America that came out almost exactly as it was planned." It was founded in 1972 as an industrial community, a site for the factories of the Society for Useful Manufacturers (SUM), one of Alexander Hamilton's corporate schemes to industrialize the newly united colonies. The settlement quickly became a colony of the industrialists who ran SUM--men like Samuel Colt, who produced his first revolvers in Paterson. It was not until 1831 that the town...
...Paterson became what Norwood calls "a Wild West outpost of industrialism." While most American cities developed and began their early growth as commercial centers, producing civic-minded merchants and opulent monuments, Paterson never found benefactors among its industrialists. It was merely a place to house the workers who ran the silk factories, and the industrialists fought every attempt to improve or beautify the town. Jacob Rogers of Rogers Locomotives declined to donate a small patch of land for the city hospital. "I don't owe anything to Paterson," he said...
...Norwood, Paterson is a symbol of the neglected American city, an entity never acknowledged or accomodated by American political institutions. Cities by and large exist at the pleasure of their state governments, which are dominated by rural interests, or more recently, by the affluent suburbs. She is correct is pointing out that American cities have always been suspect. It is in the dense cities that individualist land and property rights have been attacked by collectivist demands...