Debate still rages over new N.J. national park
PATERSON, N.J. -- America's newest national park features the second-most-powerful waterfall east of the Mississippi, at the spot where Alexander Hamilton founded the country's first planned industrial city to win America's economic independence from Britain.
Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park is "the most historic site in America that no one has heard of, let alone seen," says Leonard Zax, a Paterson native and retired Washington lawyer who fought to create the park system's 391st unit here.
So why do critics, including some congressional Republicans such as Rep. John Campbell of California, call it a "pork park" — a parochial economic development scheme?
The battle over the park, authorized by legislation signed by President Obama this spring, reflects two competing views of how to run national parks:
• An already overextended National Park Service needs to focus its limited resources on maintaining existing parks, not adding new ones.
• The Park Service needs to reach people with whom it has had little contact, including urban residents, immigrants and racial and religious minorities such as Muslims.
Hamilton founded Paterson in 1792 at a 77-foot-high waterfall on the Passaic River, the most powerful cataract east of Niagara Falls. He envisioned a model for American economic self-sufficiency, a place to establish the primacy of immigrant-powered manufacturing over the slave-based agriculture practiced in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia.
Paterson became the site where Samuel Colt built his first gun mill and John Holland built the first motorized submarine. Its mills produced more locomotives than anywhere else in America, more silk than anywhere in the world.
If "national park" suggests grizzlies and glaciers, Paterson today — a gritty, dense, impoverished city of about 145,000 — may seem an odd site.
The Great Falls historic district struggles to attract visitors. Signage is inconsistent or poor — the sign on the interstate from New York is covered with graffiti — and, given Paterson's narrow old streets, "it is difficult to find the place," says Gianfranco Archimede director of the city Historic Preservation Commission.
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