Paterson
— — a working city built around a waterfall.
Not only on a wall.
“An industrial city in Passaic County, organized in 1792 around the second-largest waterfall east of the Mississippi. The mills are mostly quiet now, the brick still red, the river still loud. Alexander Hamilton chose the site for the new republic's first planned manufacturing town. William Carlos Williams wrote a five-volume poem about it. The falls run hardest in March and after a heavy rain, when the spray reaches the iron footbridge and the sound carries blocks east. — from the studio
Paterson, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Paterson sits in Passaic County in northern New Jersey, about 30 km northwest of Manhattan on the Passaic River. The city was organized in 1792 by the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, a project Alexander Hamilton drove as the new republic's first planned industrial town. Its anchor is the Great Falls — a 77-foot drop in the Passaic, the second-largest waterfall by volume east of the Mississippi. The falls and the surviving mill district were designated Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park in 2011. Population sits near 159,000, making Paterson the third-largest city in the state.
The mill district along the river is built from brownstone, red brick, and brown sandstone quarried in the region, with the mid-19th-century factories rising three to five stories along the raceway system that drew water off the falls to power silk, cotton, and locomotive works. Paterson was called Silk City through the late 1800s; by 1910 some 25,000 silk workers were employed in roughly 300 mills. The Rogers Locomotive Works, founded 1832, built more than 6,000 engines before closing in 1913. Much of the original mill stock still stands and is being slowly re-tenanted as housing and small workspace.
The Great Falls of the Passaic drops 77 feet over a basalt cliff carved by glacial meltwater roughly 13,000 years ago, when Glacial Lake Passaic finished draining through this gorge. Flow varies sharply with rainfall: a few hundred cubic feet per second in late summer drought, two thousand or more after a March thaw or a heavy storm. Hamilton first saw the falls in 1778 during the Revolutionary War, picnicking with George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, and returned with the site in mind for the industrial scheme he would publish in his 1791 Report on Manufactures. The iron pedestrian bridge above the gorge dates to 1827.