William Carlos Williams led me to Paterson. I was immediately drawn to the opening lines of his long poem named after the city: “a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands…by multiplication, a reduction to one…a dispersal and a metamorphosis.” While describing his own poem as a “failing experiment,” Williams’ Paterson was an attempt to redeem the failure of the American language through an intimate study of a failed American city. 

The first planned industrial city of America, Paterson, New Jersey is now a city debilitated by the abandonment of its founding identity. Disparate relics populate the urban fabric as longstanding testaments to the city’s historic failure. The anchor of Paterson, however, still stands today, just as it had some 13,000 years ago since the end of the last ice age. The “lucky burden” of the Great Falls and the envisioned potential to harness its waterpower preordained the very conception of the city.  

I made many trips to Paterson, always equipped with a camera and the Williams poem. I would arrive by train and roam the city by foot. I relied on Paterson as a textural map, allowing me to make better sense of my contact with the place. 

Drawing from Williams’ allusion to The Unicorn Tapestries, I appropriated the image of “The Unicorn in Captivity” and used this as a key to recontextualize my reading of Paterson. After identifying particular vertical towers within the city that were emblematic of its former glory, I likened them to the stakes of the fence that encloses the unicorn. The Great Falls, whose stature had been exceeded by its surrounding cityscape, became the symbolic unicorn. On my fifth and final trip to Paterson, I embarked on a pilgrimage that I had devised for the city. Positioning myself in front of each architectural monument, I held a historic image in my hand, layering it with the present in the background. This photo series would become representative of my role as both interceptor and mediator of the city. 

As a result of my visits, the kind of architecture that I envision for Paterson will be intrinsically tied to the multiple narratives that I have encountered, namely, those derived from Williams’s poem, the historical city, its current state of ruin and the geological formation of the rift in the rock. In its multiple forms, the new monuments will occupy the site of the falls and bleed into the urban fabric, at once memorializing the inherited histories while also transforming the spatial and experiential impression of the place.