In the early 1950s, a young poet wrote a letter to the great poet, William Carlos Williams. Enclosed with a few samples of his best writing was a description of the program that the young poet set out to complete: “I envision for myself some kind of new speech—different at least from what I have been writing down—in that it has to be a clear statement of fact about misery (and not misery itself), and splendor if there is any out of the subjective wanderings through Paterson.”

The wanderer who wrote the letter was Allen Ginsberg. He grew up in Paterson, New Jersey and became just one of the unusual number of artists and characters that the city has brought forth. It’s common currency among the Paterson-familiar to recite the canon, a ritual that was captured in Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film, Paterson. In my list are the boxer and victim of the criminal justice system, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and Lou Costello of Abbot and Costello, who, according to family lore, was driven to the Paterson train station by my great-grandfather on his first trip to Hollywood.

William Carlos Williams offers perhaps the best individual expression of what have been many attempts, across different mediums in different historical eras, to make sense of the misery and splendor of Paterson—and imagine something new. The endeavor has been collective, too. In February 1913, three classes of silk workers in the city—from the militant, highly skilled ribbon weavers and broad silk workers protective of their craft traditions to the more readily-replaced dyers’ helpers—united in a mass strike that became a six month experiment in mutual aid and self-government. English, Italian and Jewish laborers in Paterson began with a demand for greater control over working conditions.

As historian Steve Golin recounts in his seminal book on the strike, The Fragile Bridge, women were at the forefront from the beginning. The strike was carried out under the banner of the Industrial Workers of the World, an entity whose leading light was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. A local teenager named Hannah Silverman made speeches, and like other female participants (including young mothers) she was a participant in the I.W.W. strategy of filling the jails. As repression intensified, forcing the silk workers out of Paterson to gather in the suburb of Haledon, the strike evolved from a demand for incremental reforms to a demand for control over the mills.

Though the strike failed on its terms (the manufacturers had secondary mills in Pennsylvania that kept them solvent), its legacy, and those of the many other strikes, is part of what gives the city its splendor. It is a peculiar splendor, not just a place defined by dark, decomposing mills at rest, and not merely the picturesque splendor of its Great Falls. Rather, it is the splendor of the locale’s immigrant communities, who still arrive to establish a new life for themselves and who of late have been coming from such diverse places as the Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia, Bangladesh, the Middle East and Jamaica. These new arrivals to Paterson can derive from its civic legacy moments when its people profoundly rejected the exploitative conditions in which the city was born.

Many of the leading organizations seeking to revitalize the city, non-profits and the city government alike, make much of Alexander Hamilton’s role in the founding of the city. His statue was moved to the main vantage point at the Great Falls. But there is a quietly maintained alternate history, a thread kept from William Carlos Williams—followed by an investigative journalist named Chris Norwood writing in a 1970s book About Paterson, as well as a 2017 essay for The Nation—which holds that Hamilton is more the author of the city’s troubles than an inspiring model for its recovery. Hamilton helped set up a private company, the Society for Useful Manufactures (SUM) in 1791, that rendered Paterson a factory town with limited sovereignty and little oversight for the mill owners. SUM privatized hydropower from the Passaic River, and the manufacturers governed the city without democratic accountability. In an article that appeared last spring, scholar of literature Kyra G. Morris reads Williams’s project in Paterson as an attempt at recovering a more humane relationship between the people and with the environment. The sickness is the SUM-Hamilton status quo.

The problems the city faces today are part of this legacy: once used as a dumping ground for the mills and dye houses, today it’s car drivers and the needs of commerce broadly that have privileged access to the banks of the Passaic River via Route 21. Owing in part to the exodus of large industry, the city government is dependent on aid from the state government to meet its obligations, and as such lacks capacity to lead on social and environmental renewal.

The raceway system, the early industrial hydropower network that wends through the Falls area, is left dry for want of funding for its upkeep. And downstream of the structural problems, political participation as measured in election turnout is quite low. Even with a mayoral election scheduled for May 2026, there’s little sign of a bold alternative vision articulated by anyone with the authority to do so for, say, social housing, resident-directed investment and municipal enterprise, or climate protection and sustainable development.

(It must be said that the dysfunction comes with some side-effect blessings. Paterson’s place-out-of-time, jewel-box built environment, remains mostly untouched by capitalist monoculture. It would probably make William Carlos Williams proud that the city is, at a population of over 150,000 people, among the largest in the United States without a Starbucks.)

A program for Paterson must follow Ginsberg and attempt a clear statement of fact about misery. The misery here is not just lack of top-down investment. It is exploitation—social and environmental—from actors already on the scene and from those who have left but whose effects are still being felt. The muse of William Carlos Williams needs no saviors. Instead of platitudes about bringing in investment, we might look to the residents. It’s a place that has a knack for giving rise to the best in its people: solidarity, new ideas, new speech.