One of those buildings is the original home of Samuel Colt's firearms factory. It is the larger building with the many windows on the right, known even when this photo was taken as the Colt Rifle Mill for the rifle-shaped weathervane that stood atop the building's original spire for years. The plant of Colt's short-lived Patent Arms Manufacturing Company was built in 1836 on the site of the Colt family's former nail mill, but closed seven years later, the buildings becoming a silk mill and that area of Paterson becoming a textile manufacturing center while Colt made his name and fortune with another incarnation of the firm in Connecticut. Some of the original building remains today as part of a national historic area, I believe. Attached is a rendering of what this area looked like around the time of the Civil War, with the spire of the Gun Mill salient.

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Poor Paterson... it's been popular since the mid-sixties to blame urban blight and ratty conditions on whatever ethnic group currently dominates the city. But here it is... photographic evidence that a) blight is blight; b) fond memories of yesteryear are occasionally myopic; and c) the industrial district is likely to be the worst spot in town.

Pearl of the Passaic? Not sure about Paterson, but until recorded voices took over for conductors on New Jersey Transit rail lines, a few of the old boys loved to announce: "Newark next... Newark, NJ, Paradise on the Passaic."

One of those buildings might be the original home of Samuel Colt's firearms factory.

It's wonderful that these black-and-white pictures of Paterson's mill area can be complemented by the brilliant watercolors of the area that Oscar Bluemner painted a few years later, such as 1915's "Expression of a Silktown, New Jersey."