Audio
Frank Blesso Remembers Paterson Part 2
Transcript
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Interviewer: |
Part two of Frank Blesso. Okay so we were talking about the raceway system. |
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Blesso: |
So there were other activities going on in the district once the property was on the national register. Mary Ellen who had always been working with a group of local citizens got together a group at the same time the community college was going to build a county college actually in Wayne. They had purchased Wayne. And Mary Ellen and others had built an informal committee to try to put Paterson forth as the location for the community college. And I was invited to those committee meetings. And one of the ideas that developed under that committee meeting was to prepare a plan to propose that the college occupy the buildings in the historic district. And so that was one of the first efforts John Young helped in assembling that kind of plan. And at the same time Mary Ellen created the citizens group to assist in evaluating planning and development in this Great Falls district. Now that we have a district recognized nationally and the governing body of the city of Paterson at that time was the Board of Finance. And the Board of Finance designated the group that Mary Ellen was instrumental in creating, The Great Falls Development Corporation, as an advisory group to the city. That same group, again, I can't I guess over-stress the importance of Mary Ellen's influence in the district. The group decided to have a Labor Day festival celebrating the Great Falls. And that Labor Day of 1971 they celebrated an area that Mary Ellen had encouraged a lot of volunteers and actual contractors to clear an area at the top of the falls that had been kind of isolated, fenced in by the Passaic County Water Commission. And that area was cleared and improved and even sod was laid down and all through the efforts of Mary Ellen soliciting donations and assistance from other developers and contractors and to open that up at the first Great Falls Festival was held. And that was a big deal. It was a four-day event. Governor Cahill flew in on a helicopter landing at Hinchliffe Stadium for the opening ceremony. And it became the first of many years of celebrations of Labor Day. And the Labor Day was particularly picked because of a connection with Labor Day and Paterson which other people will talk about or have already talked about. |
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Interviewer: |
Well, no one has talked about that yet, actually. |
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Blesso: |
I'm not versed, but there is substantial evidence that the first Labor Day was created by someone involved in the Paterson Labor Movement. |
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Interviewer: |
Oh, okay. I'll take a look at that. Okay, so there had been plans to do away with the raceway system. What happened then? |
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Blesso: |
Well, those plans roughly stopped. All acquisitions ceased. And so that the city was left with some properties that were acquired and others which were not. It took a few years. I'm jumping ahead a couple of years. But once the acquisition had stopped, the city created a redevelopment area similar to the in terms of its function in that there was a plan and that the plan would specify what properties would be acquired by the city and what would be rehabilitated and so on. So that there was a new redevelopment area created that included a good portion of the historic district. And because it had a redevelopment plan then the state was a position to transfer properties to the city. The city had made an application to the Federal Economic Development Agency under a program called Title IX of the EDA, and it received an $11 million federal grant for the historic district. And a portion of that grant was used to buy back properties that the state had purchased from private owners and to then make those available for development in the new Great Falls redevelopment area. And that resulted in two buildings, one of which was acquired from the city and the other acquired private for artist housing. The developer, The Regan Development Company, developed two separate mill contracts for 144 units of housing. And this housing at the time there was interest in doing something for the artist community and the developer and the city was able to get a special waiver from HUD in that the financing was based on the section 8 rental assistance program which is a rent subsidy. It's not free rent. It's a rent subsidy which the families who pay 30% of their income after certain adjustments. And that program normally is only eligible for families, low income, moderate income families, disabled people or elderly. And we were able to get single individuals who were artists to qualify in terms of eligibility for that program so that was quite an achievement. It had a cap. It was not going to be 100% artists. It was 70% artists and with a review committee set up and so on. And those buildings are still functioning for that purpose. They already had some rehabilitation work, but they're still in very nice condition, very attractive inner courtyards and nice additions to the historic district. |
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Interviewer: |
And which mill units were those? |
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Blesso: |
Those were the Phoenix Mill on Van Houton St and the Essex Mill at the beginning of Mill Street. |
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Interviewer: |
Right, I passed that coming here. Okay. Now all this time you're living in Paterson, right? |
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Blesso: |
Yes, I moved from the Alexander Hamilton Hotel into rental property that was owned by the family that had a major bakery in town. It was originally owned by the sister of Joseph Lazzara who not only owned this major bakery but he was a state senator. And so we were renting in this very nice, large home that had been made into a two-family house, and we had a one-year lease. And at the end of that one-year lease, we got an eviction notice, not because we were bad tenants or anything but because his niece was getting married and needed an apartment. And so at that time this was in 1969 and it was another mayor's election. There were, I think, three-year terms at the time. And the elections, I guess, were in November. And so we had decided that we were going to live in Paterson. It wasn't a requirement at the time, but we had made that decision. And Mayor Kramer was being challenged again. "Should we really invest and make a commitment now?" And he said, "Yeah." So we went ahead and we bought a house on the east side of Paterson in May of 1969. And Pat Kramer won the election in November. And so we're still living in that same house which is now in the east side historic district. And so we're very happy with the location and expect to continue there. |
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Interviewer: |
And did you have kids? |
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Blesso: |
And we had three boys, yes. |
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Interviewer: |
And what schools did they go to? |
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Blesso: |
They first went to the local parochial school, St. Theresa's, and then went to Montclair Kimberley in private school in Montclair for high school. |
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Interviewer: |
Okay. And why do you think you stayed in Paterson all this time? |
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Blesso: |
Well, we're happy with our location. It's convenient. Our three sons have moved out of the house. One is in Boston area. One is in Brooklyn, and one is in Hudson River Valley. And it's convenient to get to them. We're happy to be living on the east side. |
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Interviewer: |
How long did you stay with the redevelopment group? |
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Blesso: |
I stayed with the redevelopment until 1993. And what happened, John O'Malley had retired. And I became the redevelopment director. And in 1993 the state of New Jersey offered a statewide retirement incentive program for all public employees, that they would add five years of credit to your time. And I had purchased time that I was eligible to buy back from New Britain, Connecticut. And so I bought five years time and here I could get another five years if I retired. And so I had also just made twenty-five years employment in Paterson and so I was eligible for medical coverage. So it seemed like a good idea to accept that incentive and so that's what I did. I was also while my kids were going to private school and getting ready for college, I had a part-time business at night and on weekends doing home inspections and so I had a tiny engineering practice to develop. And after retirement the city did not through the city but through its non-profit development arm, The Paterson Restoration Corporation, hired me back on a part-time basis to do redevelopment consulting. And I did that for a number of years. |
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Interviewer: |
What would you want today's generation to know about Paterson? |
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Blesso: |
I think I want them to know that it has the potential to be a vibrant area. It still needs a lot of work. It needs to, one thing that Paterson had in 1968 and it still does, it has an image problem. And in fact, I guess this is a story that when we worked in New Britain, we had a consultant from New York City that advised us, the redevelopment program, in terms of marketing development sites and so on. And when and this gentleman when John came to New Britain, he sent a few months later, he sent John a cartoon from New Yorker magazine. And the cartoon shows somebody in a raincoat in front of a pay phone saying, "I want to make an obscene phone call to Paterson, New Jersey." And that was 1969, and those are the kind of images that we still have to deal with. And there's some severe problems. I'm not minimizing them. But there's also some good opportunities here. The city's financial condition is very severe, as many urban areas. The city is a microcosm of what's happened across the country to the middle class. And so that's certainly a drawback. The school system, as you know, has been taken over by the state. The state isn't even putting up the proper funding to do what they claim that they're supposed to be doing. So there are challenges. But when I see the young people that participate in the youth corps, in some of the programs, and listen to them talk, I picked up the program of the poetry and I was really amazed and pleased to see the optimism and the spirit of the young people in Paterson. And that's encouraging to see and so I look forward to better times. It's going to be difficult, and it's going to be dependent a great deal on the future of the economy of this country as to how we deal with building up a middle class that has shrunken economically and is struggling now. |
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Interviewer: |
So let's talk about the events of the Great Falls. I'm assuming you were there? |
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Blesso: |
Yes, and I've been to just about every festival. |
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Interviewer: |
So were you there when Philippe Petit did his thing? |
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Blesso: |
Oh I was there. In fact, I have home movies that I took of Philippe Petit and Karl Wallenda and Lemoyne, all of whom had walked across the falls. Philippe Petit was the fussy, young man. And I know that the Kramer family took them around Paterson. They took them to Jacobs. One story that we didn't talk about is that I'm going to switch to Jacobs again. They did buy his property. The redevelopment people, we decided that the block that they wanted to clear for him did not really make sense and in terms of displacement, of costs, and so on. And at the same time, Charlie Jacobs decided that the building right in the heart of downtown which became available would be the perfect location for him. And so the building's called The Stern's Quackenbush building which was a very attractive building built as kind of a bookend to Meyers Brothers. So you had two major department stores in the 40s and 50s opposite each other anchoring the center of Main St. And so he moved into the old Stern's Quackenbush building. And so that solved his location problem. It didn't solve the long-range, urban problem of Paterson in downtown urban areas. He operated for several years and then sold the business and retired. |
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Interviewer: |
So back to the falls. |
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Blesso: |
All right, so back to the falls. On the events of the falls, originally the group started out with a partnership, the first few festivals were three-way partnerships between the Great Falls Development Corporation and the Chamber of Commerce and the City of Paterson. And the Great Falls Development Corporation one of its, one of Mary Ellen's other accomplishments, I'll call it, was that when the highway department built Route 80, or had the plans for building Route 80, the drainage for Route 80 had to be conveyed and channeled to get to the Passaic River. And in order to do that, this had nothing to do, was related to the peripheral highway but not essential to the peripheral highway. That drainage would have to go to the river regardless to accommodate Route 80. And one of the properties purchased for the drainage line was the boiler room for building Rogers Erecting Shop on the corner of Market and Spruce St. And once the state bought the boiler room, the owner was left with a remnant that was unusable to him. And Mary Ellen convinced the owner to donate that building to the Great Falls Development Corporation. And ultimately that tied in with the EDA Title IX funding where a plan was developed so that federal funds could be used to rehabilitate the building. It would be a complicated lease arrangement so that the city could spend the federal money on a city-owned building so that that was worked out. And that building was totally renovated with all new windows which were constructed by a force of city employees who were joined by union workers, by [?] workers in making window through its own window factory and doing other preservation work, installing the piping and heating system and so on. And so that was all paid for by the EDA Title IX funding. I guess another one of Mary Ellen's projects was one day, again this was she had received a solicitation from the National Endowment of the Arts about a grant program that they were offering. And this one was called City Options. And one day she came with John Young and the three of us were trying to come up with an idea of what could we apply for the National Endowment of the Arts. Here's an application sitting in front of us, and I don't remember whose idea it was. It was probably Mary Ellen's. But the hydroelectric plant which had been built by this [?] in 1910, opened in 1914 and had been operating by the [?] and then in 1945 when the [?] transferred its assets, sold them to the City of Paterson, the city ended up leasing the hydroelectric to PSE&G. And PSE&G after some flooding damage, I think in 1969, decided to close the plant. At that time there were involved with designing nuclear plants and that was the big thing. And they decided that it didn't make sense to them to repair the plant, repair the damage, and so they with a little encouragement from Mary Ellen, they didn't need much. They knew [?] the plant had been closed, and they turned back the lease to the city. And so this plant was sitting there and we came up with the idea, let's apply for funds to do a study to reactivate this plant. And so we put in an application and got funded and then hired an engineer who came up with a favorable concept to renovate the plant if you could get additional funding. And we then took that favorable study and turned it over to the city. The city then received some money from the, I'm trying to think of which [?], a federal grant from the Department of Energy for a million and a half dollars to do the construction plans to get the plant back in operation. And so that's a long way around how this plant eventually did get back. And the city created a municipal utility authority to develop these plans. The municipal utility authority attempted to sell revenue bonds for the development of that plant, and because the bonds at this time there was a new mayor by the name of Frank Grays who was actually an old mayor. He was mayor before Pat Kramer was mayor, and he came back in after Pat had helped his entry back into politics by putting him on the public works commission. And then he ran for city council and then became mayor again. And he I think properly did not let the city's faith and credit stand behind these bonds. They had to be strictly revenue bonds and the MUA could not sell the bonds. The bond was eleven or twelve million dollars and they can only get offers on nine or ten million. And so they regrouped, and they decided, well, if we can't sell the bonds, let's see if we can find a private developer who will take the bids to see who can get a developer to release the plant. We've done the heavy lifting. We have the [?] federal energy commission license to operate the plant. That's the hard part that the city had achieved. So they went out and they solicited proposals and bids for an operator to run the plant. And they were successful. They found a developer who put up fifteen or sixteen million dollars and did the renovation and got the plant back in operation. So it opened up in 1985. And that design was a modification of the interior equipment. Originally there were four turbines, and they came up with a design that with new technology, using new equipment with only three turbines, they increased the capacity of the plant by I think it's 140%. |
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Interviewer: |
Wow. Now you said the MUA? Who are they? |
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Blesso: |
Yeah, that's the Paterson Municipal Utilities Authority. |
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Interviewer: |
Okay. Now you mentioned that Governor Cahill flew in on a helicopter to Hinchliffe. Did you get to Hinchliffe for other events? Did you go to the car races? |
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Blesso: |
Did I go? I went to the I think was in 1971 they Mary Ellen's group had a major musical spectacular in that they had the Tommy Dorsey band, Duke Ellington, Tito Puente, and oh, Vaughn Monroe sang there. And it was really a magnificent crowd that showed up to hear all these great, big bands and singers performing there. I've been to a couple of auto shows where they said the thrill sometimes as part of the festival, sometimes independently but thrill racers, thrill drivers and so on. I went to, I'm a basketball player actually, I still play with a bunch of old guys. And I went to see the Harlem Magicians which was a group that Marcus Haynes who was one of the original Harlem Globetrotters, he formed his own group called the Harlem Magicians and they played an exhibition at Hinchliffe Stadium as part of the festival. The festival inside the stadium there would be a one-day antique auto show and around the track of the stadium would be a flea market so it was a combination auto show/flea market. And after the first couple years, I became like the co- with Charlie Parmelli who was a close friend of the mayor. He organized this auto show, and I assisted him in several subsequent shows. And that was a big part of the festival. |
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Interviewer: |
Were there other organizations that you were a part of? |
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Blesso: |
Well, I ended up after the Municipal Utility Authority when they implementing the plan with the developer, they hired a project manager. And that project manager worked for them for several years and then passed away. And when he passed away, they advertised for a project manager and at the time I had taken my retirement I was doing consulting and so I applied for that position in 1995 took over as the project manager. |
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Interviewer: |
Okay. |
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Blesso: |
In terms of other civic, I've been involved with Paterson YMCA on the Board of Directors. I'm presently the Vice President of the Y board, but I've been involved with them for many years. |
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Interviewer: |
Did you play basketball there? |
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Blesso: |
Yeah. Yeah, in fact we had a team in the over-50 ring. |
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Interviewer: |
What else do you want people to know about your involvement in Paterson, your life in Paterson? |
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Blesso: |
I think that it was a great decision that I made to join John O'Malley and move to Paterson and raise our family here. And I'm very happy about it. I've been very pleased to see this national park is something that I spent over forty-five years trying to work on in different ways. I can remember going to Mary Ellen and others to Trenton trying to talk about a state park. I remember even a trip to Washington where we tried to get unannounced into the park service, trying to get to talk about a national park in Paterson. Mary Ellen always had a little trepidation about the national park in terms of a concern as to how it would be controlled. She had very good ideas in terms of preservation. She was really ahead of her time, ahead of her husband in terms of recognizing the value of preservation. And she would be pleased with the park service. Her concerns would have evaporated completely. She'd be very pleased with what's going on. |
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Interviewer: |
So I'll close out. |
Description
Frank Blesso talks about life and events around the Great Falls.
Duration
39 minutes, 16 seconds
Credit
Frank Blesso/Intern Barbara Krasner
Date Created
07/30/2015
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