Colt Mill Rescued From Ruins, Paterson
Site Awaits Restoration
The Herald News
By: Bill Hughes,
Sept. 2, 2000
PATERSON - In what officials have called the most significant
accomplishment of historic preservation undertaken in years, workers put the finishing touches this week on a
$685,000 project to stabilize the former site of Samuel Colt's first gun mill in the Great Falls Historic
The project involved the disposal of tons of debris and the delicate
removal of thousands of stones, one at a time, from the teetering walls of the old mill, which was built in
1836. Each finished stone from the building's exterior was carefully cataloged, tagged, and stored in wooden
crates on the site.
Workers also constructed elaborate bracing systems for the remaining
solid portions of the structure, and waterproofed the top edges of the entire perimeter of the exterior wall
"After all these years of slow movement, something's finally
appearing and it really looks good," said Mayor Martin G. Barnes. "This is the first piece of a much
larger puzzle, and hopefully things will start falling into place and we'll get the rest of the project for
that site underway."
The braces now holding the eastern and western walls upright are
comprised of chain-link netting pressed together by horizontal bars made of steel U-channel and
pressure-treated lumber and anchored to massive concrete blocks specially poured onto strategic locations
around the building.
The top edges of the entire perimeter of the building have been
capped with waterproof, steel-reinforced cement to prevent future water damage to the remaining structure.
"It's like a giant Band-Aid around the building," said Sal
Strano, a project manager with Robert Charles Enterprises, the Secaucus firm that performed the physical work.
"It's a crude way to describe it, but that's more or less what it is."
Strano said work crews varying between six and 10 men spent the past
three months filling 10 trash bins with debris from the site and pouring roughly 60 tons of cement to form the
stabilizing piers that now hold the largest wall sections upright.
The project, which finished on schedule and under budget, was funded
by matching grants from the federal Urban History Initiative secured for the city by Sen. Frank Lautenberg,
D-Cliffside Park, in 1992, and the New Jersey Historic Trust.
"This is the kind of restoration work people come back from
Europe and talk about," said Mike Wing, the coordinator for the city's Historic Preservation Commission.
"People said it could never happen in a city like Paterson, but here it is."
Bill Brookover, a historical architect with the National Parks
Service who oversaw the project, said the stabilization was an important step in the overall development of
the Great Falls Historic District.
"This is a very unusual project because the Colt Gun Mill is
very important, but it's in a ruinous state and it's difficult to discern what is worth saving,"
Brookover said. "Until now it hasn't been safe to go in there and assess the situation accurately. The
next step is to clean up the inside then come up with a workable preservation plan and the funding to do
Brookover and Wing said there is probably asbestos contamination
inside the ruins that will have to be removed before other work can be performed, but both are hoping there
are no other serious hazardous materials on the site.
The ruins of the mill, which sit on a spit of land downstream of
Paterson's Great Falls just beyond the intersection of Van Houten and Mill streets, have lain fallow for
decades after a 1983 fire gutted the building. The last productive use of the structure involved silk dyeing
by the Allied Textile Printing Co., which abandoned the 7.5-acre site a few years before the fire.
Most recently, the city approved the sale and development of the site
to a Yonkers firm, which originally planned to build 190 units of mixed-income townhouse units with a café
and a river walkway. The sale has not been finalized, however, due to a variety of obstacles including lack of
state and federal approval and a lawsuit against the developer by a local preservation group filed earlier
Barnes said the developer, Larry Regan, is now seeking to change the
project from a group of two-story, vinyl-sided townhouses to one larger, mill-style apartment building.
Regardless of what happens to the rest of the site, the Colt Mill
will be preserved in one form or another as a separate entity. The building, which is on the National Register
of Historic Places, was the site on which Samuel Colt produced the Colt Paterson, a weapon that earned the
nickname, "The Gun That Tamed The West."
Although Colt's original business failed in Paterson before
flourishing in Hartford, Conn., approximately 5,000 weapons were produced in Paterson, of which 500 are known
to still exist, according to Paterson Museum Director Giacomo DeStefano.