Paterson's Melting Pot: Beyond Alexander Hamilton's Vision

Paterson’s Melting Pot: Beyond Alexander Hamilton’s Vision

Barbara Krasner

Krasner, Paterson’s Melting Pot, 2

HIST 5890-60: New Jersey HistoryProfessor Suzanne Bowles

December 15, 2014


Paterson’s Melting Pot:

Beyond Alexander Hamilton’s Vision

Usher1 Arbus arrived on the S.S. Niew Amsterdam from

Rotterdam in November 1916. Just nine years old, he traveled with

his mother, Machla (Mary), 29; his brother Jankel (Jack), 7; and

sister Chane (Anne), 5. They were traveling to his father, Abe

Arbus, 76 Main Street in Paterson. Abe, born in 1876, came to New

York in February 1913 on the S.S. Campanello from Rotterdam. He

told ship officers his destination was Paterson, New Jersey where

his brother Jankel lived at 76 Main Street. He would probably

need the bulk of the five dollars he had in his pockets to get

there.2 Soon the Arbus Brothers set up a silk mill that

eventually became New Deal Weaving on the fourth floor at 3 Mill

1 Usher became Arthur and then Marris Arbus as an American.2 S. S. Campanello, Frame 356, line 13, February 28, 1913, accessed December 11, 2014, Ellis Island Foundation.


Street, one of about 300 Paterson firms involved in the silk

industry in some way. 3

From the initial prospectus authored in the summer of 1791

by Alexander Hamilton and Tench Coxe, the Society for the

Encouragement for Useful Manufactures, or S.U.M., sought to make

use of immigrants and machines as cheap labor for this first

industrialized city of the new republic. Hamilton envisioned the

establishment of many different types of manufactories:

pasteboard, paper hangings, sail and other linen cloths, cottons

and linens, women’s shoes, stockings, pottery and earthenware,

hats, ribbons and tapes, carpets, blankets, brass and iron wire,

and thread and fringes.4

Hamilton could not know the extent to which his vision would

be realized or to what extent immigrants were integral to the

city’s growth and survival. Immigrants would bring more than

cheap labor. They would bring skilled labor, progressive labor

3 PBS, “The American Experience: People & Events: The Paterson Silk Strike of 1913,” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldman/peopleevents/e_strike.html Accessed November 8, 2014.4 “Prospectus of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, [August 1791],” Founders Online, National Archives. Source: The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 9, August 1791 – December 1791, ed. Harold C. Syrett. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965, pp. 144–153. Accessed November 7, 2014, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-09-02-0114

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/goldman/peopleevents/e_strike.html

http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-09-02-0114


philosophies, civic pride and philanthropy, and services. But

their contributions would not come without exacting a price.

Paterson became a melting pot of its own, attracting skilled

workers from Europe, especially Poland and Russian, Switzerland

and Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East to the mills

and other industries. By 1900, 36.9 percent of Paterson’s

residents were foreign born. Throughout the rest of New Jersey,

only 23 percent were foreign born.5 In About Paterson, Christopher

Norwood reports that a popular way to pass the time was for

Patersonians to go down to the station in the evening and watch

“the immigrant train” come in.6

By the turn of the twentieth century, Paterson had become

the 32nd largest city in the United States and the third largest

in New Jersey following Newark and Jersey City.78 By 1900,

“Paterson was the fastest-growing city on the East Coast, its

5 “Table 13. Nativity of the Population for Regions, Divisions, and States: 1850 to 1990,” U.S. Census Bureau, accessed November 26, 2014, https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab13.html. 6 Christopher Norwood, About Paterson: The Making and Unmaking of an American City (New York: Saturday Review Press/E.P. Dutton, 1974), 55.7 “Table 19. Nativity of the Population for the 50 Largest Urban Places: 1870 to 1990,” U.S. Census Bureau, accessed December 5, 2014, https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab19.html.8 Newark held the 16th position and Jersey City the 17th position. Paterson never held anything above the 32nd position before or after 1900.

https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab19.html



population increasing an average of 50% every decade.”9 Nearly

6,000 Italians had settled in the city and represented the

largest foreign-born group.10 By 1932, students observed that

about 65 percent of Paterson’s population had a foreign

background in the following descending order: Italian, Poland,

Germany, The Netherlands, England, Ireland, Russia, Scotland,

Palestine, Syria, and Turkey. They wrote, “Each of these

representatives of the old world has something to contribute to

the life and progress of a community, a state, and a nation.”11

Immigrants, J.D. Osborne writes in his doctoral dissertation,

provided the core of Paterson’s labor force throughout the city’s

industrialization.12

Skilled Workers Flock to Paterson

A British immigrant gave birth to the silk industry in

Paterson. John Ryle, born in England in 1817, earned the

reputation as “the father of the silk manufacturing industry in 9 Norwood, 40.10 J.D. Osborne, Industrialization & the Politics of Disorder: Paterson Silk Workers 1880-1913 (Warwick, UK: University of Warwick/British Library Document Supply Centre, 1979), 175.11 June 1932, 108. Interestingly, no mention is made of Jews or the Yiddish language in the chapter on Labor Center.12 Osborne, 173.


Paterson.”13 His career in the industry began at the age of six

as a bobbin boy. He came to America in 1839 to take a job as a

mill superintendent in Massachusetts. There he was convinced to

move on to Paterson to introduce silk manufacturing there. He

eventually donated land for a large park and served as mayor.

By 1875, Paterson had earned the title of Silk City and

outpaced the rest of the country in silk production.14 By 1880,

nearly one person in three who worked in an American silk mill

worked in Paterson.15 As Morris William Garber attests in his

doctoral dissertation, “Nineteenth-century immigrant culture laid

down the roots of the Paterson silk industry.”16

Skilled workers came from textile centers in Europe, the

Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East. In Europe, specifically

Russian Poland, textile production in Lodz and Bialystok

attracted young workers.17 They swarmed to these cities from

13 June 1932 Senior Class of the State Normal School at Paterson, New Jersey, A History of Paterson and Its Relations with the World (Union City: Hudson Dispatch Printers, 1932), 44.14 L.P. Brockett, The Silk Industry in America: A History Prepared for the Centennial Exposition (New York: xx, 1875), 156.15 Morris William Garber, The Silk Industry of Paterson, New Jersey, 1840-1913: Technology and the Origins, Development, and Changes in an Industry (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1968), 197.16 Ibid., iii.17 Poland gained its independence in November 1918.


their villages. Many were Bundists, belonging to the Jewish

socialist organization, looking for a better way of life than

poverty. To a contemporary American traveler, Lodz looked like

“some of the most successful American business centers.”18 Even

so, unemployment proved to be a problem. In his oral testimony,

Harry Wax recalls, “In those days many Jewish men in Lodz were

sent for by others that had already gone before them, to go to

Paterson, there you’ll find jobs.”19 There were, of course, other

reasons to leave Łódź and Bialystok: the pogroms. In June 1905,

341 Jews were killed and 50 wounded; Bialystok suffered three

pogroms within a five-month period, where 70 Jews died and 500

were wounded.20 They came to Paterson with their experience in

warping, weaving, dyeing—and striking. Wallerstein reports that

an immigrant estimated “75 percent of the weavers decided to go

to Paterson, and most of those who went elsewhere eventually

moved there, too…”21

One who fell into this latter category was Jacob Urback. He

arrived in New York as Jankel Auerbach in August 1904 on the S.S.18 Quoted in Jane Wallerstein, Voices from the Paterson Silk Mills, Voices of America (Charleston: Arcadia, 2000), 11.19 Ibid., 19.20 Ibid., 21.21 Ibid., 24.


Grosser Kurfürst from Bremen. Once in America, with his

background as a weaver in Łódź, he set off for the wool mills in

Lawrence, Massachusetts. His wife, Sara Przybilska Urbach,

arrived in April 1906 on the S.S. Noordam from Rotterdam. She

traveled with her sister-in-law, Leia Przybelski, and her

children, Jacket, 9; Elke (Elsie), 6; Matel (Mary), 4; and

Schloime, 11 months.22 The first three of these were fathered by

her first husband, who had died. Jacob and Sara’s daughter Ruth

was born in Massachusetts in 1914. But Jacob developed an allergy

to wool and the family moved to Paterson, New Jersey. There Jacob

set up a silk mill, Bilsky-Urback, with his brother-in-law, Phil

Bilsky23 at 33 Dale Avenue, sharing the building with two other

silk manufacturers and a winding and warping company.24 Elsie and

Mary worked there as weavers.25 According to the 1920 U.S.

Census, Jacob, then 45 years old, had filed his first papers for

citizenship. By 1927, the firm was listed as having forty box

22 S. S. Noordam, Frame 56, lines 21-26, April 11, 1906, accessed November 30,2014, Ellis Island Foundation. 23 Some members of the Przybilsky/Przybilska family changed the name to Bilsky, as Phil did.24 Paterson City Directory, 1928 (New Haven: Price & Lee, 1928), 254 and 858, accessedDecember 5, 2014, Ancestry.com.25 Roni Seibel Liebowitz, interview with author, telephone, November 20, 2014.Also 1920 U.S. Census, New Jersey, Passaic County, Paterson, Ward 4, Sheet 5B,accessed November 30, 2014, Ancestry.com.


looms; it manufactured broadsilk, a kind of wide silk with no

woven pattern, frequently used for underwear, ties, and ladies’

dresses.

Jacob and Phil were realizing the American Dream. Jacob had

a sister in Paterson. Sarah had her brother. They were in good

company in Paterson.

Silk mills were a place of romance in America, too.

Elizabeth van Houten Marchitti’s parents met at Warner Woven, a

ribbon and label manufacturer. Her mother, Anna Johnson, was a

quill winder. It was her job to sort the quills or spools of

thread that went into the loom to weave the labels. She sorted

colors, too. Krine van Houten26 was a weaver at first and then a

loom fixer, a critical job for both the owner and the weaver,

since a person’s worth was determined by skill and production.

But Krine had had other dreams. He had wanted to continue his

schooling, but after his mother’s death in 1918 as a result of

the flu pandemic when he was only twelve, his options narrowed.

After he graduated from grammar school his father told him, “No,

26 Van Houten is a well-known name in Paterson and a street off Main Street bears the name. Marchitti’s family is from a lesser-known branch.


you don’t need any more school. You need to help…to support the

family.” Off to the factories he went.

Anna was the daughter of an Armenian broadsilk weaver,

called Harry Johnson in America. His original last name was

Donabedian. He arrived in America in the 1890s from Harput. Once

in America, he married Mary Boyd, a domestic servant from

Ireland.27 When Mary first came to Paterson, she worked as a cook

for a wealthy family. Harry and Mary married and settled in

Paterson by the time they participated in the enumeration of

city’s 1920 census.28

Gerald Gemian is the son of Armenian immigrants who came to

America to escape the Armenian massacre of 1915-1917. His mother

had lived in a village at the bottom of Musa Dagh, Moses

Mountain, in Turkey. The villagers opposed the Turks by setting

up fortifications at the mountain’s top. Gemian’s teenaged mother

was among the villagers and emigrated as a refugee. She arrived

in the United States in 1921 at Boston, where she met her future

27 Elizabeth van Houten Marchitti, interview by author, Totowa, October 29, 2014 and 1920 U.S. Census, Paterson, Tenth Ward, Sheet 10B, accessed October 28, 2014, Ancestry.com.28 The 1910 U.S. Census enumerated the couple with two young daughters in WestHoboken, Second Ward, Sheet 11A, accessed December 11, 2014, Ancestry.com. Harry Johnson’s occupation was reported as silk weaver.


husband. They married in 1922. Gemian’s father settled in

Worcester, Massachusetts. Silk weavers who had learned their

craft in Armenia making rugs, the Gemians moved to New London,

Connecticut, where there was a prominent silk mill. From there,

the Gemians and their toddler son, Gerald, relocated to Paterson

in 1925 to follow the work. Gemian’s father worked downtown near

Ellison Street. He worked a twelve-to-sixteen hour day. He soon

became a widower; his wife died of tuberculosis around 1929. 29

Paterson, however, offered employment opportunity beyond the

silk mills. For example, Elizabeth van Houten Marchitti’s

paternal grandfather and great-grandfather had worked in

Paterson’s locomotive industry as machinist and laborer,

respectively. Her grandfather Orrie van Houten and her

grandmother Nellie emigrated from Holland.30

Many immigrants found jobs in the mills and factories with

the sheer purpose of eking out a living wage. The southern

Italian mothers of both celebrated Paterson poet Maria Mazziotti

Gillian and Arthur Guarino worked as seamstresses in Ferraro’s 29 Gerald Gemian, personal interview by Lexi Hartley, West Paterson, August 8,2013, Great Falls National Historical Park, accessed December 11, 2014, http://www.nps.gov/pagr/historyculture/stories.htm.30 1920 U.S. Census, Prospect Park Borough, First Ward, Sheet 2B, accessed October 28, 2014, Ancestry.com.


and Baron Fashions, both Italian-owned coat factories, as their

way to contribute to the family economy. Gillan says the Ferraro

Coat Factory was about twelve blocks from their home. “They would

drop coats off,” she says, “and then after we were in bed, she

would sew on the linings in the coats and if they made 25 cents

for those coats, that was a lot.”31 Gillan adds a perspective

from the late 1950s:

… I recall that when I was 17, my mother didn’t want usto know how hard their lives were. If she could keep itfrom us, she did. And she never complained. She never said, we don’t have money. She never said, she never made it seem as though we were poor, although obviouslyonce we got a television it became quite clear that we were poor. But she never, never said that. She did the best she could and she always tried to keep the uglier sides of life away from us. But when I was 17, I had tobring her something at the factory where she worked andit was right down the street over here off Main, off lower Main Street. And I climbed up these rickety stepsto go to where she worked and opened the door and when I got in, the noise level, it was horrible. And all these people sewing and one light bulb hanging over their tables and my mother was sewing by hand and therewas another row of women sewing on machines. There was a sound of the machines and dust, there was dust, so much dust because they were working with material. My mother was there, sewing on the linings of a coat and Iremember that there was a floorwalker behind, I don’t know what you would call it, like a manager… Like a supervisor behind them, walking and checking their, he picked up the coat she was sewing and said, this, you

31 Gillan.


call this sewing? And he threw the coat on the floor. And I was standing in the door and my mother saw me. And her face got so red. And she just lowered her head and picked up another piece and began to sew again. I’ll never forget this as long as I live. She didn’t want us to see that.32

Despite cultural and linguistic differences, Paterson’s

skilled workers shared a tradition of craft and a goal of

survival.

Progressive Labor Philosophies

Immigrants came to Paterson with their ideas of socialism

and solidarity. Despite the preponderance of skilled labor jobs,

the wages did not adequately compensate the level of skill. Sam

Schwartz, the son of two weavers, attests there were always

strikes. He says, “”Weaving was underpaid as a field and being a

weaver in Paterson, you couldn’t take any pride in it.”33

Paterson is perhaps best known for the infamous silk strike of

1913 where 24,000 went out on strike for a seven-month period.

Suffice it to say here that at the core of the conflicts sweeping

the eastern United States between 1909 and 1913 stood new

32 Ibid.33 Sam Schwartz quoted in Wallerstein, 34.


immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who took the lead. As

Steve Golin writes in A Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike 1913, “…they had

come to Paterson with prior experience both in weaving and in

labor conflict.”34

In 1913, Italian immigrants Pietro and Maria Botto

volunteered their home in nearly Haledon to strike organizers.

Botto was a silk weaver who had arrived in America in 1891. By

1910, his sixteen-year-old daughter, Adelia, was also a silk

weaver.35 Leaders addressed overflowing crowds from the Botto’s

balcony, a “natural ampitheater.” Bunny Kuiken, granddaughter of

Pietro and Maria and born in 1929, was never told about the

unsuccessful strike even though she lived in this same house with

her grandfather. According to Kuiken, Botto wanted to help and he

had the means. But the rally at the house caused a split in the

family, because Maria Botto was very sick at the time. She

succumbed to cancer in 1916.36

34 Steve Golin, A Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 2.35 1910 U.S. Census, Borough of Haledon, Sheet 20B, accessed December 12, 2014, Ancestry.com.36 Bunny Kuiken, personal interview with Keith McDonald, Haledon, January 26, 2012, Great Falls National Historical Park, accessed December 12, 2014, http://www.nps.gov/pagr/historyculture/stories.htm.

http://www.nps.gov/pagr/historyculture/stories.htm


Much has been written about the 1913 strike.37 However,

Gerald Gemian personally experienced the 1933 strike. He was

about ten years old when hundreds of workers from the mills

poured onto lower van Houten Street. The mill owners had called

in the police to break up the ruckus. Gerald held onto his

father’s hand in the picket line. But when the police charged on

their horses and brandished their clubs, the crowd dispersed.

Gemian says, “I was helping my daddy. I was walking side by side

with my daddy.” The strike affected him personally in two ways.

First, he understood that it was indecent not to provide a decent

wage. Second, he learned the power a group could command vis-à-

vis the power of an individual. He also learned the power of

cooperation. While ethnic groups tended to stand alone, they came

together in time of need for pure survival.38

Arturo Mazziotti was a labor organizer. He arrived in the

United States, according to his daughter Maria Mazziotti Gillan,

in 1922 from the mountain village of San Mauro Cilento in

southwestern Italy. Due to a spinal tumor, he was unable to work

37 See Steve Golin’s A Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988) for a more complete discussion. In addition, the American Labor Museum in Haledon at the Botto House has additional resources.38 Gemian.


in the silk factories like other Italian immigrants who could

hoist and carry large rolls of silk on their shoulders. Instead,

he worked as a janitor at Central High School. He walked over to

5th Avenue to meet with his compatriots, who were trying to get

five more cents an hour. The police came with billy clubs and

they broke up the meeting. They knocked Mazziotti on the head and

he dripped blood back into the house. Despite his wife’s

admonitions and his concussion, he said, “I’m still glad I did

it, even though we didn’t get the five cents more, and they broke

it up, we had to do it anyway.”39 Mazziotti, an excellent orator,

followed a philosophy to help out in any way he could. His mantra

was, “You can’t be for yourself. If you’re only for yourself,

what are you? You’re nothing.”40

Civic Leaders and Philanthropists

While not an immigrant of the twentieth century, it is

important to mention Prussian immigrant Nathan Barnert. Barnert,

who arrived in America in 1849 at the age of eleven, paved the

39 Gillan.40 Ibid.


way for Jewish and other immigrants in many ways. He provided

jobs and led a life of service.

The lure of gold fever stopped his burgeoning career in his

father’s tailoring business. He set off to get some of the spoils

for himself in California and returned to New York in 1856. He

worked in the clothing business for two years and then settled in

Paterson, where he opened a shop with Marks Cohen on Main Street.

He soon bought up a similar shop owned by Solomon Mendelsohn.

During the Civil War he received large Union contracts and was

able to employ hundreds of people. When peace was restored, he

began to invest his money in real estate. He retired in 1878 to

rest upon the substantial wealth he had accumulated through his

shrewd investments.41

One of his projects was to create the modern mill, then

considered to be a speculative operation. The successful mill

bore his name. He also entered politics, first as an alderman for

several years and then twice as mayor. He had clearly made the

American dream come true.

41 William Nelson and Charles A. Shriner, A History of Paterson and Its Environs (The Silk City), Vol. 2 (New York and Chicago: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1920), 141.


Barnert’s wealth was not self-serving. Instead, he observed

the Jewish traditions of tzedaka (charity) and tikkun olam (repair

the world). His philanthropic pursuits were numerous. They

included donations to erect a synagogue at the southeast corner

of Broadway and Straight Street. When Paterson experienced a

horrific fire in 1902 and many churches burned, Barnert opened

the doors of the synagogue to Presbyterians for their services.

He erected the Hebrew Free School, too.

Perhaps Barnert’s crowning achievement was the Nathan and

Miriam Barnert Memorial Hospital and the Nurses’ Home of 13th

Avenue. He knew that Jewish and Italian doctors could not

practice in the local hospitals. So Barnert built his own where

they could. He founded his first dispensary on Hamilton Avenue in

1908. As the city’s needs grew, so did the hospital and its

location responded accordingly. He also donated funds to build a

synagogue in Germany, and an orphanage in Jerusalem. Lofty goals

were not always part of his plan, however. As William Nelson and

Charles A. Shriner observe, “His practicality and sentiment are

combined in an interesting degree in a plan that he has followed

for many years. Whenever a young man and woman are united in


matrimony through his aid, he makes a gift of $1,000 to each

couple. Ninety-one dowries by him in this manner, in one instance

to three generations of one family.”42

Jacob Fabian left his home in Galicia, the section of Poland

annexed by Austria-Hungary during the partitioning of Poland in

the late eighteenth century, and journeyed to New York. He came

to Paterson in 1896 from New York City hoping to make a success

of himself. He opened the Paris Cloak Store and earned a

reputation as one of the city’s most successful businessmen.

After more than three decades in the clothing business, he

retired and entered the motion picture industry. Within five

years, he owned his own Paterson theatre, the Regency, and others

in Newark and Jersey City. Like Barnert, he became a

philanthropist. During World War I, he volunteered his theatres

to the war effort. He donated $400,000 to build Temple Emanuel

and dedicated the synagogue in September 1929. He served on the

boards of Barnert Hospital and St. Joseph’s Hospital.43

42 Ibid., 144.43 “The Patersonian: The ‘Great Fire’ of February 1902,” 100th Anniversary Edition (Sykesville, MD: Great Falls Publishing Company, 2002), 8.


Services for the Immigrants

Helene Miller’s family ordered their meats and poultry from

Wetter’s, one of the many kosher butcher shops in Paterson. Abe

Wetter and his kosher butcher shop became a staple in Paterson’s

Jewish community. A butcher from Galicia, Abish Wetter, 48,

traveled alone on the S.S. Ryndam from Rotterdam in 1904.44 He

joined his brother, already established on Broome Street in

Newark. The 1920 census finds his son, Beril (Benjamin), set up

in the kosher butcher shop on Prince Street in the heart of

Newark’s Jewish immigrant Third Ward.45 But in the 1930s,

Benjamin moved his family to Paterson and established the Wetter

Butcher Shop on Graham Street. According to Cynthia Wetter,

Benjamin had first moved to Brooklyn and met a man named Sam

Feldman there. They decided to go into business together in

Paterson but the deal soured and Benjamin set up his own butcher

shop.46 The Wetters maintained their butcher shop for decades,

surviving the 1968 race riots. The shop was unscathed, although

danger was no stranger. Benjamin’s son, Irving, who took over the44 S.S. Ryndam, Frame 401, line 14, November 16, 1904, accessed December 12, 2014, Ellis Island Foundation.45 1920 U.S. Census, Newark, Third Ward, Sheet 26A, accessed December 12, 2014, Ancestry.com.46 Cynthia Wetter, email message to author, December 4, 2014.


shop, was once robbed at gunpoint and shoved into the meat

freezer. Fortunately, some of his workers heard his pounding on

the door and they freed him.47

Oral history narrators often recall Paterson’s downtown area

for its retail shops. Though not of Paterson, Newark Jewish

immigrants Aaron, David, and Leopold Meyer owned and operated

Meyer Brothers, a popular department store there. The

enterprising brothers emigrated from Germany in the late 1860s.48

Another large department store that defined Paterson was

Quackenbush, which came to be owned by Russian Jewish immigrant,

Louis Spitz. He began his dry goods career by working with his

father at the store on Paterson’s Main Street. He took control of

the store when his father died in 1904 and bought the Quackenbush

Department Store in 1913 and turned it into the store the oral

history narrators remember. He served on numerous civic and

Jewish committees, often in a leadership role.49

47 Bonnie Wetter Ross, personal interview by author, telephone, December 5, 2014.48 1900 U.S. Census, Newark, Second Ward, Sheet 2, accessed December 14, 2014,Ancestry.com.49 “Mt Nebo Cemetery Profiles: Louis Spitz, April 13, 1877-June 2, 1929, Aged 52 Years,” Barnert The Magazine, May/June 2012, 19, accessed December 14, 2014, http://barnerttemple.org/sites/default/files/uploaded_files/site/Our_Community/Bulletins/2012MayJune_BTMagazine.pdf.

http://barnerttemple.org/sites/default/files/uploaded_files/site/Our_Community/Bulletins/2012MayJune_BTMagazine.pdf



Beyond downtown and Main Street, immigrants still played

important roles. Although Arturo Mazziotti did not have a high-

powered or highly-skilled profession, he provided much-needed

services to the Italian immigrant community. He taught standard

Italian to children of immigrants who wanted to attend medical

school in Italy. He served as a liaison for Italian immigrants

who wanted to bring family over or become naturalized citizens.

He accompanied these people on three buses to Newark and helped

them complete the appropriate forms.50

Arthur Guarino arrived in Paterson from southern Italy in

1957. He already spoke English and secured a job as a bank teller

at Linares Bank, which mostly catered to the Italian immigrant

community. He worked for the bank for forty years, never rising

above the position of unit clerk. Still, he provided a service to

his community. The bank itself was founded by Sicilian

immigrants.51

Gaetano Federici emigrated from Castelgrande in southern

Italy to Paterson when he was seven years old in 1880. He became

50 Gillan. 51 1920 U.S. Census, Paterson, Fifth Ward, Sheet 5A, accessed December 14, 2014, Ancestry.com.


a sculptor of international renown. He was commissioned to sculpt

a statue of Barnert for the front of City Hall, “the first time

in the history of Paterson that such an honor had been bestowed

upon a living man.”52 The statue was completed in 1925. He

created several other statues for the city, including a World War

I memorial.53

Sapping Strength, Gaining Strength

The arduous process of assimilation proved to be problematic

for many immigrants in Paterson. Language formed one barrier,

especially for Arturo Mazziotti. He just couldn’t get his tongue

around English, his daughter recalls. She says, “He was abysmal,

not that he couldn’t understand. He read newspapers…He would read

in English…”54

In Gerald Gemian’s family, his parents and his uncle asked

him for assistance with their English. They took night classes

and as soon as they could, they filed their first papers for

52 June 1932 Senior Class, 50.53 Federici’s works are exhibited at The Hamilton Club, which would not have even admitted him in his day.54 Gillan.


citizenship.55 In America, they felt “a relief and thrill, a

freedom that was unheard of.”56

Ethnic groups helped their own. Arturo Mazziotti, for

example, turned to the Cilendano Society for help and he helped

them in return. The society, there were some fifty Italian

societies in Paterson alone, provided death benefits, health

insurance benefits, mortgages, and provided a social milieu for

Italian immigrants from the Cilento region of southern Italy. The

society’s elders taught bocce ball, and due to Arturo’s

intervention, gave music lessons to young people.

Jews turned to the Workmen’s Circle, the Jacob Dinezon

Lodge, the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (Y.M.H.A.), or

landsmannshaftn, groups of people from the same village or region,

who provided the same kinds of benefits as the Italian societies.

While societies offered comfort and an oasis from the

cacophony of multiple languages, so did ethnic neighborhoods.

Italians settled in Riverside. The Dutch settled in Prospect

Park. The Armenian community settled in South Paterson. Many

55 The five-year residency requirement was proposed by Alexander Hamilton in 1802.56 Gemian.


neighborhoods, however, offered as much diversity as on Main

Street.

Living in two- or three-family houses was the norm. Single

family homes were reserved for the rich. But often the family

elder had worked hard enough at the factory to buy the building

and family lived on each floor. Babysitters were immigrant

parents or grandparents. Roni Seibel Liebowitz, who lived with

her parents on the second floor of her grandparents’ home, was

sent to the third floor and her grandparents when her sister

needed medical care out of state. Holiday and Sabbath meals took

place on the third floor as well.57

Immigrants also found strength in their faith and houses of

worship. They found strength in their traditions and

celebrations. But sometimes religious practices had to fall by

the wayside. Helene Miller recalls when her mother had to give up

her kosher traditions, because her father developed an ulcer.

Still, her great-grandmother insisted on still wearing her sheitl,

her matron’s wig, into the bath.58

57 Seibel Liebowitz. 58 Helene Arbus Miller, personal interview by author, Norwood, November 12, 2014.


Despite herculean efforts to assimilate, poverty and

sickness pervaded immigrant communities. Maria Mazziotti Gillan

talks about the coal stove only really heating the kitchen; the

rest of the apartment was freezing. They ate farina and

spaghetti, spaghetti and farina, over and over again. A neighbor

tossed chickens in the garbage, but Gillan’s mother was too

embarrassed to take the chickens for her own. Instead, she

maintained a large garden and believed that the more she gave

away, the more she received. The dinner table always seated extra

people.59

Gerald Gemian also recalls the days of the Great Depression,

at least a decade before Gillan’s family arrived in Paterson. The

mills closed and his father was out of work. He wore the same

pants and socks until they gave out. When they did, he bought new

ones from the Five-and-Ten until they wore out. The Gemians were

forced to go on relief. Gemian became a scavenger: He scrounged

around for empty soda and milk bottles and returned them for a

few cents each. He crawled through the junk yard to find copper.

He caught gold fish from the Passaic River with his bare hands

59 Gillan.


and sold the fish to the Five-and-Ten. His father got him a job

on Washington Street at a fruit and vegetable market. He worked

Saturdays from 8 am until midnight, all the while prohibited from

touching the produce. He became adept at watching his friends,

who had working parents, eat their hot dogs while he stood

outside.60

Not all immigrants, of course, faced such abject challenges.

Mill owners, like Helene Miller’s family and Roni Seibel

Liebowitz’s family, were able to financially make good. They were

able to afford homes.

Conclusion

Immigrants formed the heart and soul of Paterson, its

industries, its culture, its rhythm. They brought their skill as

weavers, warpers, twisters, quill winders, and dyers to the

mills. Most survived the noise, dust, and other unsafe and

unhealthy conditions of the factories. Their labor struggles

focused worldwide eyes on Paterson. They learned how as a group,

they had power. They helped one another within their specific

60 Gemian.


ethnic groups as well as across them. Neighbor helped neighbor in

societies and individually. They pushed past language barriers,

poverty, and sickness.

Much of the secondary literature praises immigrants yet

glosses over the struggles, with the notable exception of the

silk strike of 1913. The one exception is Jane Wallerstein’s

Voices from the Silk Mills, a compilation of oral histories collected by

Wallerstein through her own personal interviews and by accessing

the oral history collection at the Charles Goldman Library in

Wayne, New Jersey. The latter was a seven-year project

orchestrated by the Jewish Historical Society of North Jersey.

Oral history reveals immigrant trials and tribulations at a

level that does not trivialize them. A much deeper analysis of

immigrant effect on Paterson is needed, culled from existing oral

history collections and from new narrators. The goal of this more

expansive effort would be to represent all the ethnicities that

contributed to Paterson. Only a few of them have been touched

upon here.

Alexander Hamilton knew in 1791 that immigrants were

essential to his vision of a national, industrialized city. But


in 1802 he advocated for heterogeneous masses to evolve over time

into a homogeneous group dedicated to the national spirit.61 He

did not foresee the labor conflicts. He also did not foresee the

philanthropy. But he could have easily understood the burning

desire to make good in America. After all, he immigrated to

America from the West Indies himself. The desire is a trait he

shared with the immigrants of Paterson, even a century or more

later.

61 “Alexander Hamilton on the Naturalization of Foreigners,” Population and Development Review 36, No. 1 (March 2010), 181.


Bibliography

Primary Sources

Gemian, Gerald. 2013. Interview by Lexi Hartley. West Paterson.

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Gillan, Maria Mazziotti. 2014. Interview by author. Paterson.

November 18.

Kuiken, Bunny. 2012. Interview by Keith McDonald. Haledon.

January 26. Accessed December 12, 2014. Great Falls National

Historical Park.

http://www.nps.gov/pagr/historyculture/stories.htm.

Marchitti, Elizabeth van Houten. 2014. Interview by author.

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Paterson's Melting Pot: Beyond Alexander Hamilton's Vision

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