Quarry Lawn Design and Construction
Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park, City of Paterson, Passaic County, New Jersey
Since 2009, Hunter Research has provided archaeological and historic preservation planning services to the City of Paterson and its partners at the National Park Service as they seek to redevelop the Allied Textile Printers site, a brownfield and highly significant industrial archaeological resource that sits at the core of the national park and the Great Falls of the Passaic/Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (S.U.M.) National Historic Landmark District. The Quarry Lawn project, begun in 2019, will be the first section of the ATP site to be converted into interpreted park land. Hunter Research joins a talented, multi-disciplinary team of engineers, architects, landscape architects, environmental specialists and others in the design of a park space that will seamlessly incorporate a river walk and lawn for recreational activities with stabilized and interpreted industrial ruins of a series of textile dying houses. The whole setting is framed by the basalt walls of the former Mount Morris quarry, which supplied building stone and crushed rock for the construction of buildings and streets in Paterson for more than a century. As part of the current project, Hunter Research thoroughly documented the industrial ruins and quarry using drone and digital technologies, and conducted subsurface investigations to uncover evidence of how the dye houses used a complex system of water supply and drainage. This provided data that the design team has used to preserve and interpret key features of the site’s industrial heritage, while also providing a high level of documentation that is allowing design and construction to proceed without delay.