In Paterson, that's just the way things go

When the massive brick wall of a three-story Ryle Avenue mill collapsed on July 16, sending the roof tumbling through two floors and debris shooting into the road, it instantly became the perfect metaphor for its hometown.

The building, although it was a part of local history, had been slated for demolition because it lacked structural integrity. But, as is so often the case in the city's seized-up bureaucracy, the process stalled, and so there it sat, a rotting reminder of Paterson's once-fearsome industrial muscle, dying with one last howl as Father Time finished the job that local officials could not.

Once, mills like that made up the heart of a New Jersey manufacturing juggernaut that harnessed the power of the 77-foot-high Great Falls to produce textiles, firearms, locomotive parts, and so much silk that the word found a home in the city's nickname.

And, like so many in the state who have some Italian blood in them, my family roots wind their way back to those hulking brick-and-mortar behemoths along the Passaic — growing up, I heard many a story about my own great-grandfather, a sharply-dressed, wealthy man who owned one during Paterson's heyday.

When I was a kid, I would try to imagine what it looked like during his time, when it was a thriving boomtown of shops and tenements fueled by the energy of thousands of European immigrants streaming off the ships every day. All I could see then, through the thick glass of a car windshield, was a shattered shell that looked moments away from imploding.

But hey, it was the 80s, wasn't it? White flight, urban blight, the crack epidemic, and outsourcing took their toll, and finding a safe downtown anywhere was difficult. Hoboken was in shambles, Newark was long dead, Jersey City was rough as ever. Times Square was filled with hookers and pushers and peep shows, and the Bronx, with its crumbling buildings and tagged up facades, could have been Beirut's stunt double.

Years later, though, there's less of an excuse. Jersey City is rebounding, parts of Newark burn bright, and Hoboken is exclusive. Times Square is again the glittering jewel it was meant to be, and even the Bronx has made headway.

And then, barely limping along, there is Paterson, torn up and hemorrhaging blood from the twin bullet holes of crime and corruption.

Where is the redevelopment? Where is the falling crime rate? Why, after all these years and all these millions spent, has nothing changed?

People are terrified to even drive through, and cringe when their GPS sends them across the river` for a "shortcut." Just last month, a kid from my hometown died in the street from a gunshot wound to the neck in a neighborhood described as "the Wild West," and days ago a man was arrested for nonchalantly carrying a fully-loaded machine gun on East 16th.

The state still runs the utterly failed school system, the police force has been gut-punched by massive cutbacks, and the murder rate is unchanged. All the while, the city administration, instead of addressing the myriad of problems, recently announced that it's ready to move ahead on an initiative to — get this — debut a line a of bottled water that would be named after the Great Falls.

What the hell is going on?

Undoubtedly, some will say that I'm focusing on Paterson's many negatives at the expense of its positives — and they'd be right — but that's only because I badly want this madness to end.

And don't get me wrong, I don't know how you fix things; I'm not a municipal planner or a police chief or a mayor. But I do know that if it can be done in New York, it can be done anywhere, and that a real, solid effort to turn the city around must be made — and soon — before Paterson starts challenging Camden for a title that it wants no part of.

Otherwise, it will continue its long descent, and decaying silk mills will be the least of the worries.

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

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Tags: Paterson, Silk City, Great Falls, New Jersey, History, Politics

One veteran’s longest day

BY STEVE JANOSKI

The red cover is faded and tattered, its gold lettering slowly beginning to wear to the point of illegibility.

The pages have taken on a yellow hue, and small, dark smudges of fingerprints — dirt? blood? — festoon the corners.


It sits quietly on the table, with its owner of nearly seven decades having recently departed this world after 88 years, with the story of how it came into his possession known to but a few.

Frank T. Semeraro was born in 1922. Following the death of his mother, he had to quit school early to work on his father's garbage truck, and came up in a hardscrabble Paterson existence in the earliest decades of the American Century.

His father had been wounded while serving in the Italian Army during the Great War, and had left that country just as Mussolini's shadow began to rise over Rome. As the storm of World War II began to gather, he was positive of one thing: he didn't want his son to go to war.

But, as the long fingers of fascism began to wrap around the globe, there would be few families who remained untouched, few children that remained unscathed. The Semeraro home on McBride Avenue was to be no different.

After the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the young Semeraro, like so many others, decided that he was going to go to war.

He planned to join the US Navy so he could fight the Japanese, but an ill-fated fishing trip left him so seasick that he reconsidered that course.

He decided to leave it up to the government, and figured that when they drafted him, they'd send him where they needed him. When the US Army called in 1943, it decided that he was needed in Europe, and so after boot camp, Semeraro was sent to England.

As 1943 wore on into the following year, rumors abounded over whether, where, and when the Allies would make their great landing on the European mainland to begin the final stage of the great battle to save civilization.

The plans for the landing, ominously named Operation Overlord by high command, were unknown to the troops on the ground…until the day that the call came.

And as they herded troops into the transports sitting along the coast of the English Channel on the morning of June 6, 1944, Semeraro wasn't sure where he was headed, but he knew that whatever was happening, it was big.

The seas were rough that day, and men vomited as the boats shook; a result, no doubt, of a brutal combination of seasickness and devastated nerves.

As they closed on the French beach, it's likely that the scene that greeted Semeraro was one straight from the depths of hell — steel abatis, known as "Czech hedgehogs," strewn across the sand as the great cement pillboxes of Hitler's fearsome Atlantic Wall rose into the heavens — but there was little time to take in the sight, for as they neared the shore, his landing craft was struck by a shell.

In an effort to save their lives, troops began streaming over the sides and into the water. Semeraro did the same, but realized quickly that his comrades, weighed down by their heavily-loaded packs, were sinking straight to the bottom and drowning.

Fearing this would be his fate, he pulled his knife and cut off his pack before desperately swimming for shore. Once there, however, there seemed to be no respite from the flurry of German bullets — until he saw one man waiving him over.

The man was another American soldier, and had already dug out a small foxhole to provide cover. When Semeraro reached him, the soldier began giving him his rations, weapon, and the like.

"I've got to get back to the boats, I need medical attention," the man told him. It was then he noticed that the soldier was holding his stomach and intestines together with his hands.

"Just wait for the others," he told Semeraro.

Before he left though, he handed him a small, red prayer book, Army issue, 1943, with its title, "A Spiritual Almanac for Service Men," printed across the front in golden letters.

"You're gonna' need this," he said, before disappearing back to the ships, never to be seen again.

Semeraro stayed in that foxhole as long as he could on D-Day, listening to the gruesome bark of the German MG-42s as they mowed down American troops and turned the Channel's water red with their blood.

He held onto that prayer book later on as he fought his way off the beach and through the pillboxes and trenches of the Atlantic Wall, and then through the hedgerows of Normandy, where the Germans fought tooth and nail to try to keep the Allies from breaking out.

It stayed with him through the rest of his service, and after the war, too, as he established a family construction company, married, had children, then grandchildren, and then great-grandchildren.

The world would eventually come to know the ghastly horror of that day, and that beach — Omaha Beach — would come to join the ranks of places like Verdun, Antietam, and Iwo Jima as being amongst the most infamous killing fields in history.

And when "Grandpa Semeraro" (as he was known to all of us) passed away on Oct. 6, he joined all of the other spirits of the Greatest Generation who are slowly passing on to eternity, forever to be remembered as those valiant few who faced down true evil, and saved the world from unimaginable darkness.

This story was related to me by his grandson, Frank T. Semeraro, who is proud to share his grandfather's name.

E-mail: janoski@northjersey.com


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