Paterson’s Underground Railroad historic site is an example of leadership, persistence and community action to preserve the city’s multicultural historic legacy—some of it seemingly lost to time. Its landmarking involved persistent activisms in the mid-1990s, when Dolores Van Rensalier came to Paterson from California seeking confirmation that her own distant relative, William Van Rensalier, a Black engineer in Paterson’s early industrial history, had partnered with his employer Josiah Huntoon in America’s secret slave-era transit of fugitives through Paterson…only to discover an empty lot at Broadway and Bridge Street where the Huntoon home had stood.
How the City then traveled from the potential sale of the lot as a fast-food franchise to its official recognition and landmarking as hallowed ground—indeed, as the first registered historic site in Paterson to acknowledge African-American history—is an eventful and solemn story tragically marked by the police-shooting death of Black teenager Lawrence Meyers in February 1995. But it is also a case study in the persistence of history in Black communities—local, statewide and national,* and in wider community activism and cooperation. As the quickly-formed local Underground Railroad Coalition fought to stave off the threatened sale, and Ms Van Rensalier made her case to the City’s Preservation Commission, statewide African-American history authority Dr Clement Alexander Price appeared at a historic convocation in Paterson and publicly endorsed the site’s likely authenticity.
Ultimately the City Council and then-Mayor Bill Pascrell made way for local historic landmarking (January, 1996) and the investment to protect it. Along with the City’s subsequent mayors, the Paterson Preservation Commission (HPC) and Parking Authority, the Passaic County Board of Commissioners and the Passaic County Community College have all since collaborated in preserving the site. The Huntoon–Van Rensalier Underground Railroad Foundation, formed by Ms Van Rensalier and descendants of both original families, has since invested deeply in its solemn and permanent beautification, including a sculptural monument and ongoing public celebration.
The later rise of the National Network to Freedom as a project of the National Park Service prompted an effort by public historian Jimmy Richardson to give the site national resonance. With the dedicated support of both Gianfranco Archimede of the Paterson HPC and the additional scholarship of Dr Flavia Alaya, who had chaired the Paterson Commission during the original landmarking period, the application to the Network to Freedom in March 2022 received official recognition the following August.
* This embattled narrative of the creation of Paterson’s first major monument to African American history, complete with contemporary news stories and photos, can be found in full in the sourcebook, Bridge Street to Freedom, by Ms Van Rensalier and Dr Flavia Alaya (then professor of cultural history at Ramapo College), published under the imprint of Ramapo College of New Jersey in 1998.