Paterson owes its start to Alexander Hamilton, who planned it in 1791 as America's first industrial city, powered by the Great Falls of the Passaic River, and it later became the Silk City. That history is easy to see: the 77-foot falls are now a national park, and the old mill district and Rogers Locomotive buildings still stand. Hinchliffe Stadium, a Negro Leagues landmark, has also been restored.
It is a dense, hard-working city of about 162,000 packed into a small area, close to Manhattan (about 20 miles). Main Street is known as Little Istanbul for its Turkish restaurants and bakeries, and Dominican, Bangladeshi, Arab and Puerto Rican communities give the food and festivals real range. Garret Mountain offers green space above town. It is cheaper than much of the New York area, though prices are rising as buyers spill over from the city. The tradeoffs: violent crime is above the national average, especially on parts of the Eastside and downtown after dark, and the Passaic River has flooded badly several times, including Hurricane Ida in 2021.
Cities with a similar character, anywhere on the site.
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- Known as
- The Silk City; Home of Great Falls National Historical Park; Birthplace of American industry (Alexander Hamilton's planned manufacturing city); Little Istanbul (Turkish community)
- Founded
- 1791 founded by the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures (SUM), planned by Alexander Hamilton; 1831 incorporated as a city
- Languages
- English; Spanish; Arabic; Turkish; Bengali; Urdu; Albanian; Gujarati
- Airports
- Newark Liberty International (EWR), about 17 miles south; Teterboro (TEB), about 8 miles east (private and charter only); LaGuardia (LGA), about 20 miles southeast; JFK, about 30 miles southeast; Westchester County (HPN), about 40 miles northeast
- Tipping
- Restaurants 18-20%; bars $1-2 per drink; taxis and rideshare 15-20%; hotel housekeeping $3-5 per night; bellhops $2-5 per bag; counter service optional
About this data
Population 161,793, land area 8.41 sq mi, median value $360,100 and median rent $1,548 are from Census QuickFacts (Vintage 2025 and ACS). Metro figure 20,112,448 is the given New York-Newark-Jersey City MSA, shared with New York City; Paterson is not the anchor city. Paterson has no dedicated tourism bureau confirmed, so the city site is used as the visitor website; the event calendar is the city events calendar page seen in search results and not load-tested. Elevation, coordinates, founding, event months, hotel ranges, tipping, cost-of-living index, crime rates and airport distances are approximate or from general knowledge and not verified in this pass.
