[gentle music] [birds chirp] - [Narrator] Join author Mary Bruno and river guide Carl Alderson on an epic four-day kayak journey down one of the most historic and neglected waterways in the nation.

- [Mary] It's the river that really built New Jersey.

It's the river that in many ways built the country.

- [Narrator] From its pristine source to the city of Newark, discover the story of the Passaic in "American River," a film by Scott Morris.

[gentle music] [slow soft wooden flute music] [slow soft wooden flute music] [slow somber music] [slow somber music] [traffic hums] - You know, when we were kids, we grew up in the lower stretch of the Passaic, and the lower stretch of the Passaic, about three to five miles upriver of Newark was a very industrial stretch of river.

The bank across from us was prosthetic, basically.

It had been wiped out completely when they built Route 21.

And it was just a giant corrugated metal wall with these big round drains that would kind of vomit strange, frothy things into the river.

The river itself was muddy, the mud was dark, it smelled bad.

And my mom would tell us, you know, "Don't play by the river."

But, she didn't even have to tell us that because it was so obvious that this is not the kind of place that you're gonna go wadding in, or swimming in, or even dipping your hand in, it was that scary.

It was like this menacing presence that was there, always, in the background.

My name is Mary Bruno.

I was born in 1952.

I grew up in North Arlington.

It's a small town, a mile square.

It's about three miles upriver from Newark.

It was a really lovely, close-knit community.

A lot of single-family homes, middle, lower-middle class town, crowded.

We lived on a slope.

At the top of the slope is a ridge that overlooks New York City.

At the bottom of the slope is the river, the Passaic River.

[gentle music] When I moved away from my home in North Arlington, I left the environmental blight of the Passaic River behind me.

I think in some ways I went looking for nature.

I studied aquatic ecology.

I became a scientist and a writer and a paddler.

And, over the last 25 years, I've either kayaked or canoed or rafted down rivers, both in this country and other countries as well.

And I just fell in love with moving water, its poetry and its power.

But there came a time when I was compelled to find out what had happened to the river of my youth.

And I found out these things that, well just, they amazed me and they depressed me in equal measure.

I mean, this is a river that people painted pictures of it, people wrote poetry about it, you know, it was celebrated for its beauty.

It's the river that really built New Jersey.

It's the river that in many ways built the country.

And sadly, down in Newark, there has been so much industry and so much effluent dumped into the river, and much of it is extremely toxic.

It's an EPA Superfund site, a place that's been designated by the US Environmental Protection Agency as one of the most contaminated sites in the country.

If anything is gonna change with the Passaic River, it's because people start to care about it.

And, that can't happen if they don't even know it's there.

It will just remain this neglected, forgotten river.

[birds caw] [gravel crunches] If you wanted to write about a river and not kayak it, it would be like writing about the ocean but never going out on it, or writing about a mountain and never climbing it.

I think it was imperative to get out on the river.

[car doors bang shut] - Still using the same technique as always.

- Which is?

- Too much strap.

- This is my favorite part, Carl, how you like are so careful putting the straps-- - You see how I do that?

- Wrapping 'em up.

Yeah, that's, that's like, they teach you that in kayak school, right?

- They do, because you trip over these and then you're so sorry that you left them out.

Julia's not using the technique.

- [Mary] Julia, what is that technique?

[Julia laughs] What a violation.

- Did you see that magic act?

- It's all done.

- [Mary] Quite a violation.

- One, two, three, go.

- I got it.

All right.

- All right.

- Okay, I got it.

- Okay.

- Okay.

- Memo to self, always take the bow.

I had this very naive notion that you just call up an outfitter and you say, "I wanna kayak the river and here's the dates I wanna go," and they say, "No problem," and they get you all the equipment and they give you a guide and off you go.

Well, there are no outfitters on the Passaic River.

- We're just about ready, Mare.

- So, then I had to find a guide.

You know, I asked around, I put a lot of notes out on Passaic River news groups.

And then, one afternoon I got this email and they recommended this guy Carl Alderson.

Without Carl, the trip never would've happened.

He is extremely knowledgeable about the aquatic environment in all manner.

He did the logistics.

He figured out where we were gonna put in, where are we gonna take out.

He had the boats.

He was so organized.

We'll be traveling from the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge all the way down river to Newark.

It'll be four days altogether, two consecutive weekends.

It takes that long to do it.

I'm gonna get it all muddy, man.

- Already?

I just cleaned this boat.

- Watch your head.

Whoa.

[Carl chuckles] There we go.

- All right.

How's that feeling?

- Feeling good.

- Tired yet?

- Yes, I'm exhausted.

[Carl laughs] Can we go home?

[Carl laughs] [gentle inspiring music] One of the first things I did when I was looking into writing about the Passaic was I looked at a map.

And, the river is just crazy.

It starts in Mendham and it ends up in Newark.

So first it goes south and then it makes this crazy U-turn and goes north for 40 miles, and then it comes back south and then north and then east, and then finally it turns around and comes back south and empties into Newark Bay.

As the crow flies, that's about 30 miles.

It takes the Passaic 86 miles to get there.

And looking at that, the logical question is why?

Why does it do that?

And, the answer is the Watchung Mountain Ranges.

There are three of them, and they stand between Mendham and Newark.

So it has to somehow find its way around these three ranges of mountains.

- Ah, yeah, yeah.

All right, let's see.

Mary?

- Yeah?

- I think we can go over the submerged log.

- Really?

- Think so.

Think so.

- Really?

- Piece of cake.

- Okay, yeah.

You can go, I can go.

- Oh, yeah.

[gentle music] [birds chirp] - Oh wow.

When I kayaked the upper river, I had no idea that that even existed.

I had no way of even thinking about the Passaic as a pretty river.

The river at that point is more like a creek.

It's kind of narrow.

It's relatively shallow.

It's very clean.

But then it gets to the Millington Gorge where it transits that first Watchung ridge.

So you get this mile-long shoot, big riffle area, so you can kind of fly.

All right, now, this is what I'm talking about.

A little speed.

- The most dangerous thing you can encounter on a paddle trip is a strainer.

And a strainer is a lay down of a log that's got a lot of branches, a lot of things that you can catch on.

- Oh, I see where you're going, okay.

Uh-oh, sorry.

- You got, you got the free-- - I'm going right through though.

- You got the freeboard.

- Hold on.

- You got the freeboard, I don't.

- All right.

Holy crap.

Look what I got here.

- Oh boy.

- The thing that's most important about Carl is that Carl is my courage.

Are you out?

Carl gives me the courage to go out on this river that I spent my entire life being afraid of, being afraid even to touch the water or to touch a stone that was on the bank in the water.

Gonna barrel right through the center of this guy.

[water rushes] Whoa, I don't know, it's pretty low.

[Mary laughs] - It doesn't matter.

- It's not really an easy river to kayak, certainly the entire length.

I mean it isn't like shooting rapids on the Grand Canyon, but the river, depending on where you are, it can be kind of dangerous.

Uh-oh, I think we're gonna have to go up and over this.

Look at, there's a little ski board here.

Oh, hey, this log is not-- - That's not a stable log.

- No, it is not stable.

- Looks like you're first, Mary.

- I've never been first before.

- You're good.

- Hey, you know something, this log, this log here is very wet and slimy.

Yeah, this is really slimy.

[water rushing] - And look at the foamy thing that you have going on.

- It's so gross.

- Yeah.

Well, it's just organic-- - I mean, who knows what that foam is?

- That's organic.

- Okay, I got the bow.

Can you?

- I got rid of that guy.

- Good idea.

I got it, we're good.

[groans] Okay, now how can I help you get over?

- All right, let's see what I can do.

You can stay there now.

I can do that.

- Yeah, okay.

- Yeah.

- Good.

- Oh, boy.

Oh, yeah.

- Oh my god.

He's doing the Roy Rogers, only worse.

You are insane, my friend.

- Oh, come, here, come give me a paddle.

- Yeah, yeah.

[Carl chuckles] [gentle uplifting music] [gentle uplifting music] ♪ Now let's drive the hounds at bay ♪ ♪ Climbing over the break of day ♪ ♪ Over the mountain, the field, the fountain ♪ ♪ Away to the chase, away, away ♪ - This far upstream, we find evidence of colonial America.

The 300-year-old historic home of JoAnn and Tom Behr.

[lively banjo music] - [Carl] Oh yeah.

- [Mary] Holy cow, that was crazy.

[lively banjo music] - Solomon Boyle built that house we think in 1732.

His son built this in 1750.

And the fascinating thing, 'cause we looked up the history of these families at length and they were sharply divided in the Revolutionary War.

So the old man had nothing but the worst kind of language for Washington and the Continentals and everybody else.

And one of the sons was a colonel in Washington's army.

So that for here, you know, it was a civil war.

- So that rock wall out there-- - That's the bridge abutment.

- The bridge abutment from when it was a gristmill, a lumber mill, and a forge.

- [JoAnn] Yeah.

- [Carl] How long have you lived here?

- What, 30-- - 31 years.

- [Carl] And, what made you choose this place?

- I wanted to raise goats.

[laughs] And I needed the land.

And, at the time, it was in 1987, I saw this listed and I said, "It's the perfect place."

It had the barn.

- House needed a lot of work.

- Needed a lot of work.

But I, we didn't care.

- [Carl] What was the reputation of the river?

Like a lotta people, they hear the Passaic River and they immediately think, well who'd wanna-- - Yeah, kayak with all the, you know, the trash and fuel drums.

This part of the river is still really clean.

It needs to get taken care of.

It would be really great if government might actually pay attention to that and help clean the river.

It's a beautiful, clean river.

♪ Well at him, at him, Rover, Rover ♪ ♪ At him, at him, see him, see him ♪ ♪ Merrily, merrily leads the mountain ♪ ♪ Merrily the chase goes on ♪ Over the mountain, hills, and fountain ♪ ♪ Away to the chase, away, away ♪ Anyway, kinda botched that one, guys.

[laughs] [train horn blares] [train rumbles] - Ready, Freddy?

Oh, you're on backwards.

You are so bold.

- Bye, ya.

- Bye.

Once you come out of the gorge, the river changes complexion.

You enter this long, flat, low floodplain called the Central Basin.

[gentle music] The Millington Gorge breaks through Long Hill and now you just enter this wonderful grassy field.

Water and low-growing vegetation all meet.

There are horses and the cattle and the occasional rural homestead.

It's the lake bed of the former glacial Lake Passaic.

Eons ago, ice sheets came down, they advanced down as far as New Jersey, clogged up some of the Passaic River's exit points.

And so, the water backed up and formed this lake that was like 30 miles long, 10 miles wide, it was huge.

All the bogs and meadows are really these sodden, leftover footprints from glacial Lake Passaic.

I'd really love to do that, is kayaking the bayou.

I think that'd be really cool.

- I did it.

- You did?

- At night, a moonlight paddle in Louisiana on a bayou.

- That's romantic.

- There were gators.

There was this one gator, he was used to paddlers though.

They would throw him goldfish scraps.

[gentle music] Wow.

- Look at that.

- That's serious.

- That's spectacular.

- After you exit the beautiful floodplain Meadow, you then enter the Long Hill Valley.

We go from rural America to suburban America very quickly.

So this is the sewage treatment plant coming up on the left.

One of many through the valley, in fact.

If you can't see them sometimes you can smell them.

- [laughs] But I don't smell, do you smell anything?

- No.

- I don't smell anything.

- So Mary, check it out.

The plant is actually working right here.

- Is this the outflow?

- This is the outflow right here.

- All right.

All right.

- I'm not getting the-- - No, I'm not getting anything, smell-wise.

But why am I parking myself by it?

That's what I wanna know.

- So now, you know, coming out of the Great Swamp and coming through that pristine area with just rural, few houses, you don't see this.

You know, they're probably on septic systems anyway up through there.

- Mm-hmm, right, right.

- [Carl] There's not a municipal system.

So this is really the first one.

And this is where the character of the river starts to change, because now the suburban inputs, the sanitary treatments, the overland flow from the driveways, the roadways.

So you're getting greases, you're getting grit, you're getting oils.

- The river itself is so beautiful and you know, the rain kind of, I don't know, this sort of cloud of quiet envelopes everything.

And then, just when you're kinda getting in the groove, eh, strainer, and you know, then you've gotta kinda go climbing over these things.

And it's kind of fun in one way, every now and then.

But when it gets to be, you know, every couple hundred yards, we start to realize that it would take us hours just to go, you know, a couple of miles, and it was crazy.

So, do something to cut things a little bit short.

All right.

♪ We are the Aldersons, we are the Aldersons ♪ ♪ We are so strong [Mary and Carl laugh] [gentle music] - As you move downstream on the Passaic River, the population and industry just crescendos.

- And now we're picking up thousands of homes, all of the ills of modern man.

It's communities that are bucolic on their front face, but the Passaic gives you, like kind of a backstage.

The rusty old hulks of old vehicles are on the riverbank.

The landscaping company is pushing debris down into the river.

The small commercial complex has all of its trucks and trailers all backed up to the river.

And so, now that's what you're seeing on the river.

The village looks great, but don't look too closely because we're hiding the infrastructure on the river.

Once you get past the backs of buildings and trailers and trucks and debris, suddenly [snaps] you're out of it again.

And the most magnificent thing happens, the Passaic turns back into wilderness.

[birds chirp] [gentle music] [birds chirp] [gentle music] - Great Piece Meadows, like the Great Swamp, is really kind of a crown jewel, if you will, of the Passaic River Watershed.

I describe the Passaic as a hound off leash.

You know, it just meanders all over the floodplain, through this beautiful swamp forest, really.

It's pretty remote.

I mean, that's the beautiful thing about it.

And, there's a put-in off Route 46 behind a warehouse.

[water laps] [upbeat music] [upbeat music] - When one enters the Great Piece Meadows, you've just entered into an old growth forest.

The trees are large and magnificent.

[inspired music] The floodplain is forested for as far as the eye can see.

There are places in the Great Piece Meadows where you can walk a half mile off the river on either direction and not find civilization at all.

"How did this happen," you ask yourself.

And there's a whole story as to why that exists.

It's a beautiful, modern story.

It's a tale of people who came to the rescue of the river.

- Great Piece Meadows would not exist today, it would be houses, probably, and light industry if it weren't for one man, and that's Robert Perkins.

Robert Perkins was an extraordinary man, very intelligent, very reclusive, very eccentric.

And he was this really soulful kid, apparently, because he recognized really early on, I mean, in his adolescent years, that the world was going in a bad direction.

There were too many people and there were only gonna be more people, and humans really could not be trusted to steward the land properly.

The family wasn't wealthy, but his father had some wealthy clients.

So young Robert decides that he's gonna raise money and he's gonna buy up some land, he's gonna preserve wildlife.

One woman in particular, Marcia Brady Tucker, she contributed generously to organizations that supported and studied birds.

So young Robert visits her in her townhouse and basically asks her to donate money so that he can acquire properties.

So, he starts this organization called Wildlife Preserves, Inc. And apparently the US Fish and Wildlife Service, before World War II, was thinking about purchasing land all along the Central Basin and creating the Passaic Valley National Wildlife Refuge.

Most of the properties were bought by farmers.

They would buy like a strip of land in Great Piece Meadows and they would use it for salt hay, or for timber.

It looked like a parquet floor.

These properties were these long alleyways, like, Robert Perkins said one of them was a hundred feet wide and 9,000 feet long.

The balkanized nature of these holdings actually turned out to be advantageous later on, because as towns around Great Piece Meadows tried to develop properties and expand, they'd run into a property that Wildlife Preserves, Inc. owned, and boom, they were thwarted.

The thing about Robert that was so interesting is the way he went about fulfilling his mission to preserve land, was very much like who he was.

It was quiet, it was behind the scenes, it was very dignified.

And it's like before anybody knew what was happening, it was like, can't develop Great Piece Meadows.

- Great Piece Meadows is a meadowland.

The Passaic is beyond those trees, and it's a flood storage area that, when there's a lotta rain, we may be under three or four feet of water right here.

- [Mary] Len Fariello is the manager of Wildlife Preserves.

He worked for Robert Perkins for many years.

He has this nickname, Running Deer, which he got because he was a cross country track star in high school.

- Without places like this, when there's a big storm event, places downstream would, billions of dollars worth of damage.

So, when the river rises, the water has a place to go, so it just doesn't have to go downstream.

- [Interviewer] How accessible is this place to the public?

Could people come and enjoy it?

- It's unknown, somewhat, but people that know about it do come and enjoy it.

Yes, bird watchers come, and it's divided right now into a hunting area and a sanctuary area.

Back in the day there was a lotta duck hunters.

You know, duck hunters wear high boots, and I just went out in the meadows barefoot, and I was able to catch a lot of duck hunters back in the day, and run them down and get their hunting licenses.

And, many of 'em, I prosecuted.

- How do these guys react to this barefoot, you know, guy coming after them?

- Well they all knew me.

I'd hear "Running Deer's here" and then I, sometimes I couldn't even see 'em.

I would just see the cattails or hear the cattails and just run in that direction.

[insects chirp and buzz] Okay, when I was a boy, amphibians migrate, and there was a spot where the amphibians would hibernate, and then they would go down to a low area like this to propagate.

And so, they built 287 right through it, and the first year it was there, I went out there, and I'm wondering, why is there no toads crawling in this breeding pool?

And I went up on the highway bank, and they were all squished, just killed, I mean, they didn't have a chance.

And then possums went to eat the toads and they got squished.

So, I mean that's just one thing that really I remember as a child.

- [Mary] Yeah, it breaks your heart.

[gentle music] - [Carl] Watch the web, Mary.

[gentle music] - Oh, eagles.

See in the tree?

Right, right there, the dead tree, straight ahead.

[gentle music] [water laps] [eagle caws] [gentle music] - Back out?

- That's a no.

Wow.

See a lotta spiders in here.

- Lotta-- - Not much else.

[gentle music] [water laps] [paddle scrapes] - Hey, look at that.

- What is it?

- It's a baby basketball.

- Throw it up here.

- You ready?

- Yeah, I'm ready.

- [Carl] Yeah, I have this thing when I'm in a kayak where-- - Look at this little ball.

- [Carl] I have to get a ball-- - Mini, it's a mini basketball - Or it's just not a kayak trip.

- Ick.

- I like to think I am the Passaic River chief recycler of sporting equipment.

We've watched the amount of plastics grow to enormous volumes.

You are number one.

It's disheartening.

I guess if you didn't laugh about it a little bit, you would just have to cry.

We're trying to be cognizant of the whole picture.

So, when we're on the river, it's not just the plant ID and it's not the water quality, it's the small little floatable basketballs that pop up and the styrofoam and that.

And the way that some aquatic plants will colonize plastics and styrofoam and actually grow on a mat on top of the manmade floating island.

- We were talking about that, how like nature is so sort of opportunistic and tenacious, and it will like, anything that floats is a platform.

- I got some duck weed on me.

- Yeah.

You're gonna probably die after you eat that sandwich.

And you got poison, you're probably eating poison ivy now.

- On my fingers, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- Now it's in the sandwich.

- Mm-hmm.

[gentle music] - [Carl] Hey, how's the water today for you?

- Nothing's biting.

- Really?

What do you usually fish for?

- The biggest thing in here is Northern Pike.

- Oh really?

Wow.

[gentle music] [gentle music] [gentle music] At Two Bridges, just downstream of Great Piece Meadows, the Pompton River joins the Passaic.

The Pompton is the largest Passaic River tributary, and it contributes an enormous amount of water.

[gentle music] Once we exit Great Piece Meadows, so begins what I like to call the Twin Falls section of river.

The river now is gonna traverse the second and third Watchung Mountain ridges, by passing through Little Falls, and then over Great Falls.

[water rushes] [water rushes] So we're standing here at the mill in Little Falls, right on the Passaic River.

The mill is now an apartment and condo complex.

It used to be a carpet mill that was started by Robert Beattie, an Irish immigrant, back in the 19th century.

- My father and his two brothers were the final operators of this property as an industrial complex, called Beattie Carpet and Rug.

And it was founded in 1840 by my great, great, great grandfather from Armagh County, Ireland.

He came over here when he was 11.

He was a weaver with a very large carpet company and he started his own, and he was scouting around for production sites.

And he remembered that this property here would be a good source for power because there was some grist mills below the rapids.

So, the real impetus for this site was hydropower.

- What was it like when you would wade into the Passaic with your brothers?

I mean, downstream from here.

- Oh, we were Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer types.

- Yeah, yeah.

- For a couple of years there.

It was a motley group of nerdy kids, very nerdy kids, getting into trouble, but not bad trouble.

We would go island hopping, you know, islands below the dam.

But we didn't know anything about the history.

We just knew that it was Dad and my uncle's company.

We just thought it was great to be outta the city for the summer and go on a new adventure.

I have a lotta pride in my ancestors, and everything has a beginning and a middle and an end.

Everything.

But there's a constancy with this river.

You know?

Some people visit a cemetery.

If this is close by, I'll come here.

[gentle somber music] [gentle somber music] [raindrops dribble] [gentle somber music] [gentle somber music] [Carl laughs] - Well, today's weekend two.

We're out here on the Passaic River in Paterson.

We are gonna be going around the Great Falls, and I'm gonna be the Uber driver today.

- And a one, and a two, and a three.

And up.

- I'm laughing.

[Carl and Mary laugh] - We're putting in here because the entire length of this creek is bulkheaded with a concrete wall.

This is no place for kayaks, my friends.

Here's my paddle.

All right, let's go find out.

- And this is not true of the whole river, but it's kind of an example of how the Passaic isn't really friendly to boaters, necessarily.

It doesn't, not the river itself, but whoever bulkheaded it doesn't really invite you to come and paddle it.

[upbeat guitar music] [upbeat guitar music] [gentle music] - This is where you start to realize that despite the rivers of the United States being free to all, they're open public space to everyone, the banks of the rivers aren't.

This happens all over, no matter where you go.

And if you're kayaking, that's a bit of a problem.

Now you've got to get out.

So, you've got to push your way through the weeds.

All right, now, come in that way.

Nose first, we'll pull you up.

Oh wait, I gotta make sure I'm stepping on the bank though.

All right, let's do a double carry.

- Let's do two.

- Okay.

The double-- The Great Falls is easily the highlight of any journey down the Passaic.

But first, we are having lunch at Libby's.

I am going to get the flapjacks.

- Yeah, me too.

No, they don't have any flapjacks here.

- I don't care if they don't have 'em, I want them.

- We are here in Paterson, New Jersey at Libby's Lunch, which is an iconic restaurant.

Its specialty is hot dogs, all the way.

- Don't forget, Taylor ham provides you your essential proteins there.

- [Susan] Hello, how are you?

- Hi.

- How are you doing?

- We're good, how are you?

- I'm okay, honey.

- Could I get a Taylor ham and egg sandwich please?

- Taylor ham, egg.

On a hard roll, honey?

- A hard roll, perfect.

Yeah, thank you.

How did you know?

- It's a family-owned place.

My mother-in-law owns it.

Everybody comes for their sauce and the hot dogs, their burgers.

Our specialty here is our all-the-way hot dogs.

All the way is chopped onion, mustard, and chili sauce.

It's nice because people do come to see the river, so you have them type of people that come, you know, to view.

But it's also scary when like you have a big storm or something.

But it has, thank God, never affected here.

- I grew up on the river.

If you go all the way up river on Little Falls, and through the Little Falls area, you go past the twin bridges, it's probably one of the most beautiful things you'll ever see, and no one really knows about it, unless you're on that river with a boat, you know?

When I grew up on the river it was great 'cause my friend had a small backyard, but we had the river so, we used to go fishing.

I won a bunch of competitions, just catching carp on the river.

And it's just a different way of life, you know?

You go up and down the river, everyone on that river is so nice, you know.

They wave you to you and stuff and you pull up on your boat, you know, it's just beautiful.

- [Susan] You wanted it extra messy.

- Oh yes.

- There you go.

- I like it floating.

Now that's a Libby's burger right there, people.

Look at that.

[laughs] All right, digging in time.

Get the napkins ready.

- Oh, cheese fries.

I'm stealing.

- Taylor ham and egg.

- Perfect.

- I'm stealing.

- Thank you so much.

[car horns honk] - Right, tightened.

- All right, let's do mine.

- Hold on, I'm gonna move this up here.

Hot.

- What is that thing?

[lighthearted music] [car horn honks] [car horn honks] Beep, beep.

Whoa.

[gentle music] The Great Falls is the destination of all destinations on the Passaic River.

That's what you've come for, that's the showstopper.

[uplifting music] [water rushes] [uplifting music] [water rushes] [uplifting music] [water rushes] [uplifting music] [water rushes] [uplifting music] [water rushes] Nowadays, I don't have to explain to anyone who Alexander Hamilton is.

But, I still do have to explain what it is that happened here, at this place that Hamilton found so fascinating.

- Paterson is the place where, you know, Alexander Hamilton saw these falls and he recognized that this was a way that the United States could gain its manufacturing independence, and maybe superiority from Great Britain.

We could build this manufacturing center and exploit this amazing power of Great Falls.

[slow gentle music] [slow gentle music] - Alexander Hamilton was contracted by the SUM, that's the Society for Establishing Useful Manufacturers.

They're actually the first private corporation chartered in the state of New Jersey, November 22nd, 1791.

And they were really just a group of men that were investing in America.

And they were investing in the Federalist idea that the only way we could truly enjoy our political independence that we had won in the Revolutionary War, we should couple that with economic independence.

We shouldn't just be consumers of European products and suppliers of raw material, we could do it all here.

And the chief genius behind that was Alexander Hamilton.

The museum is primarily an industrial museum, but we really celebrate all aspects of Paterson, which was the first planned industrial city in the United States.

The three big industries we had were locomotives, silk, and airplane engine production.

Just about every major event that took place in United States history, we have a foot or a thumbprint in it.

- So they used to make locomotives here.

- Yes, this is the final assembly.

Pretty much where we're standing, there would've been a locomotive in some phase of production.

And then of course the most unique piece that we have, the two submersibles developed by John Philip Holland, Irish immigrant, Paterson school teacher, the father of the modern submarine.

We have boat number one and number two.

The first one was an experimental model tested just up above the Great Falls in June of 1878.

It went down, which didn't surprise anyone 'cause everyone was there to record the men going down in the iron coffin.

The article in the day, for the "Paterson Daily Press," it was titled "Down Among the Fishes."

He went down, which didn't surprise anyone.

An hour later, he surfaced.

And that was enough, especially to attract the interest of the Fenian Brotherhood.

They contributed money to build what the Navy considers the first practical ocean-going submarine.

Today we would look at this submersible as an act of terrorism, 'cause really the Fenians, they're essentially the precursor of the IRA, and they really wanted to use this against the British Navy.

- What was the effect of all the industry on the Passaic, on the river?

- Well, of course the main number, the number one issue would've been dumping, especially with textiles.

I mean, where we were fortunate is we have what's known as soft water and it doesn't have a lot of minerals in it.

So it was really ideal for dying.

I could show you color charts inside.

It's amazing.

'Cause everyone thinks, you know, everybody wore drab, especially kids, because everything's black and white photography.

When I show the colors, they're brighter than anything we wear today.

But of course, you need a lot of water for dying, for bleaching.

And, I always get reports from people grew up even in the 40s and 50s, and they say, you wanna know what was the popular color, you would look to see what's going out of the factory and into the river.

You know, one day it'd be blue, red, so yeah, there was definitely pollution.

- Yeah.

[gentle music] Recently, quite a few amazing things have happened on the Passaic.

One of them is that Great Falls has been declared a national park.

It's been given national park status right up there with the Grand Canyon and Yosemite.

And that, to me, is such a sign of hope.

- I remember, like growing up, because most of my family were all working people.

They were truck drivers and stuff like that, so.

My name is Robert Veronelli, and I'm lead visitor services for the national park.

I work for the city of Paterson.

I do pretty much everything from giving tours, doing research, anything that they need, I can do.

Right now we're in the upper raceway, and this is what powered the mills.

The water would travel through here, and it was that downward plane from above the falls to below the falls.

It would cycle around, come back through, and then you'd have the middle raceway, and then lower raceway, and then back into the river.

So even back then, we were recycling energy.

We're actually, you know, way before our times of actually being able to recycle the energy.

As we're walking, we see like the wood planks every now and then.

Those are the flumes that would send the water down onto the water wheels.

And the water wheels would turn, the equipment would turn, and that's actually how you got your products manufactured.

Paterson wouldn't be Paterson without the falls and the river.

And, for many, many years we worked our hardest to destroy the river.

We didn't know any better, we just did it.

And now, we're reinventing it.

We're reinventing the river and we are reinventing the town.

And, the river is probably at its cleanest it's been in years.

That is the life force that has always brought survivability to this area.

It brought people here to begin Paterson, and it's actually bringing Paterson back to life.

- We just wanted a nice weekend break from all the hustle and bustle-- - [Mary] Oh that's, that's good.

- He works crazy overtime and-- - [Mary] What do you do?

- I told him block-out that time.

- Work at a water department.

- Yeah.

- Oh, water department.

- That's perfect.

- Funny you should mention.

- Yeah.

- So on your days off, you like to be near water.

- Yeah, there you go.

- I can't get away from it.

Paterson?

- No-- - No, actually-- - Philadelphia.

- Oh!

- Philadelphia, the city of Philadelphia.

- Yeah.

- [Mary] So you came up from Philly?

- We drove up from Philly.

- Yeah.

- Stop it.

Really?

- It's beautiful.

- We did.

- Whoa.

- Then we run into you guys.

[all laugh] - We're from the Virgin Islands, so-- - [Carl] Oh yeah?

- We used to live literally, facing the the ocean.

- Wow.

- And so-- - Now you're in Philly.

- I was like homesick for a minute, so I said-- - I'm sorry.

Can you get around?

- Well, what can we do?

- We're in Paterson now.

- Can we go to the beach?

Nah, I don't wanna go to the beach.

Let's see.

You know.

So I started doing some research online to find out if there were any falls that were close by.

So here it comes, and here we are.

[laughs] - [Mary] Wow.

[gentle inspiring music] Many of the old factory buildings that were part of the SUM still exist on the banks of the river in Paterson.

Some of them have fallen into an advanced state of disrepair.

There have been fires there, there's been a collapse of some of the infrastructure.

But it's this sort of hauntingly beautiful kind of environment.

It feels like a Hollywood movie set, but it's real.

- This is the remnants of the Waverley Mill, about 1855.

This was a real beautiful mill up to 1980 when it started a series of fires that reduced it to the rubble you see now.

The whole facade was all arched windows.

I mean, it was a gorgeous mill.

But it's so many years of neglect.

And of course, the vegetation is a major problem.

- Yeah, that doesn't help.

- 'Cause it really blows it apart once it starts rooting into the mortar.

- So Jack, what are we walking towards here?

- We're walking towards the ruins of the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company.

This is where Sam Colt would produce the first assembly line production of firearms in the United States.

He didn't invent the revolver, although a lot of people would claim he did.

Where we walked through, this would've been the bell tower, and of course the staircase.

Originally this was a four-story brownstone, and then it had a lovely bell tower on it.

And over the years it's been modified, until the recent art decorations.

- [Mary] Yeah, which are kinda, kinda cool.

- I gotta say I love some of them.

[gentle music] As I said, this was like the little mural park.

And that's Fetty Wap, the rap star from Paterson.

This is where the skaters were, but they skateboard up in, all up in here.

It's pretty neat.

- Oh, look at this.

Whoa, that is really cool.

- So unfortunately it's a large industrial site.

You got like, what, 35 acres here, and you can get access in so many different points.

And it's dangerous.

I mean, beams are hanging by a thread.

Maybe they've been there for 50 years.

One day you're gonna walk by and that beam's gonna be on your head.

- My name is Christian.

I've been homeless in Paterson since December.

The long story short, what's it called?

I have a neurological disorder.

And, after several years of being clean, I relapsed.

Make a long story short, back here is probably the most serene area in Paterson.

It's absolutely a refuge.

I've been staying back here, you know, in a certain area because it absolutely is rejuvenating psychologically to be in this type of environment as opposed to, you know, being in the inner city of Paterson all day and night.

You know?

As long as you're able to become friendly with the raccoons, there's nothing really to worry about.

- [Interviewer] Where do you sleep?

- Well, there's a, actually a room with a bed, which fortunately has been overlooked by other people, 'cause I know they would've taken it.

Because a small guy like me, obviously is not at the top of the, you know, the food chain in Paterson.

So, for me to have found it, I feel blessed.

- [Interviewer] Do you collect this stuff as-- - Well, I can, honestly, I take the garbage and I turn it into money.

Actually, the market just took a plunge yesterday.

So, but it's about seven cents a pound for heavy steel.

So I have an honest way of making money, you know, without, you know, while living in a less than, you know, in a situation that oftentimes compels people to do things that are outside the paradigm of what's considered to be legal.

This is a great area back here.

If I was a kid, you know, I say it as a joke, when I think about it, if I was a kid I would live back here and now I am living back here.

But this is honestly like the coolest area, and it gives me time to reflect and you know, so-- - [Interviewer] All right.

- But thank you so much and-- - [Interviewer] You take care of yourself now.

- No, thank you.

- All right.

Yeah.

- Thank you.

- Bye bye.

[cart scrapes and clatters] [cart scrapes and clatters] [gentle music] [water rushes] - Great Falls is the river's most magnificent muscular moment.

It's this stunt where it hurls itself over a 77-foot cliff and lands in a deep narrow gorge, and then makes a sharp pivot, almost like a Z, and heads back down and then into the lower valley.

And the lower valley is where I grew up.

Let's stay parallel with the water, the current, right?

Any other words of advice?

[gentle music] [gentle music] - Five, six pounds heavy.

Plus my gear.

- I'm glad you're not heavy.

Let me know when.

- [Carl] Now.

- [Mary] All right, I'm coming.

[adventurous music] [adventurous music] - [Carl] Once you leave the falls, there's a sweeping arc that just surrounds the city of Paterson.

Now it opens to a big expansive river.

There are large, dense neighborhoods, communities, and everything's happening.

- [Mary] You see a variety of different style of bulkheads that people have built along the river.

- [Carl] There are bridges and there are more bridges and there are highways zooming past, and there is noise, noise, noise everywhere.

[distant drumming music] - [Mary] And then as you get further down, you see the real major industrialization of the river.

[relaxed drumming music] [gentle music] [gentle music] - And then you enter a segment that's very quiet, very deep-watered, and very, very large.

This is a big river now.

You now encounter a roaring sound.

And if you're not careful, you're gonna meet that roaring sound a little too closely.

As you approach it, there's an optical illusion.

You don't realize there's a dam there.

I defy anyone who hasn't been there before to actually know that you're approaching a 15-foot-high dam and a wall of water.

It looks as though your eye is meeting the horizon and it's just river beyond.

So that is called the Dundee Dam.

It is the most expansive, largest manmade structure on the river.

And, it's a hydropowered dam.

In the constructing of the Dundee Dam, those who engineered and designed, constructed it, must have realized exactly geographically where they were.

This was the end of what we call the freshwater, non-tidal section of the river, which is most of the river, and the very beginning of the tidally-influenced river.

In other words, below the Dundee Dam, the river goes up and down with the tides.

And I'm speaking of the push of water that comes from the ocean, enters into the bays, Newark Bay, and pushes the water up the Passaic River.

And that last stretch is called the Lower 17 Miles.

In that slosh, the water is moving back and forth, not just in one direction anymore.

And the industry, the big cities, and the contamination are all there to give the 17-mile lower stretch its character.

It's a polluted waterway.

Not just any polluted waterway, it is one of the major polluted waterways of the United States.

[adventurous music] [adventurous music] - I always have a little trepidation when I'm kayaking down below the Dundee Dam because, you know, I know that this is a very toxic part of the river.

But as long as we're careful, we'll be okay.

I mean, we don't wanna drink the water, we don't wanna get it inside us.

So if we had cuts, for instance, we'd wanna cover those up, we wouldn't wanna get river water inside us.

But as long as we can prevent that from happening, we'll be fine.

And oddly enough, despite all that sort of darkness, there's really a lot of signs of joy and life in that part of the river.

[gentle music] Just downstream of the Dundee Dam is the Nereid Boat Club in Rutherford.

The Nereid is the oldest, and one of the few surviving boat clubs on the Passaic.

People would turn out on Saturdays and watch their club row and cheer them on, have picnics on the side of the river.

But because the river was fouled, many of those boat clubs, one by one, sort of closed and shut down and people stopped coming to watch.

But the Nereid managed to survive, mostly because of a guy named Erik King.

- So the Nereid Boat Club has been on the river, you know, since the 1800s.

And it's the, the boat club and the river have gone hand in hand.

When the river was nice, boat clubs were flourishing, and there were many of 'em and it was active, and spectators came from all around to watch these boat races.

Then when the river got polluted, the spectators went away, the rowing kinda stopped.

The boat club actually went defunct for many years, and we had to bring it back alive.

And so as the river got cleaned up, it has sparked many people, not just rowers, but many people's interest in actually looking at it again.

There's been a lot of people putting their efforts in together to help the river and the boat club.

So at first, when we started, we were going out in our little motor boats and picking up branches and stuff, doing whatever we could, picking up bottles that we saw.

Now, we work together with this organization called Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission.

They have this skimmer, this skimmer is picking up volumes of debris out of the water.

[debris clatters] And, you don't see the same debris just going back and forth every day now.

You'll see it once or twice, and they get it or we get it and it's gone.

So, the river is becoming more user friendly.

[uplifting music] - Every year in October, the Nereid holds its annual Head of the Passaic regatta.

And rowing teams from really all over the northeast coast come and participate and compete.

And we'll be paddling by there on the day of the regatta, so that'll be really exciting.

- Oh my goodness.

They're taking boats out.

- I love that when they carry it over their heads, it's so cool-looking, isn't it?

- Wow, look at all the people.

- The river gets very busy, very congested when all this is happening, but it's great to see, because you'll never see the river look more alive.

- [Carl] Two, two, three.

Two, two, four.

[Mary laughs] Beautiful.

- [Mary] See if we can beat 'em.

- [Carl] Oh, they're faster than us.

- Oh no, we're losing.

[Carl laughs] - We're losing.

[adventurous music] [adventurous music] [adventurous music] [traffic hums] [car horn honks] [traffic hums] [people murmur] [traffic hums] [people murmur] - Being on the river is a very powerful and emotional experience for me.

And, being on the river, passing my hometown is even more powerful.

[car horns honk] So, here we are at ground zero for Mary Bruno.

This is the house that I grew up in.

It is a block above the river.

Seven of us lived in this house.

Mom and Dad had a bedroom upstairs.

My two younger brothers, Joseph and Paul, shared a bedroom upstairs.

And then my sister and I shared a bedroom downstairs.

And my oldest brother, 'cause he was the oldest, and he was a boy, I guess, no offense, had his own room.

How you doing?

How are the girls?

- Oh, they're good.

- What's going on?

How are you?

[both laugh] This house used to be owned by the Burnses, and the Burnses were this, just this great, crazy family, I can talk about 'em later.

But then they sold the house and we were very sad.

But then, the Catuccis moved in.

It's like, bonus.

[both laugh] It got better, you know?

- And then we lived next to the Brunos, bonus.

- Yeah.

- [Interviewer] Lois, do you have a feeling for the Passaic River?

You live so close that, I mean, do you-- - I remember my grandparents telling me stories about swimming in the Passaic River.

They would tell me how clean it used to be, and how they used to picnic along it, and they would actually swim in it.

I don't know if that's true.

- You've never-- - No, no-- - [Interviewer] Swam in the river?

- It's been polluted since I've known it.

- Uh-huh.

- Unfortunately.

- We are here in the parking lot of the Arlington Diner.

The Arlington Diner is an iconic piece of North Arlington.

But this is a really good example, the Arlington Diner, of the way the river gets kind of ignored and disrespected, because this diner is right on the water, it's right on the river, and right near a bridge.

But you can't see the river from the inside of the diner.

In fact, you can't see the river from here, we're standing right in the parking lot.

I could throw a stone into the river from here.

I might even be able to spit into the river from here.

But you can't see the river from here, because nobody cares about the river.

[car horn honks] [gentle somber music] - As you descend down the 17 miles, you realize that the river is no longer the river it once was.

And I'll explain.

A river is not just the channel in which the boats go up and down.

A river is every last bit of the watershed in which it resides.

In other words, the river starts from the very top hill that a raindrop falls on, and then makes its way, by hook or crook, down to its ultimate destination to the ocean.

So when you think about what a river is, and you look at the lower 17 miles, you realize that you're really only looking at what's maybe a small fraction of what a river is.

The bulkheads and the walls and the dam isolate the channel from all that was the river.

Now I'm talking about the muddy embankments, the wetlands, the vegetation, those things are gone now.

Ponds, lakes, little brooks, some of these concealed by concrete, buried forever underground.

Where are they?

What is this place?

[slow somber music] [somber music] - There it is, "Newark sucks," it's still there.

[Carl laughs] There's something about that, it's so raw.

- My favorite part, Mary.

Right here.

Stickel Bridge, the bridges.

- Yeah, I love those bridges.

[somber strings music] The fact is that Newark has a proud industrial history.

It was a manufacturing center.

Thomas Edison had a laboratory there, called it a city of clever hands.

[somber strings music] - We're in the interior courtyard of the Clark Thread Mill.

Originally came to Newark in the 1860s, across the river, and then moved operations, or expanded their operations here in the 1880s.

So you have about 35 buildings on 16 acres.

It's on the National Register of Historic Places.

- Oh really?

- 'Cause it's the epitome of the American Industrial Revolution, right here, intact.

By the 1870s, they were employing thousands of workers here, many young girls and women, and skilled labor from Scotland.

So on this huge steeple behind me, they had ONT.

Everybody could see it in the area.

And it stood for, our new thread.

And that's really what it was.

It was a new innovation for the sewing machine.

And then it became a household item.

In order to be a great city, a great industrial city, you need invention, you need transportation, and you need immigration.

And Newark was beginning to have all three of those things coalesce in the middle of the 19th century.

And that really went from like one factory to hundreds of factories along the Passaic River.

It was asbestos to zippers, Newark made everything from A to Z.

From the 1870s, 1880s onward, there's ongoing complaints about pollution, and it was really industrial pollution.

Passaic River was once the center of Newark's life.

This is where all the work was.

This is where the recreation was.

I mean, there were regattas out there, people swam in the river.

It was a place you could go for peaceful relaxation.

And then it becomes something other, right?

This polluted, foreboding of further decline.

So Newark was in rough shape by the 1960s, and further declined through the 70s and 80s.

All this industry up and down the river ends up leaving, some of it forever, other times for the American South where there was cheaper labor, unions weren't as strong, cheaper land.

This area that had employed thousands and thousands of people, the work went away.

- Newark really was all the things that you talked about.

And what it had was an ingenious workforce.

And so Newark is faced with this, you know, probably the most critical problem of, how do you deal with the pollution that's generated by industry?

And I remember thinking, wow, what a great community to tackle that problem.

Because, they were so resourceful and they were so industrious.

And yet it seems like they just punted.

- Mary, Newark did punt.

They had the know-how, they had the brain power, they had the capital.

But I think a lotta these decisions were made at the corporate level, and they're like, "We're not gonna deal with that."

- All of the industries that Newark embraced, up to and including the petrochemical industry, were some of the filthiest industries imaginable.

And all of the runoff, all of the refuse, all of the garbage, all the effluent from those manufacturing centers went directly into the Passaic River.

One of the most deadly was a plant called Diamond Alkali, which made herbicides and pesticides and fertilizer.

In the 1960s, they signed a contract with the US government to make Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.

Agent Orange was a defoliant that the US government used to eliminate the cover of the guerrillas that were operating in South Vietnam.

Dioxin was an unwanted byproduct of the production of Agent Orange.

And there is a lot of it in the Passaic River near Newark.

The Passaic River, when it comes into Newark, it makes this big loop.

You know, it's basically The Ironbound section, so it's surrounded on three sides by the river.

We think it was named The Ironbound because either there was a lot of steel manufacturing being done in that part of Newark, or because it's surrounded by railroad tracks, it's literally ironbound.

It was a mostly Portuguese neighborhood for a long time, now it's much more diverse.

But, it's also one of the most polluted zip codes in the city.

[foreboding music] - Dioxin right from the start had the label, the most toxic compound made by man.

In 1983, in May and June, the Department of Environmental Protection discovered the highest levels of dioxin in soil anywhere in the world on the plant site at 80 Lister Avenue, the abandoned Diamond Shamrock chemicals plant.

- I live in this area, and I would take my son when he was really small, he and I would sort of go on these wild explorations, you know, sort of treks, right?

And we would come down here and it was wild.

I met a woman who had all these papers with her one day, and I was just like, "What are you doing?"

And she said, "Oh, I'm doing all this research.

Do you know that this is a really contaminated river?

I'm on my third bout with cancer and I really think that it has something to do with this chemical accident that took place."

And I've lived in Newark for 26 years and I had never heard of this.

I had been trudging all of this, you know, dirt and debris that was on the bottom of my shoes and my son's shoes into my home, not realizing that there's dioxin here.

And I immediately was like, what is this about?

And I started doing research, and I was like, horrified.

[deep foreboding music] - Our governor at the time, Tom Kean, declared a state of emergency, which had really not ever been done in the environmental context before.

The community was understandably frightened to death because the US EPA and Department of Environmental Protection shut down the farmer's market, restricted access to the neighborhood, blocked train traffic from going through the neighborhood.

People were told they couldn't come out during the daylight hours because there were representatives in full protective gear, what they call moon suits, roaming the street taking samples.

- You wake up one morning, you pick up your newspaper and you see front page headlines about how your neighborhood has this major contamination of this highly toxic material.

So, we didn't know about this before.

We didn't know Diamond Shamrock was producing the dirtiest form of Agent Orange here in the Ironbound section, because by the time we got involved, Diamond Shamrock was closed.

- We looked at the past operations of the plant, we realized they had an explosion, so that there was dioxin throughout the community.

We realized that they had trucked waste off of the site, so that they were on the truck routes, there were high levels of dioxin.

And of course we found out that there was dioxin in the river, because batches of Agent Orange that weren't meeting the specs for the Army were dumped in the river.

- They would let their maintenance guys on a raft come out with, literally, with snow shovels and spades and dig the dioxin-laden mud and throw it further into the river so that you couldn't see it at low tide.

And because of that dioxide in the mud, it gets into the food chain and the entire area is off limits to fish harvest.

It's illegal to catch crabs in the whole lower 17-mile stretch of this river.

Tides have moved that stuff around.

The advisories say don't eat anything you catch from any of these rivers.

And the primary reason is the dioxin.

Of course, there's other contaminants of concern in some areas.

There's chromium in some areas, there's mercury in some areas, there's heavy metals and petroleum hydrocarbons.

But, those things, we pretty much know how to treat for them and we know how to clean them up in the environment.

But dioxin is what's the deal breaker here.

- What you knew about the river when you were growing up was that you don't go in it [laughs], and you don't go near it because it's dangerous.

I grew up just a few blocks from the river down on the eastern end of the Ironbound community.

I was already getting into the preteens and the neighbors were organizing and my parents were going to a lot of the meetings.

And as most immigrant kids, you have to go to translate for your parents.

It felt really exciting and like something important was happening, where residents were really upset.

You could feel that they were fighting these really powerful people.

And we were not powerful.

We were hodgepodge of residents, old and young and immigrants.

- I had met the Ironbound community corporation leaders and dioxin was the ultimate challenge for them as community organizers, for me as a young environmental attorney, and we needed to develop what we considered to be a new strategy.

My role still continues to this day, 36 years later.

- Since the 1980s designation as a Superfund site, there has been several court cases and attempts at bringing the responsible parties or the polluters into a process of cleaning it up.

Finally, in the last 10 years, we've seen the first stages of that cleanup come to life.

- So this is the former plant site.

Now, you see there's a parking lot first and then it rises up and there's an impermeable cap, where buried beneath that is the dioxin waste, which are the remnants of the old manufacturing facility.

And all the waste that was collected from the neighborhood was entombed on site, and that's being studied every few years to determine whether it's still safe and protective of the environment until they can find a permanent disposal location and a technology to safely clean it up.

- They've actually done studies to show that there is a one-to-one relationship between low income and air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution.

If you wanna find the polluted areas, you can test the soil, you can test the air, so forth, or just check out the economic level of the people who live there.

- It literally was a file that contained the smoking gun documents.

The entire problem, or a majority of it, could have been avoided.

If the company had taken the warning, they could have continued to operate, but controlled the formation of the dioxin very carefully, and we wouldn't be here now, 36 years later, dealing with the largest Superfund site in the country.

[bird caws] [ominous music] [somber strings music] - When you come down the Passaic River on that last 17-mile stretch, just the bridges, the swing bridges, the steel arch bridges, the mechanization, all of that art and architecture and engineering coming together.

It's outstanding.

You can't not admire the ingenuity of man's hands.

All right, so we got the Bridge Street Bridge.

Best-named bridge.

That's a swing bridge.

- [Mary] Yeah, cool.

Right?

- Yeah, it pivots from the center.

The entire bridge just turns right.

What, that would be a 90 degree angle?

- [Mary] Yes, to be parallel to the current.

- Yeah, swings back.

Unfortunately, it's not just the hands at play on the Passaic River, and this is true of our entire nation.

It's sort of like the big foot, too.

If the hands are the symbol of man's creativity, then the foot must be the symbol of man's overreach and dominance.

Like, I'm just stomping through here and I'm not really paying attention at all to what I am doing, I'm just coming through.

The new apartment building, serving the commuters, easy access to a rail line.

- Yeah.

- Next to, you know, the concrete.

- The decrepit concrete plant.

- Right?

- The river is central once again.

Right?

So 150 years ago, all these factories were lining both sides of the river.

Now, it's not factories that are getting built, it's condos, it's luxury apartments.

So the river, once again, is the main artery or the spine of redevelopment.

- [Carl] I suspect we're not gonna recognize Newark in 50 years.

- [Mary] I hope not.

[Carl laughs] In May 1666, this group of Puritans from Connecticut sailed up into the mouth of the Passaic River.

And what they found was this beautiful salt marsh with blue irises and dogwoods blooming in the hills beyond.

And they also found the Lenni Lenape, the tribe that occupied that part of what is now New Jersey.

The Puritans were looking for a home, they were looking for a place to colonize.

And they built the city of Newark, first city in New Jersey, third oldest city in the country.

It was the Lenni Lenape who named the Passaic River.

Passaic in their language means peaceful valley.

[siren wails distantly] [water flows] [water splashes] - [Carl] Well, here's your near future, Mary.

- I'll go up and grab this-- - Grab you a cleat.

- I'm gonna grab a cleat.

Got it?

Holy cow, Julia.

- [Julia] Oh, how you feeling?

- I'm tired.

Now I'm tired.

[groans] [Carl laughs] [Mary groans] We did it.

[serious strings music] - Scooch through.

- Okay, there we go.

- You got it.

Where you at?

Right up there, Julia?

Okay.

All right.

- [Mary] Riverfront Park in Newark is the only place in the city where you can actually get to the river, easy access to the river.

- Grabbed all, that's so nice.

[Carl laughs] - [Mary] I'm gonna go back in time for a second.

There were weeds, there was garbage, there was broken bottles strewn on the shore.

Now, that same place has been completely redone, it's been remodeled, it's been refurbished.

There's a beautiful park there now.

- It's like amazing, even just six years ago, you wouldn't recognize the place.

I remember literally pushing the bushes aside to get down and pick up litter and all from the edge of the river.

And now, I can walk down to the boardwalk and lean out on the boardwalk and watch the fish go by.

- You know, everybody's working really hard to change the way that we deal with our environment, and we have to start looking at this river as our friend.

It's a lifeline, it's a bloodline.

It's part of us.

You cannot separate humanity from nature.

- The prognosis for the river is good and it's gonna get better.

EPA has a plan to clean up the sediments in this river.

Is it the gold-plated plan, the platinum-plated plan that the river really needs?

That remains to be seen, but it's a good start.

At the very least, it's a very good start.

- It's being designed right now.

They're 35% complete with the engineering design.

It's bank-to-bank dredging, it's over 3 million cubic yards.

It will be implemented in the next 10 years, and the major step of the river on its way to restoration will have occurred.

- A lot of the things that we're doing, we're not doing it for ourselves, we're doing for our kids.

So, in about 35 or 50 years, the water will be drinkable.

Now I'll be dead and gone, and maybe my tombstone'll be knocked over by that time.

My grandchildren, some of 'em might still be around.

But, that's the reality of what's gonna go on.

- You have to be optimistic, because look at this waterfront.

This was a dream.

This park was a dream that people told us would never happen.

And it was because of this, not only, you know, not naive optimism, but a radical optimism, an optimism that said, "We not only will fight for this, but we deserve this."

This is a community that has been for too long, separated and divorced from a connection to this river.

- You know, I think Bill put it really well before, I mean, the river is this beautiful resource that all of us should be able to enjoy, and it really got taken from us, right from under our noses.

And I think we just sort of forgot that that happened, and coming back and seeing it again, however decrepit or, you know, derelict parts of it may be, is just a reminder that there was, you know, once this beautiful river here that belongs to all of us.

[upbeat music] As I learned about the Passaic, and having had experience kayaking on other rivers, I realize that the Passaic's story is not unique.

It's the story really, alas, of all rivers, which start in this quiet, pristine place and usually end in a very wide and often degraded mouth.

[upbeat music] You know, rivers have amazing stories.

They flow through space and they flow through time.

And, to write about a river, to travel a river, there's a new story around every bend.

[upbeat music] And there's rich stories about geology and ecology and history and law and politics and people, so many stories about people.

Whoa, I'm not, oh.

- Don't grieve for the Passaic River.

Don't spend too much time lamenting what happened and what can't be undone.

Think about the things that can be done going forward.

- What the kayak trip taught me is that, for all my life I had thought of the Passaic as a monster.

And, I realized that it wasn't a monster, that the Passaic River was a victim.

[gentle somber music] The source of the Passaic, not surprisingly, is this magical place.

It's the complete antithesis of the Passaic that I grew up on.

[gentle piano music] It's a little forested glade in Mendham, which is a beautiful town.

[gentle piano music] Two streams approach each other and meet, and the stream that proceeds from them is the Passaic.

[gentle piano music] And it's this tiny, you know, maybe a foot wide, a foot and a half wide, little stream that you know, trickles through this little forested glade.

And you just wanna say to that stream, "Don't go, don't leave.

Stay here where it's quiet and clean and nice."

But of course, you know that's not gonna happen.

It will kind of proceed downstream.

And, by the time it gets to Newark, it will be a very different river.

It will have gone through its lifecycle, if you will.

[gentle piano music] It's heartbreaking, but the story isn't over yet.

And I feel hopeful, almost confident, that humankind will recognize that rivers are important, that rivers are essential, and will stop treating them as garbage cans, as places that you can extract energy to make goods and make money.

And think of it more as something that's part of who we are, part of our soul, part of our heritage, and something that we should treasure.

[gentle music] [deep uptempo orchestral music] [deep uptempo orchestral music] [deep uptempo orchestral music] - [Narrator] For more information about "American River" visit, AmericanRiver.film.

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