Inside the Abandoned National Silk Dyeing Co.: Paterson, NJ's Forgotten Textile Mill (Photos)

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  The text message from my friend J was simple: a list of addresses in Newark and Paterson. An invitation. An urban treasure map with Xs marking forgotten places. I picked the one on Piercy Street. Pulling up, I saw the building wasn’t exactly hiding. It was a behemoth of brick and colorful lettered graffiti, a whole city block of decay. A door gaped open next to an old loading dock, but the scene gave me pause. Mounds of illegally dumped trash lay along the floor of the loading bay. This part of Paterson has a tough reputation, and the open doors felt less like an invitation and more like a dare. I took a deep breath and stepped inside. The air was thick with the smell of dust and damp. I found myself in a vast, open space littered with plastic containers and skeletal metal shelving. I moved deeper, drawn toward the old boiler house section. Before I reached it, I walked into a room that stopped me cold. Everything was stained a deep, blood red. A fine crimson powder coated the fl...
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Hudson Valley Block Company






Some places hide in plain sight. You could drive Route 9 a thousand times, your eyes fixed on the traffic ahead, and never notice it. Tucked back from the highway, shielded by a dense curtain of trees, a long, low building sits in silence. It’s a flicker of grey through the green, a place the world seems to have forgotten.


But to step inside is to walk into another dimension.


What was once a series of five long, industrial bays is now a cathedral of concrete and spray paint. The air is still, but the walls scream with color. This is a living gallery, an ever-changing canvas for artists whose names, Taco, Ikay, Jase, Zy, Toco, Cent, Toasty, Soma, Tobe, are layered one on top of the other in a vibrant, silent conversation. For a moment, the function of the space is lost. You’re not trying to read the words; you’re simply absorbing the sheer, explosive artistry of it all, a language of shape and color plastered against a willing canvas.


What was this place?


The building kept its secrets well. The internet, our modern oracle, offered little more than the ghost of a dead EPA link and a nod from a defunct urban exploration site, Age & Abandon. It was a digital dead end. For a building so substantial, it was remarkably invisible, a phantom on the edge of one of the Hudson Valley’s busiest arteries. The search felt like chasing a rumor.























And then, a breakthrough. Not from a database, but from a person. A local historian, digging through old microfiche, found the key: a single, fledgling advertisement in a long-ago edition of the Poughkeepsie Journal.








Suddenly, the ghost had a name: the Hudson Valley Block Company.


From the late 1950s until sometime after 2002, this was a place of substance, of things that build and last. The old ad painted a picture of a business grounded in the very earth it stood on, selling “Besser Super-Vibra-Pac Building Blocks” made from pure crushed bluestone. It was a place you went for natural stone building blocks, mortar cement, sewer pipe, fireplace accessories, veneer stone, facade bricks, mason lime, sills, ornamental iron railings, and other construction supplies. It was the skeleton of the community, providing the bones for homes and fireplaces. Before it was a canvas for ephemeral art, it was a factory for permanent structures.


The paper trail gets hazy from there. The EPA records list a "M & N Manufacturing" at the site, but little else. A look at the property cards reveals another layer of obfuscation: the address itself changed, disconnecting the current lot from its past life on 60x South Road. The building didn't just become vacant; it was practically scrubbed from the map.
























Today, it’s owned by a company called Town Center Poughkeepsie LLC. And that’s where the story stops. It just sits there. In a prime corridor bustling with commercial activity, this moribund property is held in a strange state of limbo, too valuable to ignore but too neglected to save.


It’s a peculiar monument. It was born of industry and grit, a place that made things to build a community. Now, it serves a different kind of creator, one whose work is vibrant, temporary, and seen by almost no one. It’s a bridge between two worlds: the one that built our towns, and the one that colors their ruins. And it holds the stories of both, waiting quietly behind the trees.


























Source(s):




1. Department of Transportation and related agencies appropriations for fiscal year 1983: hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, United States Senate, Ninety-seventh Congress, second session. (1983). (n.p.): U.S. Government Printing Office. pp.67

2. MacRae's State Industrial Directory: New York State. (1994). United States: MacRae's Blue Book, Incorporated. pp.10 & 51

3. Million Dollar Directory. (1992). United States: Dun & Bradstreet, Incorporated.

4. Stone. (1961). United States: Stone Publishing Company. Volume 81. pp. 11

5. Age & Abandon. (2015, October 29). MN Manufacturing – Route 9, Poughkeepsie, NY [Blog post]. https://ageandabandon.com/mn-manufacturing-route-9-poughkeepsie-ny/

6. Poughkeepsie Journal. (1957, August 16). Poughkeepsie Journal, p. 20.


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