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

 

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 floor, the walls, and a series of round vats resting on a wooden platform. It was dye. A ghostly reminder of what this place used to be. Peering up, I could see a web of heavy timber beams, crisscrossing to support the roof. This was the old heart of the factory.

Inside the boiler house itself, a single boiler stood like a monument in the dusty, red-tinged gloom. But something else caught my eye. Neat rows of gray electrical switch boxes were mounted on the brick. This part of the building had been modernized at some point, a newer layer of history on top of the old.

That’s when I heard it. Footsteps, walking on the pavement outside. I froze, my eyes darting to a gaping hole in the brickwork. I couldn’t see anyone. My heart hammered against my ribs. I turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction, my exploration suddenly feeling reckless.

My path ended at a massive, locked sliding door. It sealed off this section from the main four-story brick warehouse that loomed over Holsman Street. It was a dead end. I felt a surge of frustration as I retreated, the sound of the footsteps echoing in my mind.

Back on the street, I wasn't ready to give up. I decided to walk the perimeter of the triangular lot one more time. And there it was. Tucked away and easy to miss, another door stood ajar. Luck was on my side.

This entrance led into the main warehouse. The space was cavernous, but strangely sealed. Most of the massive bay doors and windows had been bricked over long ago. This building had lived many lives after its first owner left, and each new tenant had walled up a piece of its past to suit their own needs.

I made my way to the stairs. Each floor was a new chapter of neglect. More trash, more debris, more shadows playing tricks in the dark corners. The fourth floor, I had read, once held a state-of-the-art research laboratory. Now, it was just a garbage dump, the walls a chaotic canvas of colorful graffiti tags.

This was the Galaxie Chemical Corporation site. From the 1980s until it was abandoned around 2006, the company churned out pigments and dyes here. The red powder I saw wasn’t just a color. It was a legacy.

The huge network of heavy roofing timber inside the dye house.

The very same room where the abandoned drums were found by NJDEP.

After a fire in 2018 caused by a vagrant cooking, investigators from the EPA and New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) came to see what was left. They found over 900 drums of chemicals. Some held hydrochloric acid. Others contained flammable materials and oxidizers. Many of the drums were in poor condition, their contents a mystery, their labels long since peeled away by time and neglect.

Worse, some were labeled as containing 3,3’-dichlorobenzidine, a substance the government identifies as a probable human carcinogen. It’s a chemical so hazardous that it’s listed by name in federal regulations. The company’s president filed for bankruptcy in 2011, a year after the last business officially closed its doors here, leaving the building and its toxic secrets to fester.

From a stairwell window on the top floor, I looked out over the entire property: the decaying roof, the garbage-choked loading dock, the silent smokestack. Below, the neighborhood went about its day. People walked to the store, cars drove past, all under the shadow of this quiet disaster. What I saw wasn't just a ruin. It was a question mark hanging over the health of a community, a monument to a past that has not finished poisoning the present.

I took one last look, then made my way back down through the darkness, out the discreet door, and into the light of the street. The next destination on J’s list could no longer wait. 

Paterson’s Bloody Labor Unrest

Before it was anything else, Paterson, New Jersey, was an idea. Today, its name might bring to mind old factories and urban grit, but its story begins with a river and a rivalry.

Back in the 1790s, Alexander Hamilton had a bold vision for America. He saw a future powered by industry, not just by farming, a belief that put him at odds with Thomas Jefferson. To prove his point, Hamilton championed a private group called the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures. Their mission was to build the nation’s first great industrial city. They scouted a location and found their answer in the thunderous Great Falls of the Passaic River.

In 1792, the plan was set in motion. A series of canals was dug to harness energy from the falls. But the first factory, a cotton manufactory, failed just a few years later. The grand vision seemed to flicker out. The Society, however, found a new purpose. It stopped making things itself and instead became a landlord of power, leasing out its land and the river’s energy to a new generation of entrepreneurs. For the next 150 years, the falls would be the engine for countless private ventures.

Silk was one of them. It arrived in 1840, a delicate fiber in a city built for tougher stuff. It struggled at first. But after the Civil War, high taxes on imported silk gave American producers a fighting chance. And what a fight it was. Silk was the queen of fabrics, the absolute peak of fashion and luxury. A silk dress was a status symbol, a treasure that women from all walks of life dreamed of owning.

Paterson was perfectly positioned to deliver that dream. It had the water needed for processing the delicate fibers. It had trains and canals to ship its goods. And it was just a stone's throw from New York City, the nation’s fashion capital.

Most importantly, Paterson had the people. It had waves of immigrant workers who knew how to handle the temperamental silk threads. By the 1880s, the city was a powerhouse, producing nearly half of all the silk in the United States. It had earned its famous nickname: "Silk City."

But beneath the sheen of success, another story was unfolding, one of tension and turmoil. At the turn of the century, the silk mills were largely powered by Italian immigrants. The lowest rung on the ladder belonged to the dyers’ helpers, mostly men from southern Italy. They formed the heart of Paterson’s tight-knit Italian community.

This community brought with it a fierce, militant spirit, born from radical traditions in northern Italy. In the 1890s, Paterson was known in some circles as a global hub for Italian anarchism. These workers and their families were not passive. They stood together, ready to defend themselves against the prejudice they faced from the public and the police, with violence if necessary. The dye workers learned that small strikes were easily broken by management. So when they did strike, they went big.

The breaking point came on April 23, 1902. A handful of dyers walked out of two of the city's biggest firms, Jacob Weidmann and the National Silk Dyeing Company, demanding the right to bargain collectively. What began with twenty workers quickly spiraled. Soon, there was gunfire. Three Italian workers and one policeman were shot.

The strike gained a desperate momentum. The smaller dye firms caved and settled with the workers, but the giants held firm. The city’s silk weavers and other factory workers offered no support, and the companies simply outsourced their work to mills in Pennsylvania. The local newspaper, the Paterson Guardian, sided completely with the employers. The strikers were alone.

By June, the strike was losing steam. A final, massive rally was called for June 18 in a nearby park. Thousands of workers showed up to hear speeches from famed radicals like Luigi Galleani. But hope soon turned to chaos. The rally dissolved into riots that spilled back into the Paterson mill district.

In the ensuing police crackdown, Galleani himself was shot in the face. He managed to escape and flee to Canada. The city declared martial law, and the National Guard marched in. The riots stopped. The strike was broken.

It was over. It was Paterson’s bloodiest labor dispute, a violent clash that laid bare the conflicts at the heart of the American dream. The city built on Hamilton’s vision of orderly industry had become a battlefield, its streets stained by the struggle between those who owned the machines and those who ran them.

Architectural Elements

In a 1899 Sanborn survey, the plot of land was not yet established for industry.

To understand a place like the National Silk Dyeing Company, you have to walk the block. A factory complex is not just a building. It’s a story written in brick, concrete, and steel. This one, filling the entire city block between Piercy Street and Haledon Avenue, tells the story of an industry.

If you start your walk at the south end, at the corner of Presidential Boulevard and Piercy Street, you’ll find the factory’s original heart. Here stands a stout, 1.5-story brick building with a gabled roof, dating back to around 1910. A tall, yellow-brick smokestack rises from it like a landmark. This was the steam plant, the powerhouse that fed energy to the entire operation. It was the first step. Before a single thread of silk could be dyed, this building had to be alive, breathing steam and smoke.

Walk north along Piercy Street, and the architecture changes. You come to a series of long, low-slung brick buildings, also from around 1910. Their most striking feature is their roofs, which have raised sections with vents running along the top. These are called monitor roofs, and they were designed for a very specific purpose: to let heat and fumes escape.

This was the weighing department, and what happened inside was a kind of industrial dark art. Workers here added chemicals like tin bichloride to the delicate silk. This didn't just add color. It added literal weight, making the fabric feel more substantial and luxurious. In a business where silk was sold by weight, this chemical sleight of hand was a crucial and profitable part of the process. The monitor roofs tell a story of heat, chemistry, and the quest for a heavier, more valuable product.

Keep walking toward the Holsman Street end of the block, and you’ll see the complex take another leap forward in time. Looming at the north end is a four-story, square building from around 1925. Its look is different, more modern. It was built with a reinforced-concrete frame, a sign of the changing times in construction.

This was the finishing department, the final stop for the silk. Here, the product was perfected. And on the top floor, there was a state-of-the-art chemistry lab. If the steam plant was the factory’s heart, and the weighing department its guts, this was the brain. It represented a shift toward science, precision, and quality control in the final years of Silk City’s reign.

These three sections, built over a span of about fifteen years, form the core of the old works. They tell a clear story, moving from raw power to chemical transformation to scientific finishing. But the story doesn’t end there. The company had already absorbed the even older Gaede Silk Dyeing works from the 1890s, a building that still stands nearby. And long after the silk industry faded, other businesses came and went, adding their own changes and subtracting from its original designs. 

Very organized and detailed paperwork for the former Galaxie Chemical Co. There were even boxes of formulation sheets. 

The fourth-floor room where the venerable research laboratory existed.

Silk Dyeing History

In the world of business, there are takeovers, and then there are alliances. In the early 1900s, Paterson’s silk industry faced a choice between the two. Outside financiers with deep pockets were circling, looking to buy up the city’s dye works, merge them, and create a giant monopoly. For them, it was about profits and reducing competition. For the men who ran these businesses, it was about something more.

Charles I. Auger was one of those men. A respected leader in the industry, he had built his own business, the Auger & Simon Silk Dyeing Company, from the ground up. He and his peers were not just owners. They were trained dyers who understood the craft, men who had spent decades perfecting their trade. They had no interest in handing over their life’s work to distant investors.

So Auger proposed a different path. Instead of being bought out, they would band together. It was a bold move, a defensive pact to keep Paterson’s silk industry in the hands of the people who knew it best. It was the business version of a neighborhood holding its ground.

The ground floor of the lab and the finishing department.

Exterior of the 1.5-story steam plant and a fuel oil storage tank.

In 1908, the plan became a reality. Auger’s company joined forces with four other Paterson firms and one from Allentown, Pennsylvania. A team of rivals became a team of partners. They called themselves the National Silk Dyeing Company.

Almost overnight, they became one of the biggest players in the country. Their only real rival in Paterson was the Weidmann Silk Dyeing Company. But that same year, Weidmann made a different choice. It sold out to an international conglomerate based in France. The battle lines were drawn. On one side was a locally-run alliance of craftsmen. On the other hand, a corporation controlled from across an ocean.

National’s strategy was unique. They didn’t shut down the individual plants and consolidate. Instead, they kept them running as semi-independent shops, each with its own management, all sharing a corporate headquarters in downtown Paterson. They turned their different strengths into an advantage, allowing each plant to specialize so they wouldn’t be competing with one another. It gave the company remarkable flexibility, letting it adapt to whatever the market demanded.

The East Main Street Works is the perfect example of this strategy in action. This complex grew from one of the merged companies, the Gaede Silk Dyeing Company. Between 1908 and 1915, National more than doubled its size, building a new steam plant and a state-of-the-art weighing department across the street. The plant’s specialty became the dyeing, finishing, and printing of silk ribbons.

Around 1925, they made their most ambitious addition. A new, modern building of reinforced concrete rose at the corner of Holsman and Piercy Streets. On the top floor, they built the company’s main laboratory. This wasn't just a testing room. It was the central hub for research and experimentation for the entire company, run by a Swiss-trained chemist named Dr. Paul Massini. This lab was the company’s brain, a symbol of its commitment to innovation.

For a time, the alliance thrived. The East Main Street Works was a model of industrial design, a complete system for turning raw fiber into finished art. But even the smartest strategies are no match for history. The Great Depression hit the company hard. The magnificent alliance began to fracture, its properties broken up and sold off.

By 1950, the East Main Street Works was in the hands of a new owner, Charles B. Johnson, who leased it to Hendor Mills Inc, which dyed rayon. The age of silk was over. The era of synthetics had begun.

According to the 1931 Sanborn map, the steam plant had five boilers and an air compressor. What happened to them is a mystery. Unsure if the boiler below is one of the original five boilers. 

All the invoices and files of Galaxie Chemical Co weren't even in the office; they were in an inoperable walk-in freezer/cooler.

Current Conditions

A place of grand ambition now has a simple, grim purpose. The old National Silk Dyeing Company complex was Paterson’s unofficial garbage dump. It sat in a state of suspended decay, a repository for old tires, broken furniture, and the city’s forgotten things. For years, the property has been stuck, a problem no one seems able to solve.

The heart of the issue is a tangle of politics and money. The city holds an IOU for unpaid taxes on the property, a debt of $2.4 million that is actually more than the site's assessed value of $2.1 million. A few years ago, the city council considered an escape hatch: a special sale. The idea was to offer up the massive tax lien at a steep discount, perhaps for as little as $100,000. Whoever bought the lien could then foreclose and take ownership, finally putting the land in the hands of someone who might do something with it.

But an offer that good immediately raised suspicion. Whispers started back in 2021. Was this a genuine effort to solve a problem, or a backdoor deal to hand a prime piece of real estate to a developer with friends on the city council? Some council members put the brakes on, fearing it was a ploy to benefit an ally of Councilman Michael Jackson. Stuck in a deadlock of mistrust, the city council did nothing.

And so the building waited, its fate undecided. The neglect was a cancer. Fires became a regular occurrence, a recurring fever that nibbled at the edges of the enormous property. For six years, the fire department was a frequent visitor, putting out blazes in a place that had no business burning. Each fire was a warning, a small glimpse of the inevitable.

The end, when it came, was as spectacular as it was predictable. On the night of April 3, 2026, a five-alarm fire roared to life. It started in the middle of the complex, in the oldest sections, where the heavy timber beams that once supported the roof were stacked like firewood. The old wood, dry as bone after decades of neglect, went up in a fury. The blaze engulfed the structure, a column of fire and smoke visible for miles. Walls that had stood for a century buckled and collapsed onto the street and parked cars. 

The smoke cleared to reveal not a building, but a skeleton. The grand laboratory, the powerhouse, the weighing rooms, all gutted. The political paralysis had a price, and the bill had finally come due. The fire simply finished the job that years of indecision had started, turning a monument of industry into a tombstone of brick and ash.

View photos of the fire, captured by photographer and retired firefighter Peter Danzo, to witness the end of the National Silk Dyeing Company.

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Source(s):

1. Rahman, Jayed, "Feds seek warrant to enter abandoned Paterson chemical factory," July 1, 2018, Paterson Times

2. National Silk Dyeing, Paterson NJ

3. Paterson, New Jersey: America's Silk City (Teaching with Historic Places), National Park Service

4. 1902 Paterson Silk Dyers Strike, Wikipedia 

5. Rahman, Jayed, "Paterson officials debate what to do with vacant Piercy Street building," May 11, 2021, Paterson Times

6. Rahman, Jayed, "Paterson firefighters put out flames at vacant Piercy Street factory," May 13, 2018, Paterson Times

7. Alarm as fire engulfs abandoned chemical factory in Paterson, NJ. (2026, April 5). ABC7 New York. https://abc7ny.com/post/alarm-fire-engulfs-abandoned-chemical-factory-paterson-nj/18839252/

8. Prussin, M., & Keleshian, K. (2026, April 5). Drone video shows massive fire tearing through Paterson factory. CBS New York. https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/paterson-fire-east-main-street-drone-video/

9. Slocum, J. (2026, April 6). Major fire engulfs, decimates North Jersey chemical factory. Patch. https://patch.com/new-jersey/wayne/major-fire-engulfs-decimates-north-jersey-chemical-factory

10. Danzo, P. (2026, April 3). Paterson NJ 5th alarm 28 Piercy St, 04-03-26. PAD Photography. https://www.padphotography.net/2026-Fires/Paterson-NJ-5th-alarm-28-Piercy-St-04-03-26

11. (1915) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Paterson, Passaic County, New Jersey. Sanborn Map Company, Vol. 2. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn05590_005/

12. (1950) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Paterson, Passaic County, New Jersey. Sanborn Map Company, Vol. 2, - May 1950. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn05590_008/

13. (1899) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Paterson, Passaic County, New Jersey. Sanborn Map Company, Vol. 1. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn05590_002/

14. Pearson, G. (2018, October). New Jersey Dept. of Environmental Protection, Emergency Management Program [PowerPoint slides]. NJDEP. https://www.nrt.org/sites/98/files/NJDEP%2520RRT2%2520PPT%252010%25202018.pdf