A Neighborhood Taking Shape: Inside NJCDC’s 2026 Neighborhood Summit

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A new county services complex. A restored historic raceway. New housing, arts, and recreation spaces. A visitor center and workforce development hub. Across Paterson’s Great Falls Neighborhood, projects years in the making are beginning to transform familiar places — and on Saturday morning, residents got to see how those pieces fit together.

On September 26, NJCDC welcomed residents, government officials, nonprofit leaders, developers, and community partners to our Spruce Street headquarters for the 2026 Great Falls Neighborhood Summit. The morning offered an inside look at projects underway throughout the neighborhood — along with the people and partnerships behind them. NJCDC Founder & CEO Bob Guarasci opened the program, and Eddie Gonzalez, NJCDC’s Director of Community Outreach and Special Assistant to the CEO, guided the presentations.

Investing in the Great Falls

Passaic County Commissioner Mike Ramaglia began with an update on the redevelopment of the former Passaic County Jail site at 11 Marshall Street. The new county complex will bring together services residents now visit in separate locations — including the Board of Social Services, County Clerk, and election services — while bringing more county employees and visitors to the surrounding neighborhood every day.

“When the county chooses to invest here on this site, it’s a statement,” Ramaglia told attendees. “This building is an investment in Paterson.”

Just blocks away, another historic piece of Paterson is undergoing its own transformation. Gianfranco Archimede, Paterson’s Director of Historic Preservation, walked residents through plans for the Great Falls Riverwalk, the rehabilitation of the historic raceway, improvements to the Upper Raceway Trail and pedestrian bridges, and a new pavilion at the Paterson Museum to preserve and interpret its historic locomotives. The long-term vision includes returning water to the raceway — one of the defining features of Paterson’s industrial history — and giving residents and visitors new ways to experience the Neighborhood on foot.

Stephanie Cullins, Executive Director of the Hamilton Partnership for Paterson, shared plans for the proposed Alexander Hamilton Visitor Center, another piece of a broader effort to make the Great Falls a destination worthy of its history.

Telling Paterson’s Story

Mayor Andre Sayegh connected those individual projects to a larger challenge: changing how Paterson is experienced — and how its story is told. “We have to be storytellers because we have a story to tell,” Mayor Sayegh said. He pointed to investments already changing the city — Vista Park, Hinchliffe Stadium, the Riverwalk, and Westside Park improvements — while stressing the importance of continued collaboration.

That spirit of collaboration carried into the next presentation.

At 39 McBride Avenue, Servant’s Heart is transforming the historic Glenro Building into the Great Falls Center, a 50,000-square-foot destination combining workforce development, food, and the arts. Executive Director John Oostdyk opened not with construction updates but with a story from his childhood. At age 11, Oostdyk struggled with reading and school. Then his father gave him a tool belt. “That tool belt changed my life because I realized that day that although I wasn’t good at reading, I was good at something,” he recalled.

Today, that experience shapes Servant’s Heart’s free workmanship programs, which help young people discover opportunities in the trades. The expanded Great Falls Center will build on that work with training space, a performing arts theater, food-related uses, and other amenities.

New Life for Familiar Places

Residents also got a look at the adaptive reuse of 50 Spruce Street, the historic mill building immediately behind NJCDC headquarters. Lamont Carter of The Eminence Group shared plans to convert the long-vacant building into about 35 residential units — adding new housing while preserving another piece of the neighborhood’s industrial fabric.

NJCDC’s own projects rounded out the morning, offering a glimpse of what’s coming next along several familiar corridors. At Spruce and Grand Streets, NJCDC plans to replace the former Doctor’s Cave property with a new mixed-use affordable housing development, reimagining a prominent gateway into the Neighborhood. At 320 Main Street, work is beginning to convert the historic First Presbyterian Church into the future Great Falls Arts Center, envisioned as a home for performances, arts education, exhibitions, and community events.

And just down Spruce Street, NJCDC’s Great Falls Youth Center is preparing to expand with the new Great Falls Recreation Center. The new facility will include a full-size gymnasium, e-gaming and animation spaces, an entrepreneurial suite, and other resources designed around the interests and needs of Paterson’s young people.

Many Hands, One Neighborhood

Taken individually, each project represents a significant investment. Together, they tell a much bigger story. A former jail is becoming a center for public services. Historic waterways and industrial structures are being reclaimed. Long-vacant buildings are finding new uses. New homes, cultural spaces, recreational facilities, and workforce opportunities are emerging within blocks of one another. And, as Oostdyk reminded the room, their success is intertwined. “All these projects are working together,” he said.

That idea ran through the entire Summit. The transformation underway in the Great Falls Neighborhood isn’t the work of any one project or organization. It’s a collection of public, private, nonprofit, and community-driven investments that overlap and reinforce one another. For the residents in the room, seeing the projects side by side offered something that’s hard to grasp one construction site or rendering at a time: a broader picture of a neighborhood shaped by many hands — and of possibilities emerging as our efforts come together.