This is an interesting lady. Always brilliant and beautiful. This town ain't big enough for her. She's a professor, and an artist, a commissioner and the wisdom in a senseless town. Writing is only a portion of her talent.
Below is a taste of her historical expertise found in an article about another important Patersonian, Gaetano Federici.
An Interpretive Background
on Federici and his Contribution to Public Culture in Paterson
by Flavia Alaya
Gaetano Federici was born in the mountain village of Castlegrande on the slopes of the southern Italian Apennines. When he migrated to the U.S.--and straight to Paterson--at the age of seven, it was so he and his mother could join father Antonio Federici in the life he had already established for himself as a mason and builder in this boomtime industrial town. As if to reclaim a little of their native Castlegrande, they settled the steeply graded heights first of West Braodway and then (as the family grew) of Oxford Street. The parish they joined with other Italian families in creating became St. Micheal's, on what was then Cross Street, and for the next generation the Federicis continued to live in sight of the twin belltowers built to the specifications of that redoubtable parish priest and fellow Castlegrandese, Father Carlo Cianci.
These Village charactaristics of landscape and "campanilismo" were not the only features of Italian tradition the Federicis preserved. There was also food and work and lifestyle, family and opera and art, each nurtured with a zeal and dedication that had deep personal and cultural roots. Antonio had dreams of a family business in construction, assited by four sons, with his firstborn leading the way. It was difficult for him to accept at first, that his eldest son's genius was for embellishing buildings, not for constructing them.
Still, encouraged by his mother, Teresa, and always eager for his father's approval, Gaetano left Paterson to study with such major bronzemakers as Guiseppe Moretti and charles Niehaus. It was the heyday of the grand sculpture studio, the great era of civic monument-making and of the artistic carving essential to Beaux-Arts architctual design. Gaetanolearned his craft at the feet of the masters. He traveled with Moretti to Alabama to mount the gigantic "Vulcan" and to Havana, Cuba, to decorate the massive Centro Gallego. He received some recognition for his skills at World's Fairs and Exhibitions and stood on the threshhold of a career that might perhaps have made his name recognizable in the larger art world.
But Gaetano Federici was drawn back to Paterson, captivated surely by...whatever it is that has always cptivated Paterson's artists. We may guess that then, too, just after the turn of the century, he was drawn to the magnet of the city's stupendous swagger and optimism, its bouyant will to survive fire and flood. Darwn also from a certain sniff of promise that out of its own pride--and deep pocket-- it could give him fame enough, fortune enough , without depriving him of the dearness of the familiar, of his family, of the belltowers of St.Michael's, of everything that was his own, so inseparable and nourishing a piece of his identity as both man and sculpture--and as son, for it is in a sense true to say that he came back to his father's business. He hung the period's standard framed dramatic photograph of the Great Falls on the wall of his studio. He chose the city of Paterson to be an artist in.
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