Work in Progress

By Alan Richard

Paterson, N.J.

On his first trip here, architect Roy Strickland expected to see nothing more than squatting warehouses and abandoned brick factories, relics of a bygone heyday.

After all, Paterson was a city fallen on hard times, whose schools were so forlorn that the district was one of the first in the nation to be stripped of its powers in a state takeover. It wouldn't be much to see.

Then, just a few minutes after crossing over the Hudson River from New York City, the MIT professor began to believe that this...