The southern end is dense urban housing, multi-family, walk-ups, shared staircases. The northern end is wooded and semi-rural, on larger lots, where what comes into the house is mud, leaf litter and lake sand rather than street grit. Both are ordinary work for us, and both are planned around what is on the floor.
Passaic County is two different places joined together. In the south, Paterson, Passaic and Clifton are densely built and heavily lived in: brick multi-family houses, walk-up apartments, shared entrance halls and staircases carrying the traffic of several households. In the north, past Wayne, the county climbs into the Highlands, Ringwood, Wanaque and West Milford are wooded, on large lots, close to reservoirs and lakes. Houses there have mudrooms for a reason. What comes in on boots in West Milford is wet leaf litter and sandy soil; what comes in on shoes in Paterson is street grit and road film. They soil a carpet differently, they need different pre-treatment, and pretending otherwise is how a job comes out mediocre in both places.
Street grit in the south
Urban traffic soil is fine, dark and slightly oily, road film carried in on shoes. It settles into the base of the pile in entrance halls and traffic lanes and it is what turns a hallway two shades darker than the room either side. It needs pre-treatment and dwell time before extraction rather than a heavier machine pass.
Leaf litter and clay in the north
Houses in the Highlands deal with wet leaves, sandy soil and clay, especially through autumn and the spring thaw. That soil is coarser and it grinds at the fiber underfoot, so entryway and traffic-lane carpet in those towns wears faster and benefits from cleaning nearer the six-month end of the range.
Local notes
- The Great Falls of the Passaic River in Paterson is a seventy-seven-foot waterfall at the center of a national historical park, and the dense nineteenth-century mill housing built around it is still much of the city's residential stock today.
- Northern Passaic, Ringwood, Wanaque and West Milford, sits in the Highlands among reservoirs and woodland, so houses there bring in wet leaf litter and sandy soil rather than the road film that dominates the south of the county.
- Clifton is one of the largest municipalities in New Jersey by land area and is built mostly of post-war capes and colonials, which means straight-run staircases and consistent wall-to-wall carpet upstairs.
- Paterson's older multi-family houses commonly share one entrance hall and staircase between several households, so those stairs take in a month what a single-family stair takes in a year.
