PATERSON — It's been called New Jersey's Niagara, an eight-story waterfall enveloped in the city it helped build.

Great Falls National Historical Park, a modest park surrounding the majestic falls, turns two today, and local and federal officials were on hand Wednesday to announce a $2 million revitalization project named for one of its loudest champions.

Renovations begin this week at Mary Ellen Kramer Park, named for the city's former first lady who began working in the 1960s to preserve the area that now encompasses the park, even fighting off attempts to build a stretch of Route 80 too close to the falls.

The park is part of the Great Falls national historic site, but has remained under the city's control for decades, awaiting required soil remediation and other upgrades before being handed over to the National Park Service. The $2 million comes from a combination of state Green Acres money and funding from Passaic County.

"It took all forms of government, a lot of hair-pulling, a lot of arm-twisting, a lot of frustration, but ultimately, the task is here at hand," Mayor Jeffery Jones said Wednesday.

The Great Falls became America's 397th national park in 2009 , but those who knew better have drawn inspiration from the falls for centuries prior. New Jersey poet William Carlos Williams, who chronicled the city in the book-length poem "Paterson" in the mid-20th Century, frequently returned to the falls in his work:

Before Williams, of course, were the nation's early industrial leaders, who harnessed the falls into a raceway system that flowed to early factories. That torrent of water didn't just power Paterson; it jump-started American industry. Park Superintendent Darren Boch explains:

Waterwheels eventually gave way to a hydroelectric system developed by Thomas Edison's General Electric Company, and the Great Falls Power Plant still provides electricity for the region.

Unlike the falls, though, industry here eventually dried up, the same way it has in post-industrial cities around the U.S. City officials hope a renovated national park will bolster efforts to revitalize the city.

Jones said the finished park will complete the city's "classic corridor" that runs from Pennington Park to the decrepit, historic Hinchliffe Stadium, which itself is slated for major renovations.

Congressman Bill Pascrell, a former mayor himself who lobbied his colleagues for the federal designation, called the park "a mirror to the generations that worked to build this city, and made it into an industrial power."

"And that maybe has changed — 'Ah, well, you should have known Paterson back when,'" Pascrell said. "Well this is Paterson now. Paterson now has got to make its own footprint."