The day after the fire, Peter Marcalus had to see the rubble.

The sprawling Marcal Paper factory on the edge of Route 80 in Elmwood Park that was destroyed by a massive blaze Wednesday had been owned by his family for nearly 80 years. Marcalus, 63, spent a quarter-century laboring there himself, first in the machine and welding shops and later as a vice president.

But as he gazed at the broken buildings and the rising plume of white smoke and the pipes and pumps and electrical wires glazed in ice, Marcalus kept thinking that far more than just his family's factory had been gutted.

The fire snuffed out a way of life.

“I’ve seen that site all my life,” said Marcalus, who lives in Oakland but still works in Elmwood Park, in an office. “It’s just shocking to see it smoldering."

Once upon a time in America, before globalization and hedge funds dominated the nation's economy, and manufacturing firms and industrial parks gobbled up farmland, many small towns were home to a local factory. In New England, mills produced shirts and shoes. In the Midwest, it was tires, ball bearings and steel beams. In the South, furniture. In the West, packaged food.

It was, as Marcalus noted, a way of life that was quintessentially American. A family with local roots often ran the town's factory, passing ownership through generations. Many of the workers lived close enough to walk to their jobs.

And so it was with Marcal Paper Mills.

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The brick factory that produced paper tissues, towels and napkins nestled itself along the Passaic River in the 1930s, a short walk from a neighborhood that still features well-kept, two-story, wood-frame homes, many with American flags fluttering from their porches.

As Peter Marcalus studied the smoking ruins of his family’s lifeblood the other day, he thought of his grandfather, who immigrated from Sicily as a boy, changed his name from Dominico Macaluso to Nicholas Marcalus and developed 30 patents, including one for waxed paper that could be rolled and placed in a box. Then he remembered his father, Robert, who returned from World War II with an innovative marketing concept — to erect a massive, neon Marcal sign that would became a landmark seen by thousands of motorists each day after Route 80 was built.

Then he thought of the legions of workers who always felt that their factory would be their home — a social and economic security blanket.

The Marcalus family built its plant in Elmwood Park — then called East Paterson — in 1939. After years of success with a steady workforce that exceeded 1,000, the company went through a series of cutbacks, mainly due to competition from overseas paper mills.

By 2006, Marcal filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Two years later, the company was bought by Highland Capital Management, a Dallas-based firm that describes itself on its website as “a multibillion-dollar global alternative investment manager.”

Marcal’s workforce shrunk, and the famous Marcal sign overlooking Route 80 went dark.

Four years later, the plant found new life when Soundview Paper Co. purchased Marcal. On Jan. 31, 2014, Soundview restored the iconic Marcal sign with LED lights.

Wednesday’s blaze ended that era — and destroyed the Marcal sign, sending it toppling into the fire. Authorities say the massive fire burned through 90 percent of the plant and left 500 workers without jobs.

“My jaw dropped," Marcalus said in an interview. "It was just very sad.”

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“I know they’ve scaled back,” he added. “But there are men and women who will be out of work, many I still know. It’s extremely sad to think about these people who won’t have jobs. Many of the people I knew are in their 50s, some approaching 60. For them to be out of work at that stage of life is stunning.”

Victor Tan Chen, a sociology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, has chronicled the steady loss of factories that once were centerpieces of small towns. He describes the impact of a plant closing as a “hollowing out” of a community.

In most recent cases, of course, factories closed because their owners moved the operation to another nation where they could pay lower salaries. For instance, the Goldberg Slipper Factory in Hackensack shut down more than a decade ago and moved to China.

For Marcal, it was fire that forced the shutdown. But Chen said the social, economic and personal impact on the local community is virtually the same.

“It’s the end of a way of life,” Chen said. “A lot of communities are built around a factory. It’s a centerpiece. It has a huge ripple effect on the community.”

How the Marcal fire will change life in Elmwood Park — and in neighboring Paterson, Garfield and other working-class communities — remains to be seen.

When the Ford assembly plant and Alcoa aluminum rolling mill shut down in Edgewater in the 1960s, the community endured a nearly three-decade decline before revitalizing itself with apartment developments. Garfield, which was once home to several fabric mills and a massive paper recycling plant, is still struggling to find new development. And Paterson, once one of America’s leading producers of silk, is also still trying to attract new investment in its once-bustling industrial neighborhoods.

Tom Duch Jr. had a personal connection to the Marcal factory. His uncle worked there as a security guard. And Duch, an attorney and a former Garfield mayor and assemblyman who is now Garfield’s borough manager, once did legal work for the Marcalus family.

“This is a huge loss for this community and for the surrounding area,” Duch said. “It’s an economic loss. It’s an emotional loss.”

Many former workers still point to the relighting of the Marcal sign in 2014 as an emotional high point that seems so tragic in the wake of Wednesday's fire. Robert Marcalus, then in retirement, had breakfast each month at a nearby diner with retired workers who called themselves the “Over The Hill Gang.” He visited his old plant for the lighting ceremony.

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One of Robert’s daughters, Jeannette Bonin of Morristown, thought of that sign relighting and her father’s personal touch with workers as she mourned the loss of her family’s factory.

“When my father walked in the employees gave him a standing ovation,” Bonin said.

Seven months later, Robert died.

As Bonin fielded telephone calls after the fire, she wiped away tears. The fire, she said, had not not just destroyed buildings. “It took a tremendous amount of memories away,” she said.

Bonin’s husband, Charles, an attorney who grew up in Wyckoff, like his wife — the two met in seventh grade — worked at the plant as a teenager during summer breaks. He later became Marcal’s chief legal counsel.

“The thing that struck me about the Marcalus family,” he said, “is they always had friends and relatives working for the company. As I watched the footage of the fire on TV, I kept thinking of the families who worked there.”

One of those workers, Jim Stewart, 69 and retired from his job as Marcal’s property manager, watched the TV news accounts from his home in Long Branch.

“I knew the buildings inside and out,” Stewart said. “It was hard to see them destroyed.”

Stewart also knew the surrounding neighborhood. He remembered how workers on pay day would rush from the plant to a local bank to cash their checks. He thought of colleagues who stopped at coffee shops, restaurants and small grocery stores on their way home.

But as he mourned the loss of Marcal, Stewart also wondered what might happen to the neighborhood.

“It’s going to be a big loss to the small businesses,” he said. “It goes right down the line."

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Before falling asleep each night at his boyhood home in Elmwood Park, Andy Stanish would look out his bedroom window at the Marcal plant.

"I could see the smokestacks outside the window," said Stanish, 33, who now lives in Jersey City and commutes to his job as a software engineer at CNBC.

"This is a piece of history. This is a piece of my history," Stanish said, adding that "everybody knows the Marcal sign. You knew you were in Elmwood Park when you saw it."

In a joint statement, Elmwood Park’s mayor, Francesco Caramagna, and the Borough Council said they “don't know what will come of this property when all is said and done." But they pledged to “do everything in our power to make sure that Elmwood Park recovers” and “that one day the iconic Marcal sign rises again."

Peter Marcalus shares that hope.

“Let’s still hope that it continues to function,” he said of the factory that defined his family. “Hopefully back to what it was.”

Email: kellym@northjersey.com