Sep. 7--When Patrick Malone saw unemployment looming in 1969, he didn't mull his next move for long.

He returned to the Ford automotive plant in Mahwah, where he had worked in the late 1950s, first as an assembly line worker and then a supervisor.

"The auto industry was doing extremely well, and it was a good place to work," said Malone, 75, of Mahwah. "It wasn't by any means an easy job. But on average they paid a little more than some of the other jobs in the area. It always had a bright future."

Many blue-collar workers felt the same way 40 years ago. Manufacturing dominated New Jersey's economic landscape and there were plenty of relatively well-paid jobs for workers with limited education.

Yet just over a decade later, the Ford plant -- one of North Jersey's biggest employers, with 3,300 workers -- closed. It was replaced by a 22-story hotel and office complex that soon housed mortgage bankers, Realtors and corporate powerhouses like Sharp Electronics.

The transformation, from factory floor to a computer-driven office hub, reflects the dramatic reshaping of North Jersey's business and economic environment -- a shift that has changed society as much as any of the social and cultural ruptures of 1969.

That year, New Jersey's manufacturing sector reached a post-war employment peak of 900,000 workers, or almost two out of five jobs in the state. Today, manufacturing accounts for just 270,000 jobs, or one in 10.

"It was definitely the end of an era," said James W. Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. "Basically, offices are now the factory floor of the new economy."

The help-wanted ads then and now give a sense of the change. Where employers recently were seeking telemarketing salespeople, senior computer programmers and a radiological technician, in August of 1969 they looked for key-punch and chemical operators, production testers, "gal Fridays" and even "mature women" to work the line at an Allendale wire manufacturer.

National and global trends fueled the change, among them the growth in low-cost goods produced abroad for U.S. consumers. The workplace was transformed by computers and the Internet -- the first version of which was launched in 1969 under the name ARPANET.

Yet some local moves were crucial, too.

In 1969, the Willowbrook Mall opened in Wayne, hastening the consumer shift away from Main Street. That movement began in the late 1950s, with the openings of the Garden State Plaza and Bergen Mall. Willowbrook was the third major mall to open in North Jersey.

The same year, the New Jersey Legislature created the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission, which helped transform a smelly, swampy dumping ground into a prized economic hothouse of malls, hotels, warehouses and offices.

"In 1969, we didn't even have an office market in New Jersey," said David Houston, president of the commercial real estate brokerage Colliers Houston & Co. in Teaneck.