New Development Should Be Balanced with Appreciation of Princeton’s Historic Distinction
To the Editor:
Nestled inside historic Princeton, set off from the town’s illustrious university, Gilded Age mansions, and touristy downtown, sits a small residential neighborhood of exceptional importance to the nation’s heritage. Located beside what was once the King’s Highway, it includes, within a quarter-mile radius, homes that served as permanent or temporary residences to renowned figures ranging from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to Albert Einstein. At one end is Frog Hollow, site of an important engagement in the pivotal Revolutionary War Battle of Princeton in 1777. A former farmhouse nearby stood witness to that battle; it was also the family home, pre-Morven, of Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
The neighborhood’s streets include numerous significant examples of early domestic architecture, including several built in the mid-1830s by the celebrated designer Charles Steadman. Generations of civic-minded Princetonians have maintained scrupulous stewardship of the area, obtaining historical registry listings and historic neighborhood designations, safeguarding what the town has regarded as one of its irreplaceable treasures.
Now, evidently, that stewardship is to be repudiated. A private developer has gained official approval to construct a massive high-end complex of 238 rental units and town houses in the heart of the neighborhood that will obliterate its historic character. The structures will reach potentially as high as 70 feet, dwarfing and shrouding homes built to modest 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century scale. Its massive bulk will encroach badly, reaching within two feet of one of the neighborhood’s historic buildings, designed by another master architect, Rolf Bauhan. An underground garage for hundreds of vehicles will present untold problems ranging from traffic congestion and pollution to obstruction of groundwater and flooding. Centuries-old foundations will be imperiled. Numerous matchless old trees will be bulldozed.
An alternate proposal for the site, on a scale and density appropriate to the district and consisting of 100 percent affordable housing — thereby offering far more low-income residences than the current project’s minimal 20 percent state mandate — has been dismissed by the responsible local authority. Objections to the project including citizens’ testimony at public hearings — arbitrarily limited to three minutes each — have met with hostile, even threatening responses from local officials as well as ugly false insinuations about the critics’ motives. Pretexts for the project have fluctuated wildly under criticism, from puffery about the supposed “walkability” of the proposed complex to dubious assertions about expanding the numbers of “missing middle” income residents.
Instead of advancing development with a balanced appreciation of Princeton’s historic distinction, a combination of private profit-driven development and secretive municipal complicity is about to complete an irreparable act of vandalism. Brutal lessons from decades ago — the destruction of the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City, for example — go unheeded.
Having protected the Princeton Battlefield, the time has come for concerned Americans, not just Princetonians, to express their concern about this latest threatened heedless spoilation and for public officials — local, state, and federal — to act.