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Vol. LXI, No. 40
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Wednesday, October 3, 2007
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Vol. LXI, No. 40
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Wednesday, October 3, 2007
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 (Photo by George Vogel)
MASTER MOVES: Chess master Jon Crumiller takes on a host of challengers Saturday at the Princeton Public Library’s Chess Day 6 on Albert E. Hinds Community Plaza. Mr.Crumiller began the day with a lecture on “Chess Eccentricities” in the library’s Community Room. |
The dark blue bricks on the rotunda of the Arts Council of Princeton’s new building are a sign that the end is in sight. But Jeff Nathanson, who joined the Arts Council as Executive Director in May 2005, continues to be as busy as ever.
Princeton Borough Council last week voted to continue negotiating in closed session with the developer contracted in the municipal downtown development project, amid increasing concerns that a handful of sticking points between the two parties would be better aired in public than behind closed doors.
In August, when a prominent Princeton area architect approached Princeton Township’s governing body with a proposal to rezone the area to meet the current market needs for senior housing, it sparked the most recent chapter in a decade-long discussion over the viability of developing one of the most environmentally sensitive areas in the Princeton Ridge.
On Princeton University’s Firestone Plaza last Tuesday, the chard, broccoli, bok choi, and other assorted locally grown produce being sold by local merchants, suggested the ambience of a French market square, as hundreds of local folks roamed around, talking to organic gardening enthusiasts, supporting local business, and taking in a crisp early fall day.
The Regional Planning Board of Princeton last Thursday came ever closer to completing its six-month, state-mandated review of the Princeton Community Master Plan, and while the review of the philosophical document is nearly complete, some planners acknowledged that there will need to be continued review, even after a revised document is endorsed.
All shops in the Borough’s Palmer Square, the so-called Fifth Avenue of Princeton, will host their own trunk shows as well as their own special promotion as part of the Palmer Square Fashion Week, October 8 through 14. And while the event’s tagline, “a week of style on the Square in Downtown Princeton” may be easily applied to all of Palmer Square’s shops, the theme, focusing on career, weekend, and evening styles, is getting some shop owners to think creatively, as well as giving them an opportunity to strut their stuff.
Kevin Kelleher will be the first to tell you that the Princeton University football team’s defense was not at its suffocating best last Saturday against Columbia.
Maura Giordano of the Hun School girls’ tennis team had reason to be concerned after the first set of the second doubles final last Wednesday at the Mercer County Tournament.
In the early stages of its game last Saturday against Philadelphia-area power Penn Charter, the Hun School football was starting to get some bad feelings of deja vu.
A friend traveling in India once wrote to me that I would need “500,000 tons of pure and indifferent love of humanity” if I hoped to survive that country. During the six months I spent there, his advice seemed to work for me, if only as a sort of subliminal code opening the way to a supremely positive experience. It didn’t work so well during scenes like the one at Mughal Sarai, a railway junction in Uttar Pradesh where my feelings became the opposite of pure and indifferent. Love’s got nothing to do with it when “humanity” is a crazed mob rioting for places on too few third-class carriages on a train bound for the holy city of Benares.
The first concert of an ensemble’s new season always brings excitement to the concert hall. The players exhibit a fresh approach to the music after a summer off, and audiences wonder if there will be a new twist to the season’s concerts. For the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, which opened its 2007-08 season Sunday afternoon in Richardson Auditorium, the new concert year began with an aura of surprise and a bit of unsettledness, as the orchestra began its first year without long-time conductor Mark Laycock. The ensemble will present its five-concert classical series this year with guest conductors, from which may well be chosen the orchestra’s next music director.
Steve Hiltner struggles with the term “natural.” As the Natural Resources Manager for Friends of Princeton Open Space (FOPOS) since 2005, he has pondered the term that, he said, many people mistakenly equate with “green.” Those healthy looking green plants may well be non-native invasive species that do little good for local birds, insects, and other wildlife. A casual observer may mistake for “natural” a declining marshland strangled by the rampant giant reed, phragmites. “I could name 30 different invasive species that have been introduced by human beings,” he said. “They present an immense challenge. Japanese Stilt Grass, for example, is an annual that benefits no wildlife, is in every square foot of our preserves taking up valuable space that could be occupied by a native species that feeds birds, insects, and other animals.”