The Stockton Street development will eradicate the historic and bucolic character of Princeton’s oldest residential neighborhood and will destroy the municipality’s overall sense of place, carefully nurtured over the centuries, safeguarded by generation after generation.  This is not a neighborhood characterized by mansions and stately homes. Most are two-floor clapboard houses; modest in scale and unassuming in their 18th and 19th century facades.​ Edgehill Street, which abuts the proposed development, is Princeton's oldest recorded street and almost entirely comprised of modest, two-story clapboard houses.

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The neighborhood's treasures and vulnerabilities

The neighborhood most directly affected is the Mercer Hill Historic District and its adjacent streets. Apart from the university, Princeton is chiefly distinguished by its historic neighborhoods and districts, including the historically important Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood, the Bank Street district, Jugtown, Mercer Hill and more. Each neighborhood is distinct but together they give Princeton its unique multifaceted historical character, which in turn, along with the university, gives the municipality its prestige. Each is an indispensable element of the larger community. An injury to one is an injury to all, as well as to the municipality at large.

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​​​​​​The neighborhood adjacent to the proposed Stockton Street development has particular treasures and vulnerabilities. Like the site of the proposed development, it lies entirely within the Princeton Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. Highlights include The Barracks (32 Edgehill Street), parts of which date to the mid-1680s and the temporary residence of both James Madison and Alexander Hamilton when Princeton served as the new nation’s capital in 1783; the Albert Einstein Residence (112 Mercer Street), built in 1840 and home to the great scientist during his tenure at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1935 to 1955; and the Walter Lowrie House, built in 1845-48, now the official residence of the president of Princeton University. Important historical sites include Morven, the Richard Stockton estate; Frog Hollow, site of a key engagement in the battle of Princeton in 1777; and the adjoining Marquand Park, a first-class arboretum dating to 1846 and Princeton’s grandest public open space.

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Edgehill Street was also a socially integrated neighborhood as far back as the mid-1800s, a fact that may be unknown, adding to its historic value. In 1853, a 32-year-old African American named James Lake bought 13 Edgehill Street where he lived with his wife and three children -- a workingman homeowner, not crammed into a luxury complex but part of a polyglot community with a few well-to-do residents and plenty of tradesmen and artisans and their families and a writer or two.  Across the street, the Freeman family, also African American, rented 10 Edgehill Street, and somewhat later, on lower Edgehill, lived Martha Vanzandt, yet another African American, and her white husband Wayman Vanzant, whose daughter Margaret would grow to become the organist at the Witherspoon Street Church. Those small town days are gone, but the spirit of that community can be updated to our own time, if we have the will to do it. It is a spirit repudiated by an affluent megalith containing a minimum of affordable units as required by law. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​These highlights barely convey the neighborhood’s historical significance. On tree-lined, one-block Edgehill Street alone, of the 14 residences adversely affected by the Stockton Street project, 11 are either Greek Revival or vernacular-style homes built prior to 1852, including five dating from 1830-1840 and one, The Barracks, dating to the 1680s. (The most recent, built in 1923, is a two-story reproduction of surrounding vernacular residences with Greek Revival styling.) Five of the houses were built or likely built by the renowned Princeton vernacular architect Charles Steadman or else stand on property that Steadman owned.

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In a different historical vein, on Hibben Road -- laid out in 1919-1920, with a dense canopy of trees – of the six residences adversely affected, all but one was built between ca. 1920 and 1927, the exception dating from ca. 1880.

 

Finally, on Mercer Street between Edgehill and Hibben, stand 11 residences that will be adversely affected, two of which were built in or around 1840, along with at least two built before 1852. All belong to the Mercer Hill Historic District.

 

Endangered history, negligent Council

As far as we know, neither the Municipal Council nor the developer has undertaken any study of the impact the Stockton Street project would have on the surrounding neighborhood. This includes not just the environmental and traffic problems, not just the transformation wrought by a massive complex in a historic residential district, but the effects simply of building the project. Along Edgehill and Mercer Streets in particular, there are residences whose foundations date back nearly two hundred years and in at least one case much earlier. Residents have been provided with no study of how the construction of the Stockton Street project could affect these fragile structures. As far as we know, no such study had been contemplated, let alone conducted. If it has, it is imperative that not just the residents but the entire municipality be provided with the results for each residence in detail. If it has not, it ought to be undertaken soon, lest further and even worse destruction follows.

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The negligence of our public officials, and especially members of the Municipal Council, on the project’s effects on historic buildings and cites is not surprising, given their role in awarding the ANR designation and the developer’s PILOT. But the Princeton Council has also displayed an indifference that borders on hostility toward the area’s historical importance and redevelopment’s threats to it.

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For example, in 2019, a subcommittee of the Municipality’s own Historic Preservation Commission expressed strong concerns about how redevelopment plans then under consideration might severely impact the neighborhood, in violation of the HPC’s charge to protect Princeton’s historical character. Councilman David E. Cohen, then chair of the Council’s sub-committee on the site’s redevelopment, replied legalistically that while “historic preservation concerns certainly come into play,” the site, which was now under the ANR designation, “is not governed by any binding preservation plan;” that neither state nor local historical districting that reached right up to proposed setback lines applied, and that “The National Register’s Princeton Historic District recommends but does not mandate any standards for preservation.” Historic preservation – and the Historic Preservation Committee -- be damned: So long as there’s a legal out, the Council sides with the developer. Indeed, having pushed for the ANR designation and then granted it, Councilman Cohen and his colleagues helped ensure that, whatever his blandishments, historic preservation concerns regarding this site would count for nothing.