Writings
“Will you think me ill bred if I talk of the town in which I live? What else have you left me to talk of?” after F. W. Maitland · 1898
The more you look, the more you see. Is that a racetrack? A casino on campus? A slaughterhouse? Did the Dinky really ride into town? Did a pond really drain a brook past my house? What is that asylum on the edge of town? Where is the Jackson of Witherspoon-Jackson?
Princeton is maddening, and also fascinating. It has changed, of course, since its founding in c. 1696, particularly in the Gilded Age of 1885–1920 when mansions and polo grounds and gothic campus were built. But there has always been a healthy population of shopkeepers, firemen, school teachers, service workers — regular people who live in modest houses with front porches. This site is meant to prompt curiosity about the forces that have directed the evolution of our town, and to invite engagement in shaping its future.
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In preparation
Harry’s Brook and Vandeventer Pond
A brook that still runs and a pond that no longer does — reading water through the surveys, and what a town does with the low ground.
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In preparation
Mount Lucas: the Asylum, the Township Poor House, and Goldman Sachs
One parcel, three institutions, a century apart. How care, poverty, and capital have each in turn claimed the same corner of the map.
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In preparation
The Princeton Racetrack
There was a track out here once. The documentary record is thin to vanishing — this is as much an appeal for sources as an essay.
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In preparation
Merwick and Stanworth
An estate, a hospital, faculty housing, and what comes next — a single site as a ledger of the university’s changing needs.
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In preparation
The Baseball Stadium behind the 7-Eleven
Grandstands you would never guess were there. Finding the diamond under the parking and the strip in the aerial record.
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In preparation
The Slaughterhouse across from Loco
Stables, stockyards, and slaughterhouses litter this town. We think of the rural Township “out there” but it was right outside the border, where we now drop our kids off to CP.
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In preparation
Engine No. 1 on Chestnut
If ever you have voted in the firehouse, you see a rich history. But that history dates back way before photography.
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In preparation
The Fates of Westminster Choir College
What was this land and what does it want to be?
Why “Township and Borough”
Some years ago I came across F. W. Maitland’s 1898 treatise Township and Borough in a bookshop in Cambridge. At the time I thought “huh, my town also has a Township and a Borough.” I didn’t think much of it until the fight over merging Princeton’s Township with its Borough in 2013. It is interesting to watch that today, thirteen years later, we are still wrestling with the merged zoning of the Borough with that of the Township. At one end of Moore Street one set of rules applies; at the far end, a different set. Where does this concept come from?
The Borough, as applied to Cambridge, is a term dating back to the Domesday Book of 1086, and long before that to a Proto-Indo-European word, bhergh-, a high hill. Township came much later, and referred to the extensive farmland beyond the Borough. Maitland’s study was of how the town of Cambridge came to claim ownership, and legal control, of the Township after King John granted the Borough rights over it in 1199, and the inclosure act of 1807.
Perhaps it is not shocking, since bona fide Tories hid out in the Pine Barrens after the revolution, that when it came time to map New Jersey, rural areas were divided into Townships (c. 1750), and the Borough of Princeton was incorporated in 1813. And perhaps also not shocking that the hottest topics in town hinge on the rights the municipal corporation has to condemn and repurpose land within its borders. What I am getting to is that the very conception of the place we live is shaped by words and arguments that far pre-date any of us. By surfacing this context, we can shape a municipality that works for all of us.