December 11, 2004
Princeton Future Witherspoon Street Corridor Study #3
Central Workshop

Present: Shirley Satterfield, Judson Carter, Eric Craig, Minnie Craig, Jay Craig,  Fannie Floyd, Jim Floyd, Marta Karamuz, Scott Sillars, Rodney Fisk, Leigh Peterson, Michael Floyd, Matthew Hersh, Francesca Benson, Gerge Cody, Wanda Gunning, Hendricks Davis, Heidi Fichtenbaum, Antonio Reinero, Andrés Reinero, Marvin Reed, Jeff Furey, Joanna Kendig, Jamie Laliberte, Holly Nelson, Michael Mostoller, Sheldon Sturges, Dennis Stark, Jan Bishop, Fay Abelson, Robert Stern, Jennifer Potash, Yina Moore, Alan Good heart, Kevin Wilkes, Susan Jeffries, Pam Hersh, Sanford Zeitler, Saman Hamati [PTO of Community Park], Nancy McMorris, Gail Ullman, Gene Imhoff

Wilkes Table

YAM: We want to make sure that we capture as many of your ideas as possible.

SBS: Try to make the tape players work so that each person in the room understands that he or she is being heard so we can pick up as many verbatims as possible…to minimize the interpretation. It is very important that listening take place.

KW: Good morning everybody. Let me just introduce everybody: Martha, Heidi, Susan, Wanda, Matthew, Gail, Jim, Andrej, Kevin & Alice.
____: Michael Mostoller mentioned the existing zoning map. I think the history of the zoning is so complicated…that at this table we ought to skip that and focus on what we want to see happen on the street in the future. We can worry about fixing the zoning later.

Susan Hockaday: Good.

KW: We might start briefly, as we did last time with a discussion of the history of the Central Witherspoon area. Jim had some comments last week about the community gardens in the upper section of W’spoon. Wanda..Jim.. the character…feelings..literal history of those 3 or 4 blocks. Yes…today is the central section of the street: From the burgeoning Packet complex, North of Henry, past Birch, the hospital, Molisano’s, down past Clay to Lytle, Franklin, Witherspoon Lane, to Cemetery. I think shouldn’t specifically chew the hospital issue. Specifically: How can we envision Witherspoon St?

Wanda Gunning: Witherspoon St was the dividing line between 2 estates that were owned by Thomas Leonard in the 18th c. Leonard came to Princeton about 1710. He married the widow of the first Richard Stockton. He acquired all of the Stockton 5000 acreage and distributed to their children and kept some for himself. He was the biggest single, financial land donor to the university. He died about the time the university opened. His 25 heirs dissipated his fortune. Many of them went to debtor’s prison. Leonard was a major figure in NJ politics. He owned land all over the place. The land went through a number of owners when Leonard died just before the Revolution. The part that was Mansgrove House, which still stands, was owned by John Witherspoon at one point. His widow lost it in the courts. Constant challenges to the title. Eventually someone picked up the land up to about Clay St and it become a development known as the Ferguson Tract in the 19th c. Josiah Ferguson. He sold off parts of it for very modest houses. Thos. Wiggins, who was the town doctor, lived where we are sitting. He had picked up most of the rest of the street and left it to the Presbyterian Church when he died as a Cemetery for the Church and for the Town.  There were cow lots developed along either side of the street. In fact the cemetery is now, there were also houses. Some were modest. Some were larger. It was a neighborhood in which both free African Americans and Whites settled. It was also receiving immigrants. It was fairly inexpensive land. It always had some title problems. When you get down to the section we are talking about today, where the hospital is, there was a smallish farm, carved out of this much bigger tract. James Carnahan lived there when he retired as President of the University in the 1850’s. It became the Pearson Dairy Farm. And was eventually acquired by Moses Tyler Pyne as the site for the hospital. On the other side of the street, there were stock farms and slaughter yards.  People complained that when you were putting flowers on the graves in the cemetery you could smell the slaughter yards. At the time Birch & Leigh were made, indeed Leigh was the last owner of a slaughter house. In the 1920’s, houses were interspersed with the slaughter houses on Birch & Leigh. The land on this side was acquired by Walter Harris. He was a professor of Architecture at the university.