New decade, new campus: The Arts and Transit Neighborhood

“I don’t know if I would call it a setback yet, but the slow pace of approvals for the arts district is certainly discouraging and disappointing,” University Vice President for Facilities Michael McKay said.

The University’s goal is to create a new entrance to campus and a hub for the arts, while streamlining traffic flow in the area with roundabouts and traffic lights. The current design includes an “arts plaza,” which would be across the street from Forbes College and surrounded on three sides by new arts facilities. The Dinky and Wawa would move south as part of a “transit plaza.”

The arts and transit project became “complicated” when the University made improving traffic flow in the area an objective of the plan, University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee ’69 said. Princeton residents have in particular objected to moving the Dinky station further away from most residential areas in the town.

Debate in the past six months over a plan to replace the Dinky entirely with a Bus Rapid Transit system only further complicated the issue, Durkee said. Since the Princeton Regional Planning Board’s rejection of the plan on Dec. 9 ended that controversy, Durkee said he hopes to once again bring the University’s plans for the area before Princeton Borough and Princeton Township authorities by the end of January to request that the area be rezoned for construction.

Durkee explained the University has the legal right to move the Dinky station, citing the University’s contract with New Jersey Transit to provide parking for Dinky riders.

“Under the contract, we’re obligated to provide a certain number of spaces ... within a certain distance of the station,” he said. “But also under the contract, we have the right to adjust the terminus of the train.” He added that the station has been moved before, at New Jersey Transit’s initiative. “Under the contract, we could do that,” he said.

But Lee Solow, planning director of the Princeton Planning Board, pointed out that the University will not move the Dinky unilaterally.

“I don’t know whether they have the legal right; I’m not a lawyer,” he said. “But I don’t think they’re moving the Dinky without having the zoning in place for the arts district.”

Both Durkee and Solow said the Dinky’s location has been a sticking point in talks with zoning authorities. Though Solow said “concerns with the size and location” of the proposed buildings have been raised, he added that the University was making progress toward addressing them.

After the plan gets zoning approval, Durkee said, it, like all University construction, must go before the planning board, which has authority over both the Township and Borough, for final approval. Solow said the Borough Council and Township Committee are working toward scheduling a joint meeting to discuss the plan.

Transforming the arts at Princeton

If the plan is approved, the buildings in the proposed neighborhood, along with existing facilities like 185 Nassau Street and Woolworth Hall, will “infuse the campus with arts activity,” Executive Vice President Mark Burstein ’83 said.

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“In some ways it’s a different way of thinking about an academic enterprise than what the campus plan talks about for other academic endeavors, which are neighborhoods,” he explained.

The Lewis Center for the Arts started this process by moving its creative writing program into a newly renovated New South Building this semester, which now also contains some theater and dance space. The center hopes to move its performance arts programs to the arts district, while the visual arts program will remain at 185 Nassau Street.

Still, some within the arts community on campus are skeptical. Lewis Center visual arts professor P. Adams Sitney said he sees the new facilities as financially motivated.

“Universities raise money by approaching donors with big projects, and donors like to build buildings more than they like to just give money to existing programs,” he said. “So almost all universities have to constantly be putting up grand things.”

Sitney added that in his view artists tend to flourish when given “pure, raw space ... space that doesn’t have the responsibility of someone’s name on it, where you can tack things on the wall or knock out part of the wall.”

But theater professor Jill Dolan said this type of view is too dogmatic. “That sense that art really only happens in dirty, divey, bombed-out places where people get inspired, I think, is a little bit romantic,” she explained.

The Arts and Transit Neighborhood is meant to bring the University and surrounding community closer together, but it may end up as a casualty of divergent visions for the area.