PACKET EDITORIAL, Oct. 11
By: Packet Editorial, Oct. 11
Back in January, when the trustees of Princeton HealthCare System voted to relocate the University Medical Center at Princeton from Witherspoon Street to an unspecified site within two to five miles of downtown Princeton, they said they expected to announce the new location sometime in the spring.
Then spring turned to summer. Now summer has turned to fall. And still no announcement.
Last year, Princeton Borough and Nassau HKT proudly proclaimed that Witherspoon House, the mixed-use building fronting on the new plaza next to the Princeton Public Library, would be ready for occupancy in the fall.
Then fall turned to winter. Then winter turned to spring. By the time the first residents moved in, it was May.
But the borough and the developer had good news to report: The two ground-floor tenants at Witherspoon House, Jack Morrison’s new Witherspoon Grill and the upscale clothing and cosmetics boutique Rouge, would move in by July.
Then July turned to August. Then August turned to September. Now September has turned to October. And still the ground floor sits vacant.
The hospital’s relocation is, of course, a rather complicated deal, involving both the sale of the Witherspoon Street site and the purchase of a big (read: expensive) piece of property in a nearby municipality. There’s potential neighborhood opposition to consider, not to mention zoning and planning boards that will need to be satisfied and everything is predicated on getting state approval for the move. So perhaps the expectation that a new site would be identified in a matter of a few months was unrealistic.
And the Witherspoon House project is, of course, a public-private partnership with the word public, as everyone knows, being a code word for delay. Although the private side of this partnership allows certain obstacles (like awarding every aspect of the job to the lowest responsible bidder) to be circumvented, it’s a fundamental principle of construction that any project involving a public agency will face delays, while a project commissioned by a private entity with deep pockets will invariably come in on time. (For testimony to this principle, just ask the Princeton Regional Schools on the one hand and Princeton University on the other.)
But delays in major projects at least on non-university lands in Princeton are by no means limited to nonprofits like the hospital or public-private partnerships like the downtown redevelopment project. These projects have been delayed by mere months. We remember getting a phone call from a prospective bride asking if we thought the expansion of the Nassau Inn would be done in time for her wedding a year later. That was in 1999.
The granddaddy of delayed projects has to be Hulfish North, the plan by Palmer Square Management to build 140 residential units. That plan was approved in 1990 but the units were never built. Thirteen years later, Palmer Square Management entered into an agreement with Princeton Borough to build between 97 and 100 luxury units on the site. 2003 has since turned to 2004, and 2004 to 2005, with 2006 just around the corner and still the ugliest piece of real estate in downtown Princeton, an unfinished garage surrounded by a rusting chain link fence on Paul Robeson Place, lies fallow.
There are no doubt a host of valid reasons why even the best-laid of these plans have gone astray or, in the case of the Nassau Inn and Hulfish North, gone nowhere at all. But wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, a project planned for somewhere in Princeton other than the university campus actually came in on time?