Richard Moody of West Windsor
What am I missing? The Route 571 corridor in Princeton Junction between Alexander and Cranbury Roads is a disgrace, an embarassment and an eyesore and is in drastic need of a clean up. Yet the West Windsor Township is spending thousands of dollars and threatening to build a mindless and artificial transit tillage with it’s inherent congestion, traffic pollution, parking nightmares and school overcrowding.
A certain member of the House of Windsor might well say, as he once said of another blot on the landscape, “The Corridor is a Carbunkle on the Behind of Humanity”. As the focal point of the Junction, the Corridor needs a makeover and a massive change of character before development action is considered elsewhere in the community. West Windsor has a number of delightful Parks. Why can’t the planners do the same for the Corridor as they’ve achieved with our open spaces?
Where are the winding pathways, the bubbling fountains, the riotous flower beds, the quaint bistros and the seductive boutiques along the so called Main Street of the Junction? Instead, we have a mediocre supermarket, a take out bagelry, a so-so pizza parlor, a garish nail salon, an “always empty in the evening” Indian restaurant – and three gas stations, three realtors and four — soon to be five — banks, all within the space of one half mile.
One gas station, at Alexander, should be demolished immediately and all the ugly store frontages torn down, re-designed and re-built. The fifth bank will soon destroy the tranquility of bucolic Sherbrook Estates. Sherbrook, where birds sing, joggers jog, walkers walk, dogs sniff and children play – but not for long. Soon traffic will snarl, cars will speed and pollute and child safety will diminish.
Ah – I hear you say. But the the blight that is the old Getty station and the Chicken Holiday strip is soon to be razed. To be replaced – you guessed it – by a chain Drug Store and the ubiquitous Starbucks with it’s cookie cutter style and lack of ambiance. Why, oh why, I ask, wasn’t the “Sun Bank” building turned into the attractive restaurant we so urgently need when that lot became available? It has ample parking, cathedral ceilings, spacious windows but it was not to be and it’s too late now. Main Street, once alongside waving corn fields, is now a bank farm polluted by gas stations, leased by realtors.
Please, please, West Windsor. Come to your senses and clean up the corridor first. Although there is little to show for 200 years of history, all is not lost although time is short. Drop any thoughts of a Transit Village and put some charm into Bank City’s Main Street before bumper to bumper back ups in the corridor become even more intolerable, pedestrians go in fear of their lives and the tagline, “Tree City”, is a thing of the past.
Did I also hear someone shout “And what about those overhead wires?” But that, surely, would be asking too much.
Richard Moody
Norchester Drive
West Windsor

