Kathleen Cherry of Princeton
Valley Road School is an important piece of history that we should cherish. The children who attended Valley Road School as I did, from grades one through eight, lived through a lot of history. Princeton was the center of many of the greatest technological developments around the world in the ‘50s and ‘60s. My parents, as others, were a direct part of this – my dad at RCA Labs where the color TV was invented, my mom at an early survey firm that saw the dawn of opinion research. We kids at Valley Road School labored on, trying to match up to the important things we had some vague idea that our parents were doing. And we coped and adjusted as RCA started to go on the skids in the 1960s and new developments happened locally and around the world.
There is no doubt that Valley Road School is in need of rehabilitation and may not serve the purposes of the school board optimally. However, renovation or adaptive reuse can be particularly cost-effective, when you factor in the value of the building to the community.
It seems to me that the corner of Valley and Witherspoon streets would make an excellent location for senior housing. There are many examples of school buildings being converted to highly-valued apartments or condos. Waxwood is a great example right here in Princeton. Another is the School House Apartments in Mechanicsburg, Pa., where my husband and I lived in a wonderful, large-windowed apartment for five years. The School House Apartments is a converted high school that had even been condemned as structurally unsound, a problem that presumably Valley Road School doesn’t have.
To improve the cost efficiency of adaptive reuse, we might consider adding a new wing containing additional units. As tremendously important as the Battle of Princeton was to our nation and the world, everything that is important about Princeton is not related to the American Revolution or Einstein. What happened during the “heydey” of Valley Road School in the ‘50s and ‘60s is also tremendously important to understanding who we are as a town.
Kathleen Cherry
Princeton

