29a1f247a3cd9c4f334d8c8ca7074822.jpg

PRINCETON: Princeton Future takes on a mission defined by its name

By Lauren Otis, Staff Writer
   On a Sunday afternoon in late-November in 1985, a well-attended panel discussion sponsored by the Princeton Friends of Thirteen (WNET) on the future of Princeton took place in town.
   Robert Geddes, former dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University, was on the panel and Sheldon Sturges, president of Sturges Publishing Group, was in the audience.
   The forum made an impression on both Mr. Geddes and Mr. Sturges, planting in them the notion that, as a unique community, the changing nature of Princeton needed to be studied and perhaps guided. It would take 15 years before Mr. Geddes and Mr. Sturges acting on this notion along with former Princeton University President Robert Goheen founded the nonprofit organization Princeton Future in January 2000, the dawn of a new millennium appropriately enough.
   ”Princeton Future started in January 2000,” Mr. Sturges said. “Bob Geddes, Bob Goheen and I met and then we had a series of small meetings, some with community leaders some with architects, and then spent that spring writing a case statement, and we sent the case statement to the two governments and to the university asking for support,” he said.
   ”When we started, we started mostly to get civic conversation, to define problems,” said Mr. Geddes. Having identified five zones in town worth focusing on along with the university — schematically represented in the Princeton Future logo Mr. Geddes designed — the organization began to conduct its signature community forums, seeking to identify consensus solutions to the growing pains Princeton was experiencing.
   ”We were as concerned, are as concerned, with preservation, conservation, as well as with development. The two are connected,” Mr. Geddes said.
   ”Princeton future tries to identify an area, notify neighbors, get them to come to meetings, listen to what people are saying — on a what if this happens, what if that happens basis — and then take those findings and digest them and make a presentation to the Planning Board of a point of view,” Mr. Sturges said.
   ”We have made an effort to invite all, and to record what each person said, and the particular focus is on those that aren’t normally heard,” said Mr. Sturges.
   ”It serves kind of a unique function in the community in trying to think ahead and engage citizens of all sorts,” said Peter Kann, former chairman and CEO of Dow Jones Inc. Princeton Future “is necessary in Princeton because we have an odd situation here of two communities and one political party. In a more normal community you would have one community and two political parties,” Mr. Kann said. With no opposition party, sometimes important issues are not raised in the Princeton community, which Princeton Future has helped get raised, he said.
   ”I think the benefits of Princeton Future are the benefits of having a non-political group look at where the town is going,” said Nicholas Katzenbach, a senior member of both the Kennedy and Johnson presidential administrations, who has served as honorary council to Princeton Future. “It’s just a good idea to have more public participation and present differing views,” in the areas of zoning and planning, Mr. Katzenbach said.
   ”My own view is the most useful role for Princeton Future to play is that kind of facilitating role,” said Robert Durkee, Princeton University vice president and secretary. Mr. Durkee, an active early participant in Princeton Future who continues to regularly attend the group’s meetings, specifically cited the benefit of discussions Princeton Future sponsored on the future of the Merwick and Stanworth properties, and the two Princeton Ys. Princeton Future brought all of the stakeholders in the community together, and helped them define collective goals and aspirations for the properties, Mr. Durkee said.
   Since its inception, Princeton Future has already had a hand in framing not only the debate over what kind of future community Princetonians want for themselves — walkable, uncongested, racially, culturally, and economically diverse — but also the actual physical form that community takes. Perhaps the organization’s biggest legacy to date is the popular new Princeton Public Library, with its well-used outdoor plaza and adjacent mixed-used retail, residential and parking building.
   ”Princeton Future really did play a major role in getting that established, in getting a really attractive and usable public space,” said Mr. Kann,
   ”I realize that if Princeton Future hadn’t existed, that space wouldn’t exist,” said Katherine Kish, president of Cranbury-based Market Entry Inc., of the library plaza, officially named Albert E. Hinds Community Plaza. “The library was resistant, they didn’t want it at first. Look at how important that space is to the library now,” said Ms. Kish, who got involved with Princeton Future to add a business voice to the organization.
   ”Business is another neighborhood that overlays all of this,” she said, adding “if you want to have a good neighborhood you’ve got to have business as a contented citizen.”
   Original plans for the library site included no public plaza and a monolithic parking garage structure with no housing or retail space, Mr. Geddes said. Princeton Future sought public input on the subject, and obtained a consensus that a public square and a hybrid parking/housing/retail building was worthwhile, he said.
   ”We suggested that there be a public square, and there be a walkway here and a walkway there,” Mr. Geddes said. Perhaps most important was the suggestion of the hybrid parking structure, he said. “We suggested that instead of going with a single purpose building, garage or an office building, you build a hybrid, we build a building which is in plan a garage and residential,” he said.
   ”From the point of view of the square it looks like an apartment house, but in fact it’s a garage you can get into from both ends. That hybrid building was the trick to the whole thing,” Mr. Geddes said.
   ”It was a fight to keep the square big, and a fight to put ground-floor retail, and a fight to keep affordable units in that building,” Mr. Sturges said. Now the library redevelopment downtown is widely admired, even by those who initially opposed it, he and Mr. Geddes said.
   Princeton Future has also used its unaffiliated nature to act as a community mediator, most specifically when it successfully helped smooth over opposition by the John-Witherspoon community to the expansion of the Arts Council of Princeton building, Mr. Geddes and Mr. Sturges said. Incursions into that historically African-American community in the past in the name of urban renewal made the expansion particularly sensitive to the community, they said.
   ”The initial proposals for the Arts Council were for a very large expansion which ran into community opposition,” said Mr. Geddes. “So we established really a negotiating committee, Nick Katzenbach headed it up, where reconciliation was sought between the community and the Arts Council,” he said. Ultimately, a scaled down building was designed and constructed, he said.
   ”The people in the community had felt they had been listened to,” Mr. Katzenbach said.
   Princeton Future still does not have a physical home, and Mr. Sturges, who is the organization’s managing director, said he is paid a stipend irregularly. However, the organization continues to pursue an ambitious agenda, attempting most recently to gather input on the question of whether certain of Princeton’s challenges — traffic and transportation, housing and building, and commercial prosperity and downtown viability — could be better addressed through an independent authority, whether a public authority, improvement district or development corporation.
   The group continues to solicit input on the question of municipal consolidation of Princeton Borough and Township, and to seek ways for the university and municipalities to work together.
   ”Where we are at the moment, with the university doing its campus plan, which is a district plan, the fact that there is no downtown district plan, there is a lack of synchronism, a lack of symmetry, a lack of coherence between the campus plan and the downtown plan,” Mr. Geddes said.
   The relationship of Princeton to the university, and the idea that the downtown planning process be a “two-way conversation” between the communities and the university, is of primary concern to Princeton Future, Mr. Sturges said.
   ”We have one-half the town, the university, that is doing what it is supposed to do, it is growing spectacularly, its buildings are beautiful, it is spending a great deal of money, and what that does to the other half of the town is put pressure on prices,” Mr. Sturges said.
   ”So what happens is that there is a pressure to keep the population of the borough in particular as mixed as it now is. Rich and poor more or less live quite happily in the Borough of Princeton in ways that are quite unusual in America, and it would be great if we could figure out how to allow that to continue,” he said.
   ”One of our goals is to make this the best college town in the world,” Mr. Sturges said.