By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The Princeton Regional Chamber of Commerce made a formal pitch to the Princeton Council Monday to upgrade the two kiosk message boards on Nassau Street.
The chamber is interested in having cleaner, more organized boards that limit the unregulated use of the boards as they are today where people can post what they want as many times as they want at the two kiosks at Nassau and Witherspoon streets and Nassau and Vandeventer Avenue.
The organization, working on the project for 12 months as it gathered input, is seeking to lease the kiosks from the town and then manage them. Officials made no decision this week.
Chamber President and CEO Peter Crowley told council members the kiosks would include a mix of advertising, maps, local transportation and other information. He said the kiosks, in their current incarnation, “have become a somewhat disorganized, very cluttered, almost I’ll call it non-information, information.
”And very often, it’s the person who can put up the most paper or the person who can put up the biggest colored sign that gets visibility.”
In documents the organization disseminated, the chamber said “at least” two “corkboard” panels would be available for the public at the kiosk at Nassau and Vandeventer, in front of the movie theater.
But on Thursday, Mr. Crowley said: “Based on the feedback from the Borough Council we are working with a design that allows community visibility on both kiosks with an upgraded corkboard approach so flyers could be posted more easily.”
There would be rules, such as a set size for anything that goes up, and paid advertising.
”If we cannot sell, if for some reason, we do all this investment and nobody wants to be up there, nobody wants to have their visibility, then we would actually go to a larger opportunity, which would be a more national company,” Mr.Crowley said. “It’s not my goal. It’s not where I think we’re going to have to go. But I don’t want to have blank panels up there.”
The kiosks, erected in the 1980s, serve other purposes. The Nassau and Witherspoon kiosk has “electric panels and services in it. These are the timers for all of the lights on Nassau as well as the kiosk,” Princeton administrator Robert W. Bruschi said in an email Thursday. The other holds equipment that a local man uses to clean in front of stores, he said.
Though town property, the kiosks are located in a least one historic district, officials said this week. That means state and local historic boards would need to review any changes.
Officials held off making a decision about the chamber’s proposal, wanting first to see what changes will be happening to both those intersections. Yet officials said there appeared to be little support for it.
For her part, Councilwoman Jenny Crumiller, the most vocal critic, said Wednesday that she felt the proposed kiosks shown in a mockup at the meeting looked “too corporate” and “too mall-like.”

