PRINCETON: Society to appeal IAS decision

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The Institute for Advanced Study will have to win in court if it wants to build faculty housing, as the Princeton Battlefield Society vowed Friday to press its legal fight to stop the project on part of the Revolutionary War battleground land owned by the institute.
The latest in the running saga came in the wee hours of Friday morning, when the Princeton Planning Board voted, 6-0, to permit the institute to shrink the lot sizes of a project consisting of eight townhouses and seven single-family residences.
The approval, coming after a nearly five-hour-hearing, was necessary for the institute to avoid encroaching in a stream corridor that the Delaware & Raritan Canal Commission governs. The commission had rejected the project, as previously designed, in January.
“One of the defining characteristics of the Institute for Advanced Study is its residential nature, where faculty and visiting scholars from all over the world are encouraged to think and share,” said institute director Robbert Dijkgraaf in a news release Friday. “This plan enables us to maintain this essential quality of the institute, which provides an interactive and stimulating intellectual environment.”
For the Battlefield Society, the legal fight goes on. Society vice president Kip Cherry, reacting immediately after the vote, said her organization would appeal.
The society is already in a state Appeals Court trying to reverse the 2012 Princeton Planning Board approval the institute received for a subdivision to construct the housing. That case was put on hold pending the outcome of last week’s Planning Board hearing.
Earlier in the evening, Ms. Cherry and other experts the organization retained tried to persuade the board to reject the project. They warned of the destruction of more than 100 trees, the negative impact on wetlands and the loss of a critical piece of history.
Though the institute owns the land where the housing would go, the society has said the project would destroy the part of the battlefield where George Washington staged his winning counter-attack. During fighting on Jan.3, 1777, his forces defeated the British in what is seen as a turning point of the war for independence.
Society president Jerry Hurwitz testified at the hearing of the “seminal event” in American history that would be desecrated if the project were allowed to be built on “hallowed ground.”
The meeting drew a crowd that backed the Witherspoon Hall municipal building, many of whom stayed until after midnight for the vote. The middle of aisle of the meeting room acted as a dividing line between supporters for the two sides. The controversy even attracted national news coverage, with a crew from CBS in the room filming the action for a future story. 