Another Look at Two New Jersey Towns

We love them, but could we built them today?

I’ve written a fair bit about Flemington and Somerville, two small towns in Central Jersey (which very much exists.) They’re places I know very well, and they’re also often compared and contrasted in debates over development in the area.

I didn’t grow up in downtown Flemington itself, but I did grow up saying I lived in Flemington. And if we went into town to stroll Main Street, grab a slice of pizza or Italian ice, or visit the library, it was usually in Flemington.

In yesterday’s link roundup, I featured a great blog post by a young downtown Flemington business owner, on a big redevelopment project right in the middle of Main Street. It’s a partial teardown/major renovation of the historic Union Hotel and surrounding area. The Union Hotel was one of those small, grand hotels that hundreds of small towns, particularly rail towns (as Flemington once was, and Somerville is) had in the 19th century.

Many of them are already gone, and while it’s sad that the hotel was not continuously maintained over the years, at least the main portion of it facing Main Street will survive. This project, and another upcoming one on the site of the old Liberty Village outlet mall, seems to be pretty popular, if only because the alternative is derelict properties in the heart of town. Several years ago NIMBY sentiment might have won out, and indeed for many years it did.

The reactions I’ve seen range from dismay to resignation to grumbling acceptance to enthusiasm. But a lot of acceptance, even if not enthusiastic. (Then there’s the handful of people who think the new, mostly market-rate apartments being built in town are a Democrat plot to swamp Flemington with illegals. I don’t care for the progressive talking point that housing policy is analogous to immigration policy, but those folks seem to agree with it!)

Some of the most interesting responses I’ve seen, however, have been those which make reference to Somerville. Some people are happy that Flemington is finally making moves to be more like Somerville. And others are dismayed that Flemington is going to “turn into another Somerville.”

So, what’s the big deal about Somerville? I profiled it here. It’s larger and somewhat more urban than Flemington, but its development pattern and overall feel is still far more small-town than big-city. Mostly, to me, it just has more restaurants, stores, and street life. I struggle, honestly, to understand what dividing line people see between these towns. Here are a few pictures from each town, for illustration, which I’ll identify below.

Flemington, Somerville, Somerville, Flemington, Somerville, Flemington.

I love Flemington, but its relative stagnation over the last 15 years or so has meant that more trips “to town,” when my wife and I visit my parents in New Jersey, have been to Somerville (or even to nearby Clinton). But it’s by no means a new place to me. Ever since I was a kid I’ve enjoyed visits there. Partly, that was because of its huge Chinese buffet, which is now an all-you-can-eat sushi joint that my wife and I try to visit every time we’re in NJ.

But partly it was for its atmosphere. As a kid, with no knowledge of urban planning, I could tell that Somerville was lively and urban, but far quieter and less intimidating than Manhattan, where we often day-tripped.

Both Flemington and Somerville are county seats. While Somerville has NJ Transit rail to New York City, Flemington was once a rail town, and while Flemington is smaller and less intense, it has the same architectural bones as many much larger places.

What I keep coming back to, though—and which has gotten some folks I’ve chatted with to think a little differently about all of this—is that everything in those six photos above, in either town, is cherished as a distinct piece of American culture. Yet take a look at those buildings—their size, their mix of residential and commercial uses, their frequently considerable depth, with small apartments in the back—and consider the firestorm that often erupts when developers try building stuff like it in the suburbs. Or even in those towns themselves. What exactly is going on there?

Well, there are a couple of broader points I can think of. One is the expectation that built places are supposed to stay the same over long periods of time. Of course, they never quite do, but nonetheless many people seem to perceive change as a kind of injustice or violation.

On the one hand, when someone bemoans a diner or a sandwich shop, I think it’s a little silly to laugh at them. They’re expressing the human desire for landmarks, familiarity, permanence, continuity. In America, that might take the form of a commercial structure from the 1960s. But that doesn’t make the sentiment invalid.

On the other hand, it isn’t desirable or possible to freeze a place in time, and inevitably some things will change. The fact that we expect something different—so much so that, for example, somebody can compare a liberalization of the zoning code to theft of the frozen neighborhood he thought he was buying into—is a historical anomaly.

There’s something else here, too. While I included pictures of some pretty large older buildings in Flemington and Somerville, the fact is that the kinds of businesses and activities they housed were extremely local. All those grand hotels inhabited large buildings, but they were probably owned by someone a lot of people knew. In suburbia, by contrast, the buildings might be smaller (detached houses compared to walk-up apartment buildings, boarding houses, etc.) or larger (big-box stores), but the scale of everything is larger and more dispersed.

I wonder how much the local scale of everything in these classic towns—reflecting an entire economic landscape that largely doesn’t exist anymore—had to do with people’s love for them. And how much a sense that new development is detached, and at a scale above the actual place it’s in, drives opposition to superficially similar buildings today.

Here’s a good piece in Strong Towns that gets into some of this. And I’ll be coming back to this, particularly this last point about scale (of activity) versus scale (of buildings.)

What do you think?

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Related Reading:

Everyone’s a Little Bit NIMBY

When Small Towns Wanted Tall Buildings

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