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CURRENT ISSUES
HISTORIC PRESERVATION:
Working to Preserve
the Unique Character of the
Mercer Hill Historic District
The Bonner Foundation
at Sheldon House, 10 Mercer Street
Built in Northampton,
Massachusetts in the late 1830's;
moved to Princeton and
reassembled, 1868;
major restoration for
The Bonner Foundation, 1997.
The question as to why we value this historic district, why we seek to
celebrate it and to preserve it, is answered eloquently in the following
description from Raymond P. Rhinehart's recent guide to Princeton:
A stroll down Mercer with a right turn into Alexander Street
is an opportunity to experience how urban design evolves. Most of the
buildings are by Charles Steadman and they tend to follow a similar form:
two stories, three bays, an off-center entrance, and clapboard exteriors painted
uniformly white. It might be monotonous, but it is not. No two
entrances were designed quite alike: from the fanlights, the capitals, the
omnipresent pillars. Steadman likewise varies the cornices. There is
privacy but there is also neighborhood. It is light years ahead of the
current wave of MacMansions being built on half-acre lots around the country.
Steadman and his contemporaries were not building monuments; they were instead
building communities. It is this legacy more than any one great building
that distinguishes every precinct of "this wonderful little spot, [this] quaint
and ceremonious village."
Reprinted with permission from Raymond P. Rhinehart. The
Campus Guide: Princeton University (New York, Princeton Architectural
Press, 2000) at p.189. Ending quotation from comments about Princeton by
Albert Einstein, November 20, 1933. See above, p.178.
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