Historic Preservation

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.