Trenton, NJ Arts and Community News
Mayor Eric Jackson today appointed city attorney Marc A. McKithen to serve as acting law director while the administration seeks a permanent replacement for the position.
The appointment follows the departure of David Minchello, who held the position for a year. The city will officially post the position on Monday, Aug. 3. [Read more…]
The Hanover Street canal house is one of three original canal houses remaining along the Delaware and Raritan Canal in Trenton, now the D&R Canal State Park. It is leased by the state to Thomas Edison State College. Photo: Lauren Otis.
One of the great aspects of Trenton is that the present is overlaid on a multi-layered past, a past which is more evident here that in larger cities, where it might have been paved or built over, or otherwise eradicated.
Winding its way lazily through the city is a remarkable feat of 19th century industrial transportation engineering – the Delaware and Raritan Canal. Although it extends up to the little Delaware River town of Milford on one end, and to the Raritan River and New Brunswick on the other, for several miles the D&R Canal flows through Trenton, entering at the city’s western edge and exiting at its northern border.
I have always loved how the canal wends across the urban landscape here, unobtrusive yet unapologetically cutting its own path through the street grid around it. Even the canal house buildings go their own quirky way, popping up out of nowhere, aligned with the waterway more than the streetscape.
Signs along the canal towpath tell us that this ribbon of water and adjacent land are now a state park, but until I talked to Vicki Chirco I had no idea that the canal still serves a commercial purpose, and is overseen by two other state agencies in addition to the D&R Canal State Park.
Chirco’s title is resource interpretive specialist – historic resources at the D&R Canal State Park, a fancy mouthful for being the park’s in-house historian. I called her to talk about the remaining canal houses in Trenton but wound up learning much more. Far from being only a historical relic, and thanks to a forward-looking plan adopted many years ago, the canal is a water works, supplying millions of gallons of water to Central New Jersey households and generating income for the state.
“It’s been a water supply since the late 1940s,” says Chirco. “That is really the reason why there is water in the D&R Canal today,” she says. “A lot of canals are just abandoned without any useful purpose. Some are filled in, some just become mosquito magnets.”
When the private operator of the canal closed it in 1932, the state took it over. “After a lot of debate, it was decided they could still make money from selling water,” Chirco says.
The New Jersey Water Supply Authority oversees the water supply function. In 1973, the canal was put on the National Register of Historic Places, and a year later the D&R Canal State Park was created. That same year the D&R Canal Commission was set up to regulate development and land use along the canal’s 400-square-mile watershed, anything which might affect the canal itself and the quality of water in it, Chirco says. The canal commission also oversees the historic integrity of the canal, she says.
The D&R Canal was built between 1830 and 1834. Both the main canal, running 44 miles from Bordentown through Trenton to New Brunswick, and the 22 mile long feeder canal running down the Delaware to Trenton from Bulls Island, were dug by hand. At its peak in the 1860s and 1870s, 80 percent of the canal traffic was Pennsylvania coal bound for New York City. By the turn of the century, canals like the D&R had largely been superceeded by railroad transportation (the D&R Canal was merged with a railroad that ran along its banks).
In Trenton, only three canal houses remain of the 17 that originally stood in the city at locks and bridges, says Chirco — one on Prospect Street, one on Hanover Street, and one on Calhoun Street. The houses were the company-owned residences of bridge and lock tenders.
The Prospect Street house is owned by the City of Trenton, and rented by the city to a tenant, says Chirco. It’s two-door structure is unique and the story of how it came into city hands is something of a mystery, she says, noting that perhaps it was a pre-existing house repurposed as a canal house.
The Calhoun Street supervisor’s canal house. Restored and administered by the D&R Canal State Park, it is currently unoccupied. Photo: Lauren Otis.
The Hanover Street house, owned and restored by the canal commission and park, is leased to Thomas Edison State College, which has a large building next door, according to Chirco. On Calhoun Street, the “supervisor house” was restored eight years ago, and is currently boarded up because there is no tenant, she says.
A few days after speaking with Chirco, I jump on my bike for a spin along the canal to check out the three canal houses. They are diminutive but have a distinguished historic heft in the late afternoon light.
As I get off my bike at Prospect Street, a car pulls into the gravel drive next to the canal house. A woman gets out, apparently home from work.
“Do you live in the canal house?” I ask.
“I do,” she says. “I’ve lived here 36 years.” She tells me she got the opportunity to be a tenant in a lottery process, and has been there ever since. “I’ve loved being by the canal, with the ducks and birds,” she says. She talks about the changes that have taken place in the neighborhood in the course of those 36 years, for better and worse. She loves the stately churches and other buildings nearby and is encouraged by renewed interest in them.
The woman demurs when I ask her name. “I want to stay under the radar,” she says. Given the historical idyll hidden in the city which she calls home, I can’t blame her.
The Prospect Street canal house has a unique two-door design. It is owned by the City of Trenton and rented out. Photo: Lauren Otis.
The Delaware and Raritan Canal State Park and Commission: www.dandrcanal.com
The New Jersey Water Supply Authority: www.njwsa.org
One hundred ago, Trenton was a center of innovation, entrepreneurship, and skilled employment, and a new exhibit at Ellarslie, the City Museum in Cadwalader Park, highlights the accomplishments of the City’s greatest enterprise – the John A. Roebling Son’s Company
The exhibit opens with a reception on Friday, July 17, from 6 to 8 p.m., and features many rarely seen artworks, publications, and objects illustrating the vast scope of Roebling products for national and international markets.
The most notable artwork is an 1898 ink and gouache painting from the collection of the New Jersey State Museum of the Roebling Works on South Broad Street and the Delaware and Raritan Canal. The Roebling brothers, Washington, Ferdinand, and Charles, commissioned the painting to capture the tremendous growth in the fifty years since their father, John A. Roebling, founded the factory with a single wire rope shop in 1848.
Expertly rendered by H.B. Longacre, a Philadelphia artist about whom little is known, the painting illustrates the tremendous investment, employment, and productivity in Trenton during the height of America’s industrial age. From that first rope ship in 1848, the Roeblings expanded their works over three city blocks with dozens of mills and shops, including the first of several four-story mills. Longacre meticulously and precisely depicted the incredible bustle at the Works, with numerous billowing smokestacks and steam vents, and with workers, horses, steam locomotives, canal boats, and electric trolleys in motion.
In the center of the painting the house that John Roebling built in 1855 for his family at the intersection of South Broad Street and the D&R Canal presides over the Works as the Roebling General Office. Today the building is part of the Mercer County Administration complex in the former Roebling offices that the County acquired in 1969 as the Works gradually shut down.
According to Jenny Martin-Wicoff, the State Museum’s Registrar of Fine Art and Cultural History, the Museum acquired the Roebling Works painting from a couple in Louisiana in 1983 with funds provided by Ferdinand W. Roebling III. The painting was temporarily exhibited around that time, and in 1989 it was briefly exhibited at the Squibb Gallery in Lawrenceville. The Roebling exhibition at Ellarslie provides a rare opportunity for the public to see this marvelous representation of Trenton’s industrial power. The Trenton Roebling Community Development Corporation reproduced the painting with the permission of the State Museum in 1992 and with support from Leigh Photographics, today’s Leigh Visual Imaging in West Windsor. Prints are available at Ellarslie.
Richard Willinger, the Curator of the Roebling exhibit, has included four large paintings that the Roebling Company commissioned for its display at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The paintings include two iconic bridges in the Roebling legacy – the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, and the George Washington Bridge, completed in 1931 – and two scenes within the Roebling rope shops. When Mercer County purchased the Roebling offices, County workers found seven Roebling World’s Fair paintings in the basement, and the County donated them to Ellarslie in 1982. A donor recently paid for the cleaning of the George Washington Bridge painting, and Ellarslie is looking for a donor to support the cleaning of the Brooklyn Bridge painting. Two of the paintings are on loan to the Roebling Museum in Roebling, N.J. where the Roeblings built a steel mill and a company town in 1906.
The exhibit includes a watercolor of the Roebling Works by Tom Malloy, Trenton’s beloved artist who compellingly documented the City’s buildings, monuments and streetscapes over several decades. Tom worked in the Roebling wire mill during World War II and shared his experiences there in a 1993 oral history.
Besides producing wire and wire rope for landmark suspension bridges, including the Golden Gate Bridge, Roebling manufactured “unthinkable” miles of wire rope in Trenton for elevators, cable cars, tramways, airplanes, shipping, mining, construction, and ski lifts – and it made wire for electrical lines, telegraphs and telephones, wire cloth and screens, and prestressed concrete. The exhibit highlights the scope of Roebling innovations and production with wire and wire rope samples, Company brochures, and hand-made wooden patterns of machine parts.
At its height during World War I the Roebling Company employed 8,000 workers in Trenton and Roebling. Many employees were immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, and the steady work at Roebling fostered their assimilation and enabled them to raise their families within the American dream. When John Smith got a job at Roebling at the age of 19, his mother told him, “Now you’re set for life.”
But the challenges were great a century ago, as workers struck Roebling and other Trenton manufacturers for better wages and working conditions, and huge fires suspected of being arson or sabotage destroyed several Roebling mills. The Roebling plants were finally unionized in 1941 just before the U.S. entry into World War II. After four generations of family ownership, the Roeblings sold their plants to the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, which operated them into the 1970s. Today, thousands of residents in Trenton, Roebling, and surrounding towns count former Roebling employees among their ancestors.
And today, the town of Roebling and the Roebling Museum are thriving, former Roebling buildings in Trenton’s Chambersburg section house offices and senior citizens, and the Roebling Market is bustling with the City’s latest immigrants from Central and South America. Artworks’ Art All Night event at the City-owned Roebling Machine Shop annually attracts an incredibly diverse regional audience numbering in the tens of thousands. And HHG Development, a Trenton enterprise, is poised to start converting the four-story, 148,000 sq. ft. Roebling Rope Shop 101 into 138 loft apartments. Although it’s taken longer than expected, the redevelopment of the Roebling Works in Trenton is gradually fulfilling the mixed-use plan that I envisioned as a graduate student in 1984 and that the Trenton Roebling Community Development Corporation started promulgating in 1985.
The John A. Roebling Son’s Company exhibit at Ellarslie runs through December 6.
Donohue
The body of former College of New Jersey Assistant Provost Pat Donohue was found Saturday night north of the George Washington Bridge and was positively identified by family members at the office of the Medical examiner in New York yesterday, law enforcement representatives said. [Read more…]
The former rectory for Saints Peter and Paul Church is now a home for teens. Anchor House was able to purchase the building with support from the Ride for Runaways. The new Anchorage opened in November of 2014.
Over its 37-year history, Anchor House has evolved from a single emergency shelter for runaways to an agency with several programs and locations in the greater Trenton area serving children from Mercer County and beyond.
When the 173 cyclists and 36 support crew members leave Arm & Hammer Park in Trenton at 8 a.m. Saturday morning and head to Oswego, New York, where they will kick off the 37th annual Ride for Runaways, they will make the 500-mile journey back to Trenton to raise funds to keep all the Anchor House programs running.
The Anchor House shelter, the cornerstone of the Anchor house program, is a 24-hour safe haven for runaway, homeless and at-risk youth ages 10-17. Runaway and homeless children and teens have walk-in access to the program 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Anchor House services include crisis intervention, individual and family counseling, temporary shelter, food and clothing, advocacy, outreach, and support groups. When family reunification isn’t possible, Anchor House works with the youths to find a safe place to live. [Read more…]
Donohue
A Mill Hill resident who has devoted his career to community service has been missing since Tuesday night and is presumed dead.
Patrick Donahue, known for his passion for Trenton and his ability to engage young people in community service projects, was last seen Tuesday.
When family members came home Tuesday night, they found a note from Donahue telling them he loved them and indicating he was leaving his car near the George Washington Bridge, friends said.
A spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said this morning that an eyewitness reported seeing middle-aged man jump from the George Washington Bridge on Tuesday night. Another witness confirmed that a middle-aged man was observed jumping from the bridge. As of 11:40 p.m. Tuesday night, the water was searched and no body was found.
The investigation is ongoing, said Joe Pentangelo of the Port Authority Media Relations Department. [Read more…]
As the rain came down Thursday morning, cyclists gearing up for the 37th Anchor House Ride for Runaways looked out their windows and were glad they weren’t out there training.
The time for training is done. Thursday it was time to clean off their bikes and load them on a truck headed for New York.
“It was raining — not spitting, not misting ,not thunder-storming, just straight down rain. And I didn’t have to ride in this rain today,” veteran Anchor House rider Joan Feldman Plumb said. “I trained through it all this season with my dear cycling buddies, and I am ready.”
Plumb shrugged when asked how many times she biked in the rain to train for the 500-mile ride this season.
“I lost count,” she said. “The rain doesn’t even faze me any more. Let’s see what happens during the Anchor House ride next week.”
Plumb is one of 173 cyclists and 36 support crew members who will be participating in the Ride for Runaways, the annual event that raises money for Anchor House, the only emergency shelter in Mercer County for runaway, abused and neglected children and teens. [Read more…]
The Mercer County Sheriff’s K-9 Unit located an 82-year-old Trenton resident who was missing from his residence since early Wednesday morning.
At 1 a.m. today, the Trenton Police Department requested the assistance of the Sheriff’s Office K-9 Unit to help locate the man, who has dementia. He ran away from his home on the first block of Morningside Drive in the Glen Afton area.
After a half-hour search, Sherriff’s bloodhound K-9 Maverick and Sheriff’s Officer David Smithson, along with Trenton P.D. Detective Lisette Rios, tracked the man’s scent more than 2000 feet, across Route 29, over guardrails, through heavy brush, along the steep riverbank. [Read more…]
A plaque commemorating explorer and Trenton native (perhaps) Zebulon Pike on the grounds of the Old Barracks. Photo: Lauren Otis.
On the grounds of the Old Barracks in downtown Trenton stands an old faded blue plaque that almost no one pays attention to. It reads: “Brig. Gen. Zebulon Pike, explorer, born near here, 1779. Captured York, Canada, 1813, but killed in attack. Pike’s Peak named for him.”
I have never been to Pike’s Peak, but I have to say, Pike has always piqued (no pun intended, well maybe a little) my curiosity. I love his little-used Old Testament given name. Who was this seemingly forgotten native son of Trenton who went on to a life of adventure in the larger world but has now largely vanished into the mists of time?
One of the first things I encountered in a bit of superficial online digging was some insistent Wikipedia entries that swore Zebulon Montgomery Pike was not even born in Trenton. Wikipedia’s notoriously inaccurate right? What about that sign at the Old Barracks? Don’t always believe what you read (more on this later). [Read more…]
