Washington Town Center, Robbinsville, NJ

My wife owns a townhouse in a neo-urbanist development "down south" by I-195. The developer did quite a nice job with the site. The development is denser, not as sprawling as the usual suburban subdivision, the houses have some nice touches and decorative details above and beyond the standard NJ neo-colonial architecture, the garages are in the back as detached "carriage-houses" on a back-alley/service road , the streets are in grid pattern with some broader boulevards, an artificial lake some small parks and squares to lighten up the layout. They are currently building a "town center" - i.e. a fancy looking strip-mall with some apartments above the ground-floor commercial space at the edge of the development. The initial grand plans of 3 more phases like this, re-routing the highway and turning the current road into a quiet main-street has probably gone the ways of many ambitious development plans and land options in the current real-estate melt-down.



(morning fog)

Even though the place does have a certain atmosphere, there is still a big difference between neo-urbanist and urban. Towns live because they are places of public life, all kinds of business, social and leisure activity, and even though some people are walking or biking around on a nice evening, this is basically still a suburban bedroom community where neighbors barely know each others names.

The park, surrounded by blocks of brick-faced town-houses is a nice touch, but feels dead most of the time. Maybe what would have been needed to jump start a livelier atmosphere would be a mix of residential and commercial development along the main roads, squares and parks. Imagine the corner house at the park a restaurant, coffee shop or ice-cream parlor, maybe even with a outdoor seating area in the park.

But maybe that would start to get noisy and messy and isn't what people who moved here would want after all. Or it simply wouldn't work and still not enough people would come that far off the beaten path to get a coffee, sit in the park and read a book.