ARTWORKS, Trenton’s downtown visual arts center, promotes artistic diversity by fostering creativity, learning, and appreciation of the arts. Our classes, exhibitions, and events make art an accessible experience for all. With this mission, the board’s goal is to provide opportunities for building and developing a community through the arts that includes students of all ages, professionals, amateurs, patrons and appreciators.
Founded in 1964 to offer professional support for artists, our predecessor organization, the Princeton Art Association, was located in that community until 1988 when it moved to Trenton and became known as ARTWORKS. During the 1990s and early 2000s, we offered exhibitions of regional artists in the main gallery; the program “Learning through Art,” developed by the Guggenheim Museum and funded by the Dodge Foundation was a partnership with Trenton Public Schools; portfolio preparation for Trenton Central High School art students; as well as a range of adult, children, and family visual arts programs.
Since 2007 the board has been completely rebuilt with a stronger emphasis on Trenton residents. The same year saw the birth of “Art All Night,” a twenty-four hour visual and performing arts festival that has become the premier public visual arts event in the region. The board recently completed a strategic planning retreat that resulted in a new direction that re-emphasizes its commitment as an art center and catalyst for community interaction.
SIGHTS AND SITES
ARTWORKS 19 EVERETT ALLEY
By Glenn R. Modica
Artworks. Say the name and it will invariably spark a heated discussion over a local developer’s proposed plan to convert this building in the Mill Hill Historic District from artist studios to residential lofts. Rising from this controversy has emerged one of Trenton’s urban myths. The Artworks building, a one-story brick building on Everett Alley, west of Stockton Street, widely known and promoted as a “19th Century Trenton Trolley Barn,” is actually an early 20th century garage.
By the 1890s, a small industrial and commercial pocket had formed in the area bounded by Broad and Front Streets, Assunpink Creek and the D&R Canal (now Route 1). Lime kilns, coal yards, a match factory, and two livery businesses operated here. One livery, Thomas S. Everett’s “Exchange and Sales Stables,” was located mid-block between Stockton and Montgomery Streets. The other, on the site of the Artworks building, stood W.S. Cadwallader’s “Livery and Boarding Stables.”
The Cadwallader enterprise-operated by Lewis A. Marshall into the 20th century- consisted of an interconnected complex of one- and two-story brick and frame buildings. These carriage houses, sheds and stables would have sheltered wagons, carriages, buggies, perhaps even horse cars and omnibuses. But not trolleys.
In June 1919, the New Jersey State Highway Department, the forerunner of NJDOT, purchased the property and demolished all the buildings on the site. Not long after, the Department probably erected the present building on the site. The existing building first appears on a 1927 insurance map of the city.
Formed two years earlier, the Highway Department became the beneficiary of the federal government’s surplus military vehicles and equipment left over from World War I. To house most of these vehicles the Department constructed a large garage at “Fernwood” near the intersection of Lower Ferry Road and Parkway Avenue, the present headquarters of NJDOT.
Off Everett Alley, the Department erected this utilitarian one-story brick building with stepped parapet. The original garage bay and most of the windows and doors have since been removed and filled in. But the unassuming exterior belies the unexpected splendor of the interior. The vast, raw and open space, about 60 feet wide by 150 feet deep, has exposed brick walls, a soaring 25-foot high ceiling supported by a series of steel roof trusses, and a nearly full-length monitor roof with skylight that floods the entire space with natural light.
Up to 90 vehicles could be housed in the garage: cars and trucks by Packard, Hudson and Chalmers, ditch diggers, concrete mixers, graders, loaders, just about everything on four wheels. Everything, that is, except trolleys.
By 1950 the Highway Department no longer owned the garage. At some point the property was transferred to the State Department of Defense and used as an adjunct to the Armory building on State Street. In 1965, the Department of Defense sold the building to Sears, Roebuck & Co., whose retail store was on Stockton Street (now the site of the DMV building) and who used the building as a warehouse. Only three years earlier Sears had razed several nineteenth century buildings on the west side of Stockton Street for a parking lot now used by DMV.
The demolition was consistent with the city’s “Mercer-Jackson Urban Renewal Project,” a 22- acre redevelopment area that essentially encompassed all of the Mill Hill Historic District. In the planning stages since 1956, the Mercer-Jackson project proposed “the elimination of obsolete buildings” in the area, about 90 residences and businesses. A 1966 plan for the area erased the garage in favor of an open space recreation area. In a Modern moment of 1960s exuberance, Mayor Arthur Holland, himself a Mill Hill resident, hailed the project for “the urban renewal minded” and envisioned an area “that will become one of the most up-to-date in the city.”
Mill Hill residents reacted sharply to the plan. Joined in a common cause, they formed the Project Area Committee-the genesis of the Old Mill Hill Society- and worked aggressively toward alternative solutions that focused on rehabilitation, and coordinated with enlightened public officials to find appropriate accommodations for anyone displaced.
Remarkably, the garage was spared. And in 1979 the city renovated the building before finally acquiring it 1986. Since 1988, Artworks has operated art classes, studios and exhibit space in the building, yet the current redevelopment plan offers no alternative site for Artworks. But regardless of whether you support more street life or more still life, the fact is the city failed to notify all the stakeholders in Artworks and actively involve the public.
Perhaps it is still not too late to propose an alternate idea for the building, one that promotes arts and culture and creates a use that stays true to the building’s mythical history: it’s the perfect space for a trolley museum.
Glenn R. Modica is a member of the Trenton Historical Society’s Preservation Committee, an all-volunteer organization dedicated to preserving and revitalizing the city’s historic buildings and neighborhoods and promoting the Capital City’s illustrious past. To find out more, visit www.trentonhistory .org
