Residents living in West Windsor are familiar with its ethnically diverse population and characteristics, but long before most communities began to embrace diversity, West Windsor was already leading the way.##M:[more]##
In fall 1957, Bob Duncan and his wife, Helen, moved from Ithaca, NY, to Hightstown, where they rented a house. About a year later, at the age of 29, Duncan, a physics graduate student at Cornell, got a job at what was then known as RCA Research Laboratories (currently the Sarnoff property), and he and his wife began looking to buy a house, and the Glen Acres development was a convenient location within their price range.
They met with a real estate agent, who told them that the development, located on Alexander Road and Glenview Drive, was a racially diverse community.
“That was not anything we opposed, but it did raise some sort of economic concerns,” says Duncan, who has lived there since. “If you lived in those times, a common understanding of interracial communities was formed on the basis of older communities that had typically been all white, but were now in the process of becoming racially integrated. But because the white families didn’t want to, they began to sell their houses in rapid succession, which drove prices down. A common view was that if you bought a house in a racially divided community, you were going to lose property value.”
Still, Duncan and his wife recognized that Glen Acres was a unique development, and what made it stand out was that residents bought into the community, knowing what it was about, and wanting it to work. They purchased the house in 1958 and moved in July, 1959.
Now 50 years later, the small development of about 20 homes located near the Delaware and Raritan Canal, still embraces its diversity, and treasures its roots. The development is holding a block party celebration on Saturday, September 6, where former residents and current residents, and anyone who has ever lived in the development, will be able to reconnect and share fond memories. The celebration will begin at 12:30 p.m.
The origin of the development goes back to 1954, when the men’s groups of the Witherspoon Street, First (now Nassau), and Second (later St. Andrew’s) Presbyterian churches in Princeton would meet to share mutual problems. One of the problems discussed was the acute need for housing for black families in Princeton. Soon after, a group of 19 men formed the Princeton Housing Group, which grew to include additional churches and as many as 200 residents.
Working quietly with neighbors in areas with suitable housing for sale, they paved the way for black families to buy homes in white neighborhoods. By the late 1950s, the group invited developer Morris Milgram, who had developed two interracial communities in Philadelphia, and his partner to come to Princeton.
With $65,”000 raised from interested Princeton residents, and the remainder from Milgram’s investors and friends, Princeton Housing Associates spent $150,”000 to build $1 million worth of housing. In two-and-a-half year’s time, two housing projects, including Glen Acres, were completed and sold. The corporation was able to pay off its investors and declare a 17 percent dividend before dissolving.
The mix was consciously set at two white for each black family. The first few years of the development were tense in some ways, Duncan says. This is because the first owners to sell their houses and move were usually white, since they could move anywhere, whereas for the black families, this was a significant find in a suburban community.
“Whenever a house would go on sale, the real estate brokers in town would be very apprehensive,” Duncan says. “There was an anxiety that instead of maintaining our integrity as a mixed race community, it would tend to go towards a not-mixed community, and most likely an all-black community,” which was far from the neighborhood’s goal.
Another source of tension was created by others from nearby communities who were not as accepting, during a time of racial tensions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One of the original black owners of a house in the Glen Acres neighborhood was a popular and highly-valued teacher at Princeton High School. “The high school students, in keeping with their typical volatility, we believe, took it upon themselves, essentially vandalizing the community from time to time, particularly the home of this black teacher.” People would drive through his lawn, throw paint on his garage doors, and cause other types of vandalism, Duncan recalls. “Racial prejudice still exists, but it’s hard for people to understand what things were like in those days,” he says.
But the homeowners in the community, who had already grown to be tight knit, organized a neighborhood watch, especially during Halloween. “During the early and late evenings, two of us would essentially walk around the community on two-hour shifts and take the license plate numbers of cars.”
People who moved into the community were not afraid, and were interested in preserving its interracial integrity, Duncan says.
“Those were the days when everyone had lots of kids,” Duncan says.”It was a blur of mixed ages and gender and races playing together smoothly and comfortable and rarely with any conflict in huge overlapping backyards. It has, in many ways, remained that way.”
Cecelia B. Hodges, another of the original Glen Acres homeowners who still resides there today, recalls similar experiences. She was originally born, raised, and educated in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.
After high school, Hodges attended Hunter College, then went on to Columbia University for her master’s degree and obtained her PhD from Northwestern University. After moving here, she later became a professor at Douglas College at Rutgers University and then finished her career teaching English at Princeton University, where she also was an administrator.
After she got married, she and her husband moved to Trenton, but decided they would rather live in the Princeton area. At the time, it was almost impossible for blacks to find housing outside of the John Witherspoon area in Princeton, and at the time, there were no houses available in that section, and they found Glen Acres, where they moved in 1958. “I have come to believe that living here is the most sublime experience one can have,” she said. “I really feel excited and grateful to be here and touched by the way in which the entire community has developed.”
While people came to the planned interracial community for different reasons, “through serendipity, or some inexplicable intervention, people turned out to be more or less of similar instincts,” she says. “That similar instinct was a desire to know other people, to respect other people, people different from you, to learn from the communal experience, and enjoy it. I don’t think anybody came with that high-minded desire, but that’s what happened.”
Hodges says she does not recall any outstanding personal problems in the early days, but in the beginning, after people had begun moving into the homes, she recalls that some taxi drivers would refuse to drive visitors into the neighborhood. “They would either say they didn’t know what it was, or they would call it the gray community,” she recalls, emphasizing that this only occurred in the beginning of the development. “It was a nuisance, but it didn’t happen often because at the same time, there were two black taxi drivers who of course, did not follow that course.”
She also recalls that when service vendors, like those who work on chimneys or gutters, would knock on residents’ doors after the development was first built, they would often ask if the lady of the house was available if a black woman answered the door. “They always assumed we were the servant of the household,” she says.
Like Duncan, however, Hodges also emphasizes the close-knit feel of the community. Further, “we proved what the philosophy in the beginning was set out to prove — that property values do not plummet when black people move into a neighborhood because our houses are going at the same rates as any other house at the same level in Princeton and West Windsor.”
Both Duncan and Hodges say the character and spirit of the community has remained to this day. The residents here still hold an annual picnic every year, and newcomers to the development, which include people of all backgrounds, seem to hold the same philosophy upon which the development was originally established — “that all people can live together,” Hodges says.
There are still four original homeowners living in the community, says Duncan. And because of the community’s cohesiveness and bonding that held it together in the beginning, many former residents and owners have moved away, only to come back to the development years later. As many as five homeowners have moved back to the community, Duncan says.
Duncan and his wife raised four of their own children in Glen Acres. “What an incredible experience I think it was for our kids, and a lot of others. Hopefully a lot of those kids with their kids and some with their grandkids will be here on September 6,” he says.
