Trenton Social owner T.C. Nelson
Trenton Social owner T.C. Nelson believes art can help build a community.
By Ron Shapella
In a city that always seems desperate for ideas that promote the positive, Terrance Carlin Nelson — better known as T.C. — is brimming with them.
For the last two years, he has run Trenton Social, the oasis of creative expression and urbane flavors at 449 S. Broad St. Trenton Social occupies an unassuming corner of the city across from the Sun Bank Arena, where U.S. 1 and South Broad give way to South Trenton. Nevertheless, it has become a place for events that have brought together artists, musicians, soccer players, cyclists, collectors of punk rock ephemera, curious suburbanites, the tassel-loafered and lovers of fine single-malt scotch, among others.
You can visit to see or hear something different, or to get a good meal. Or if you were wondering where to find the upside in Trenton’s future, you can listen as Nelson describes his plans for the coming weeks and months and get energized as though by a double-espresso transfusion.
“We are creating microtourism,” Nelson says. “There’s a lot going on in Trenton that people don’t know about.”
One event builds up to the next. In recent weeks, the annual Punk Rock Flea Market found a new home in the Trenton Social parking lot. A beer garden was built for Memorial Day weekend. The first Friday in June saw a charity art opening. On Facebook, Nelson can be seen in the “social blogging lounge” he created for Art All Night, using materials left over from the beer garden.
There will be bike tours: patriotic and historical for July 4, spooky for Halloween. The art exhibit changes every month and once a month Trenton Social hosts a celebrity chef.
Nelson is also putting the finishing touches to a proposal he will make to the Lafayette Yard Community Development Corporation. His energy and self-confidence even extends to running the downtown hotel that Marriott recently abandoned.
“I know I can fix that place,” Nelson says. “I’m feeling real strong about it. I know I could turn that place around and make it a destination. My fiancée will probably kill me, but she knows I can do it. It’s good to have a woman like that for support.”
Oh, by the way, he and his fiancée, Leanna Born, are getting married in November.
It is one thing to have a lot of ideas and quite another to be able to follow through as Nelson has. A Trenton native who attended Mercer County Community College and the College of New Jersey, Nelson lived in Mill Hill before moving recently to Ewing.
Those who once fueled up at Trenton Bagel at South Broad and Front streets would have seen Nelson tending the ovens of the popular eatery, where he was partner with his brother and sister until it was sold in 2002. At the time, he also ran the café at the New Jersey State Museum on West State Street.
He and his siblings then took jobs in the white-collar world, Nelson at Bank of America.
“I took a rest in corporate America, where I didn’t have to sling 100-pound bags of flour,” Nelson says. “Now I sling 150-pound kegs of beer.”
He took advantage of an irresistible buyout offer in 2008 when Bank of America took over Merrill Lynch, then he went to Las Vegas and did stock trading before being called back east to run one of the eating clubs at Princeton University. He was working a job on the side one night at what is now Trenton Social – then the former Urban Word, which had gone through a number of iterations since opening in 1998. Local entrepreneur Roland Pott still owns the building, as well as the Conduit next door.
“Roland had hired me to do a mixer here in the space where I am now,” Nelson recalls, “and at the end I told him it really wouldn’t take much to get this place up and running and profitable again. He says, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ and I didn’t really have an answer for him why not to. So that’s how it happened.”
Nelson’s parents were divorced and his father, a 28-year Trenton police officer who passed away recently, was living in Point Pleasant.
“He thought I was crazy,” Nelson said. “These old-timers he worked with, they were kids when they were first on the force. My dad retired in ’93. He says, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’ He would pick up the Trentonian and Trenton Times every morning and read nothing but bad news. He didn’t know what kind of help or support I would have in a city that had a lot of trouble. But I showed him the numbers made sense. It was a good location, pretty much turnkey, and just needed a little love.”
The layout of the place has not changed much over the years, except for the bar, which Nelson expanded right away into a social hub all its own.
“I thought the more bar stools you put in a bar the more bar sales you will have,” he says. “Now it has the basics. Quick, friendly service, a bartender who knows how to make good drinks, and TVs where people can find information on sports and finance that they want to know. And it resonated because the first couple of months, bar sales outpaced food sales.”
Trenton Social still has the large windows looking out onto South Broad. It promotes First Fridays in the city and art displays have always been a constant in the restaurant, as has a regular lineup of musicians. On a recent visit, the walls displayed decorated hearts created by area artists for the recent Hearts and Stars benefit organized annually by the South Trenton Area Residents’ Society. Nelson served on the fundraiser committee and showed off the artworks, each the size of a dinner plate and still bearing the list of silent auction bidders.
One in cast aluminum from the Hamilton sculptor Bruce Lindsay sold for “several hundred dollars,” Nelson says. A collage by Johnson Atelier artist Megan Uhaze featured the State House, Washington crossing the Delaware, family members, and pizzas trailing comet tails.
Other pieces that catch the eye: the end of a chainsaw blade jutted from one, a 3-D American flag adorned one, and another was a lacquered honeycomb containing bees that looked like little jewels. Most were sold, but some are still available.
Trenton Social’s reputation is growing as an important place to show art. Nelson knew something was happening when the artist painting the mural on the restaurant’s front window got a referral from someone driving by.
“At first it was a scramble to get artists,” he says. “Now artists from Philadelphia and New York want to show here. We’re booked through 2014. It’s nice to get e-mails from artists who say they want to show their works here. The arts community is really small and loyal, and if you open your arms to them they will come to you.”
Highland Park artist David DeForne, specializing in “dark pop art,” will exhibit soon, and Nelson says he is planning an outdoor sculpture garden in the near future to feature the works of Kate Graves, also with the Johnson Atelier, who has produced scale metal sculptures of historic architectural and industrial Trenton buildings.
The bicycle tours, also a monthly event, grew out of a scavenger hunt where cyclists fanned out with a list of clues and had to have their pictures taken next to various city sites. People took it a little too seriously and safety concerns, especially with street traffic, got back to Nelson.
“I’m that way, too,” he says. “I’ll be a maniac.”
For Labor Day he wants to have another event in his parking lot: a roller derby and a street soccer tournament. Nelson is big into soccer and sponsors a men’s team — called Trenton Social, of course — that plays in West Trenton.
“They’re 4–0 right now, so they’re pretty good,” he says. “You go to any park here in Trenton, and you’re going to see a soccer ball rolling around. I think soccer is an opportunity for recreation and microtourism.”
As with any gathering spot, food and drink are essential. Trenton Social is open until 2 a.m. most nights, and the kitchen is open until midnight. Nelson calls the menu modern American grill, and it contains a number of enticements, though vegan customers will have to make special requests. There is a wine list and eight specialty cocktails.
Patrons can rent “scotch lockers” for $10 a month, $100 a year, to store favorite bottles of booze. The lockers are popular, with labels for Johnnie Walker Blue, Lagavulin, and Talisker, among other potions, showing in their windows. Nelson says he has installed a second bank of the lockers and that four remained unsold.
“It gives people the sense that this is their spot,” Nelson says, “a sense of ownership.”
Having a number projects going at the same time, all intersecting with different groups, is drawing interest, Nelson says.
“Artists do shape policy and opinion, mostly subliminally, through their work,” he says. “But they do have an impact.
“We never have any problem here. There are no lines drawn in the sand. People say, ‘That’s your craft, that’s your art, that’s great.’ And it is attracting people from the suburbs and all around.”
While Nelson welcomes one and all into his big tent of ideas, it is clear that he sets high standards for Trenton Social and has limited patience for those elsewhere in the city who don’t do the same.
“There’s no excuse for any business in Trenton, from my perspective,” he says. “Trenton Social’s destiny is in the hands of the team that’s here, and this team can accomplish anything at Trenton Social. Over half the team has been here since the opening and over half live in the city of Trenton. They want to see this place become bigger than them.
“A business has to be successful on its own merit,” he says. “That’s how I want people to think of Trenton Social, that there is a great team running it.”
Trenton Social, 449 S. Broad Street, Trenton, (609) 989-7777, trentonsocial.com.
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