The 2016 Trenton holidays will be golden when the city’s Mill Hill Holiday House Tours celebrates its 50th anniversary on Saturday, December 3, with tours from noon to 5 p.m.
The annual Trenton tradition is courtesy of members of the historic Mill Hill neighborhood, who welcome the holiday season by decorating and opening their streets and houses to the community.
Mill Hill — generally bordered by Front, Broad, and Stockton streets and Route 1 — takes its name from the mill built near the area in 1679 by Trenton founder Mahlon Stacy. The district consists of 10 linear blocks of mainly 19th-century homes. The oldest was built in 1826; the newest in 2005.
Coordinators and Mill Hill residents Janet Bickal and Lisa Kasabach say the 50th anniversary is a time to put the event into historic perspective and that over the years 149 houses and three churches have been on the tour. In human terms, that is 222 home owners who have opened their houses and attracted 15,000 people.
Special mention goes to 112 Jackson Street, a single home brick Victorian featured during the first holiday tour that was open 22 times under three different owners. The house has been dubbed by real estate agents as “the face of Mill Hill.”
To help their efforts to share information about the significance of the community and tour, the two coordinators created a statement that notes:
The history of the House Tour runs parallel with the transformation of the modern neighborhood of Mill Hill. The House Tours didn’t start to show off a fully rehabilitated neighborhood but rather to bring people to a neighborhood that was just beginning to transform.
In the 1950s the City of Trenton identified Mill Hill, then known as the Mercer-Jackson neighborhood, as a priority district for urban renewal. Remarkably, instead of deciding to tear down the blighted area, the city moved to rehabilitate the area following the model of Georgetown in Washington, DC. The city got a HUD grant in the early 1960s to implement an urban renewal plan for Mercer-Jackson.
On February 28, 1964, Arthur J. Holland, the mayor of Trenton, moved his family to 138 Mercer Street in Mill Hill. This move became national and even international news. The headline on the front page of the New York Times read, “Mayor Moves to Bi-racial Area.”
Holland’s widow, Betty, remembers sitting in the house on that snowy night and watching a report about the move on the Huntley–Brinkley Report, the NBC national nightly TV news program. Mayor Holland believed that integrated neighborhoods were the only answer for Trenton’s survival.
Another neighborhood pioneer was Robert Allen, a sociologist, who bought 112 Jackson in 1966. Allen and Betty Holland revived the old name of the neighborhood, Mill Hill, and were instrumental in forming the Old Mill Hill Society. In an effort to get more people to come and see the neighborhood, the first ‘House Tour,’ a Christmas reception in Allen’s house on Jackson Street was held in 1966.
In those early years of the tour, very few people came. As part of the urban renewal project, the city installed the brick sidewalks and the Welsbach Boulevard Lamps that have become a symbol of the neighborhood to the 100 blocks of Mercer and Jackson. Gradually, more people moved to the neighborhood, taking advantage of HUD low-interest loans to renovate houses.
In 1977 the Mill Hill neighborhood was added to the National Registry of Historic Places. It was described as a, “reasonably good matrix of small scale 19th century middle class housing, among which several noteworthy buildings stand out.”
The number of houses on tour continued to grow as did the number of people attending. The first year that houses on the 200 block of Jackson and Mercer were on the tour was 1983 and the first house on Clay Street to be on the tour was in 1986. In 1991 the Old Mill Hill Society started an annual Garden Tour in June, which celebrated its 25th anniversary this year.
Starting in 2001 and revised in 2006, the Old Mill Hill Society decided to dedicate part of the revenue from the House and Garden Tours to be awarded as grants to residents of the neighborhood to make external repairs and improvements on their houses. The Society recognized that historically appropriate renovations often are more costly and their completion benefits the whole neighborhood. Since 2007, more than $35,000 has been awarded to Mill Hill residents and property owners for these projects.
In addition to the tours, coordinators say they’re planning an “all out” holiday celebration that includes a series of free street activities to create a festive atmosphere. That includes the Central Jersey Antique Car display (from noon to 3 p.m.), horse and carriage rides (1 to 4 p.m.), free photo booth with Victorian Dress (noon to 5 p.m.), a photo exhibition at Art Works (noon to 5 p.m.), a history talk (3 p.m.), and chestnuts roasting.
There is also the following live music schedule:
Noon: Trenton Music Makers from the Trenton Community Music School
12:30 p.m.: Trenton Music Makers from the Trenton Community Music School and Westminster Choir College Chapters of Phi Mu Alpha & Sigma Alpha
1 p.m.: Trenton Children’s Chorus Chorale, Westminster Choir College Chapters of Phi Mu Alpha & Sigma Alpha, Pocklembo Studio violins, and the Gentlemen of Jazz at Grant AME
1:30 p.m.: Trenton Children’s Chorus Chorale, Rancocas Valley Singers, Pocklembo Studio violinist, and Gentlemen of Jazz at Grant AME
2 p.m.: Rancocas Valley Singers, Rancocas Valley Regional High School Chamber Choir, Westminster Choir College Chapters of Phi Mu Alpha & Sigma Alpha, and Gentlemen of Jazz at Grant AME.
2:30 p.m.: Rancocas Valley Singers, Rancocas Valley Regional High School Chamber Choir, and Gentlemen of Jazz at Grant AME
3 p.m.: Rancocas Valley Regional High School Chamber Choir.
Bickal and Kasabach say the day is to bring “life to history, and history to life in the capital city.” It also opens the holiday season in Trenton style.
House tour tickets are $16. For more information, visit trentonmillhill.org.
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A scene from the modern day Mill Hill Tour,
