Walkability is a principal draw for many people who have chosen to live in Bordentown.
In a country that depends largely on automobiles to get around, people here take pride in being able to walk to get a cup of coffee, a bite to eat, a bottle of aspirin or a gallon of milk when they want or need it.
Sidewalks provide safe passage throughout most of the city. But there are notable exceptions where no sidewalks exist: Pine Street between Mary and Elizabeth Streets; some portions of East Chestnut Street; and, perhaps most notably, on Park Street, where the sidewalks end on both sides at Third Street as one heads northeast, away from downtown.
This last patch of ground is all the more noteworthy these days because of the recent transition of city municipal operations to the former Divine Word missionary site on Park Street, also known as Point Breeze, the former Joseph Bonaparte estate.
There are wide shoulders on Park Street en route to the new administration office. But no sidewalks. To remedy this, the city has sought, and now has received, a grant of $475,000 from the state Department of Transportation to improve walkability along the street.
“This grant is a crucial step in our continued investment into the City of Bordentown,” Sen. Troy Singleton, chair of the Senate Community and Urban Affairs Committee, said in a media release.
The funding will be used to construct a much-needed pedestrian and bike path alongside Park Street. The path will connect the new municipal complex, the new D&R Canal State Park at historic Point Breeze, residents of Park Street Apartments, and employees who work in the area to downtown Bordentown and the NJ Transit RiverLine.
“We are incredibly grateful to the NJ Department of Transportation and to Sen. Singleton, who not only advocated for these funds, but reached out proactively to ask where the city’s needs lie and how he can help,” said city mayor Jennifer Sciortino. “In a year when funds are extremely tight, this grant is a huge win for so many people: our residents who prize walkability, the businesses that make up our downtown, commuters who rely on the light rail station, residents who call Park Street Apartments home, and of course, everyone eager to visit the new jewel at Point Breeze.”
The city received the grant in July, but Sciortino told the Current that there is still much work to be done in determining how the roadway will be reconfigured.
“Our engineers have started to initially flesh out what it would look like,” she said. “We’re looking to create a safe passage from the heart of the city out to what is becoming a crucial component of our city.”
Sciortino says improvements to Park Street were among the recommendations contained in the city’s Streetscape and Parking Plan, which the Board of Commissioners formally approved at its July 10 meeting.
“In terms of the actual design, that’s what we still need to determine — whether the bike lane will be inside or outside and vice versa with the pedestrian area, and we’ll have to start working with the county on this because Park Street is a county road,” Sciortino said.
Sciortino added that a preliminary estimate of the financial cost of the project from the engineers came in around $100,000 higher than the grant award.
“This is definitely a welcome receipt from the state. It will cover the vast majority of the project, and hopefully we will be able to find some additional grant money to cover the remainder of the cost,” she said.
The driveway for the administration offices at 101 E. Park St. is a long, winding road, with the entrance a good deal farther down the road than the office buildings themselves.
“It’s not easy (to walk there),” Sciortino said. “You have to either go all the way down to the main entrance, and that makes you backtrack about a quarter of a mile, or cut through the woods, which is not really passable.”
There is a disused path through the woods closer to town — marked by two stone columns and a chain across the entrance. The path is a former entrance to Point Breeze, but opening it up for foot traffic is not a matter of simply paving it over, Sciortino said, and doing so is not a part of the current plan.
“We’d love to, but it would require a lot of caution because it’s archaeologically sensitive,” she said. “You can still see remnants of a bridge [Bonaparte] created. Between that and the Native American history of that property, the state has a lot of very stringent requirements when it comes to digging or any other activity.”
With the streetscape plan now adopted, Sciortino said the planning board can now take a look what some of the next best steps for the city to follow in accordance with the plan.
In the near term, the city has reached an agreement with New Jersey Transit to allow use of the River Line station, at the other end of Park Street, for public parking.
“I’m actually working as we speak to get signage out there and to start marketing that, because that will be another connecting piece with this sidewalk and pedestrian bike path,” Sciortino said.
Sen. Troy Singleton and Bordentown City mayor Jennifer Sciortino with a grant check for $475,000 earmarked for walkability improvements to Park Street.,
