Trenton teeters on the brink of becoming an urban destination, one with a hotel to stay in.

BY ANNE MATTHEWS

John A. Denlinger (www.burgerbits.com)

For the last half-century, Trenton has been a threadbare little city on the way to somewhere else, mostly New York, 70 miles north, or Philadelphia, 30 miles south. From the train, from the expressway, Trenton is a blur of strip malls, Edward Hopper streetscapes, state office parking lots, vintage brownfields, and the defiant electric sign on its Delaware River bridge: Trenton Makes, The World Takes. Until this spring, out-of-towners never stayed overnight in Trenton. They couldn’t. New Jersey’s capital (pop. 85,403) had no hotel.

John A. Denlinger

Yet this grimy, cross-grained town with more outstanding warrants than registered voters also offers perhaps the last best stock of reclaimable housing and commercial space in the megalopolitan corridor, most of it Victorian or prewar, much in tenuous condition. Some Trentonians dream of wrecking balls. Others tend mental maps of endangered treasure: bas-reliefs in local terra-cotta, arts and crafts windows, a stained-glass bank ceiling boarded over but maybe intact. Trenton today, its preservationists and homesteaders argue, is akin to Savannah in 1970, Brooklyn in 1980, or Providence in 1990—battered, dormant, immensely promising.

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