Community Spaces
In addition to their teaching function, the new performance venues in the Arts and Transit Neighborhood will host University-produced performances and other activities that will be open to the public. Combined with the art museum and the existing McCarter and Berlind theaters, the neighborhood will become a vibrant cultural destination for the region.
While the numerous arts and performance venues will be used heavily throughout the year by students and visiting lecturers and performers invited by the University, community groups will be invited to partner with the University to provide both collaborative and independent programming to activate the public plazas and the indoor performance venues.
Restaurants, cafés and other public amenities will support the needs of visitors, while also appealing to faculty, staff and students, as well as to the many riders of the Dinky and other transit services in the area.
These spaces will not all be housed in a single large structure but in a village-like cluster of buildings, compatible with the scale and texture of the surroundings, and interspersed with plazas and landscaped open spaces following traditions of campus and town planning in Princeton. The buildings will be designed by a variety of architects, establishing a diversity of architectural expression within a coherent whole created by the neighborhood planning framework.
In addition to the village of buildings and public spaces that are dedicated to the arts, a Transit Plaza will become a community and campus focal point as a multimodal transit hub. The focal point of this transit hub will be a new, relocated Dinky train station that will include an indoor heated and air-conditioned waiting room, ticket machines and public restrooms. The Wawa will be included in the station building, and an international newsstand and a bike shop and storage facility will be located nearby. The new Transit Plaza will provide for a convenient place to transfer from foot, bike or car to mass transit. New Jersey Transit buses, the community jitney, campus shuttles and future bus rapid transit will have dedicated stops in the station area. These connections at the Dinky station will result in the area becoming a focal point within the community that is designed for access to sustainable means of travel.
