New Jersey Capital City Partnership Program Launches "Rediscovering the Bloomsbury Neighborhood" Website with Research and Design by Anthropology & Education Ph.D. Candidate Elena Peeples
"Rediscovering the Bloomsbury Neighborhood" is a historical research study developed in a collaboration between the Capital City Partnership Program at the New Jersey Office of the State Treasurer, the Mercer County Planning Department, and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. The study supports broader efforts related to an ongoing waterfront recovery and urban highway realignment initiative for the area around NJ-Route 29 along the Delaware River. Elena Peeples, doctoral candidate in Anthropology and Education at Teachers College, served as a research intern with the Capital City Partnership Program from 2023-2025. In collaboration with partner agencies, she worked to design and carry out the research and to produce the interactive website at this link.
This research study considers the Bloomsbury neighborhood in Trenton, NJ, formerly part of Trenton's downtown district before it was demolished in the early 1960s to make way for planned redevelopment as part of the city’s urban renewal strategy. In the decades that followed, the area was ultimately replaced by high-rise government offices and adjacent surface parking lots which are otherwise separated from the rest of downtown. Given that the past and present built environment in the Bloomsbury area is so markedly different (that is, the features that support neighborhood activities no longer exist), this study explores the relationship between physical conditions and the use of urban space.
This study emphasizes Bloomsbury’s everyday neighborhood life, shaped by its environment, its people, and its activities, as it connects to the city and the region at large. In order to maintain the character and complexity of the people and places that form the neighborhood, this study adapts frameworks borrowed from history, human geography, anthropology and archeology to develop a multi-modal, qualitative, geo-historical approach. Through an interactive, multimedia map website, this study presents historic photos, newspaper clippings, and other materials that showcase Bloomsbury's approximately 363 businesses and organizations operating in the neighborhood in the late 1950s. Website visitors are invited to explore these materials as artifacts produced through and for neighborhood life (Bloch 1953; Joyce 2015; Trouillot 2015) -- and which can help us reframe conversations about urban development, progress, and possibility when we acknowledge the seeming discontinuities between our past and our present conditions (Battle-Baptiste & Rusert 2018).
