Plainfield is a small city in New Jersey, home to roughly 50,000 people. A lot of folks consider it rough and in decline. It’s a majority black city, is a quarter Hispanic today, and experienced a race riot in 1967 amid deindustrialization and economic deterioration.

It looks today like any number of down-on-their-luck cities that were obviously once quite grand, but which have lost many of their downtown businesses. In the 1980s, the city was designated as an Urban Enterprise Zone, a nice way of saying that it needed economic revitalization.

I drove through Plainfield for a photo essay a couple of years ago. Here’s a snapshot of what it looks like:

I like places like this. I also like New Urbanism, and housing developments that imitate the design principles of traditional cities, but then I think…a place like this is already here. Shouldn’t urbanism mean revitalizing the cities we have? It’s strange to drive right by a real old city to go park in a garage at some “town square.”

Plainfield definitely hit hard times, but it never reached real collapse. In fact, the population numbers do not point to decline at all: Plainfield only ever lost population once according to the census—and then only by about 1,300 people—between 1970 and 1980.

And this slow but steady population growth, amid a largely unchanged or at least recognizable built environment, is what brings me to today’s building, by way of an article in My Central Jersey:

Downtown redevelopment has literally reached a new frontier.

Frontier Flats, a mixed-use development in the former Rosenbaum’s Department Store at 171 E. Front St., celebrated its grand opening earlier this week.

Paramount Assets completely gutted the interior of the 55,000-square-foot property and redeveloped the structure with 35 market-rate apartments with 26,000 square feet of retail space on the first floor.

Here’s the building right before opening on Google Earth. Appearance-wise, it pretty much looks the same as it did back in the day.

Here’s a historical image from the article alongside a nice little excerpt:

And here’s (part of) the company’s description of the property:

Frontier Flats is a luxurious new three-story addition to the city of Plainfield, NJ. Originally built in 1910 and carefully restored in 2023, our apartments for rent in Plainfield are designed with one thing in mind: your comfort. We offer 35 different apartments including 12 studios, 18 one bedrooms, and 5 two bedrooms all with top-of-the-line features and finishes.

Put aside the marketing and look at the contents of the building. Only 35 apartments, in three different configurations. A real locally scaled, incremental project. Retail (pre-existing) on the bottom. In a historic building, right in the middle of downtown. Visually, it barely changes the streetscape, while replacing a vacant building with people, many of whom are likely to be affluent professionals with disposable income, which hopefully means they will spend money in town. (The article notes that the studio apartments in the building are already fully leased.)

If you ask me, this is exactly the kind of project that we should be supporting. I don’t really see any downsides to this. Urban department stores aren’t coming back. These sorts of buildings will just continue to deteriorate. If housing can pencil out financially, go for it.

What’s even more interesting to me than the project itself, however, is this bit of historical information:

Rosenbaum’s Department Store, one of the downtown’s former department stores along with Bamberger’s, Teppers, Sears, Montgomery Ward and Steinbeck’s, opened on Jan. 1, 1927, and closed in the mid-1980s.

In 1927, Plainfield’s population was probably around 32,000 people. It didn’t exceed 45,000 until 1960. That’s six downtown department stores for a city that ranged from 30,000-40,000 people! You would have no idea, driving through Plainfield today (and certainly not 10 or 15 years ago), that it enjoyed that kind of economic vitality. But there’s hope these days that it’s coming back.

Related Reading:

Inhabiting Old Ghosts

Occoquan, Virginia’s Embrace of Old and New

The Rest of Somerville, NJ: Part 1

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