I grew up between the old New Jersey towns of Flemington and Clinton. Flemington was the town that we “belonged” to and that I basically grew up in, because we were closer to it, and our errands and routines mostly centered on it. Clinton was always more of a place we visited occasionally to take a stroll or to meet a friend, but it wasn’t “my” town.

However, in recent years, going back up to Jersey with my wife to visit my parents, I find that much as I still love Flemington and still consider it “my” town, if we want to go out to eat or go for a stroll or check out a few boutiquey stores—and aren’t going to Somerville or Lambertville—we’ll go to Clinton. Clinton is smaller than Flemington (roughly 2,700 compared to roughly 4,900), but it has a much livelier and fuller Main Street. And I’ve been wondering, why and how? I’ll get to that.

There’s an interesting point that I want to note: the absolute size of a place can seem very different from how we experience it; a small place can be dense with things that engage us. That’s one of the secrets of small towns, or low-intensity urbanism in general: it doesn’t overwhelm the senses, but it offers and contains so much human interest and possibility for mental engagement for its size.

Clinton’s small downtown area has two dessert/ice cream shops, three coffee/tea shops, a number of restaurants including a few with lovely outdoor dining areas, an oil/vinegar tasting room with a fresh cheese counter and various culinary specialties and housewares, a local pickle and canned vegetable store, an art museum, a thrift store, an old-school pharmacy, even an audio equipment store.

There’s a new apartment building on the edge of town, with just enough connectivity for residents to walk to Main Street on an afternoon or weekend. There’s a little garden area with benches. There’s even a bridge over a river, with an old inn on the other side. (There’s nothing a riverless town like Flemington can do about that, of course; and it isn’t the Delaware River in Clinton, either. I think Clinton is the only river town in Hunterdon County where both sides of the bridge are in New Jersey.) Clinton, in other words, feels like a small town done right.

Flemington has a lot of promise as a major project there reaches completion, and I’ve written about all of that a lot. But it currently lacks…many of those things. The town’s two main commercial nodes, Main Street and Stangl Road, are separated, with poor wayfinding to connect them. Main Street lacks something that is obviously an ice cream shop (though it has one or possibly two, the faded Hershey’s Ice Cream doesn’t tell you for sure), it lacks a restaurant to get a drink until a restaurant in the new project opens (there is a craft brewery and a distillery, but they’re on Stangl, away from Main Street), and it lacks a selection of restaurants and shops that would make it worthwhile for most people to drop the car and spend half a day in town.

Basically everything to do in Clinton is inside this satellite image. There’s a bit of strip retail on the righthand side, just past the old town core. And the new apartment building is just a bit further to the right, out of the frame.

Here’s the old-town part of Flemington, with Main Street by the middle and Stangl and the old outlet center by the bottom right:

Flemington is also the county seat, and it has more history—its Union Hotel, the core of the big redevelopment project going on now, was made famous because reporters stayed there during the Lindbergh baby kidnapping trial, which took place in the historic courthouse right across the street.

But today, on an average afternoon or evening, Clinton has a cozy, bustling vibe while Flemington feels empty and kind of…windswept. You can walk a block and not meet another person. The streets aren’t brightly lit. The most centrally located coffee shop in Clinton, on Main Street near the bridge, closes at 8pm, and 9pm on Friday and Saturday. Flemington’s only obvious coffee shop—not on Main Street—closes at 5pm and 8pm on Friday and Saturday. (It’s also a little…weird. I’m sorry if I’m not interested in witchy tinctures and tarot readings, guys, I just want coffee.) The other place for coffee is an artisan bakery on Main Street, but it doesn’t have “cafe” or “coffee” in the name, and I actually didn’t know it served coffee. It also opens at 9am and not every day, so it’s not an option for early-morning walkers or commuters.

There are two, maybe three, restaurants on Main Street in Flemington that qualify as sit-down, and one on Stangl. One of them is only open four nights a week, from only 5pm to 8:30pm. And about drinking, if that’s your thing, there’s no liquor store or wine shop on Main Street where you could buy a BYOB bottle, either. (There’s one on a side street in a strip mall, heading toward the highway—it’s not the pleasantest or most obvious walk.) Clinton has more like six sit-down restaurants, though no quite pleasantly walkable liquor store either; there’s one at the right edge of that satellite view up above. (This is a thing because most New Jersey restaurants are BYOB; the state’s very expensive and restrictive liquor license regime is the reason for that.)

So I just keep wondering, what makes the difference between these two towns? They’re not that far apart, they’re not that different in terms of commuting patterns or class or anything. Why does one feel like a full, bustling Americana town and the other feel sparse and emptied out?

Anyone who’s done any sort of small-town revitalization work, or who owns a business in a place like one of these, please chime in! I’m curious what people’s experiences and suppositions are.

I can identify one thing: Flemington has three large shopping centers on the edge of town, one of which is in the adjacent township. There are a couple of nicer sit-down restaurants in there, as well as a coffee shop, Italian bakery and pastry shop, a Chinese takeout, a Portuguese barbecue place, and a couple of pizzerias. These are all businesses that would be nice on Main Street and would bring people to the center of town (e.g., “Let’s go before the pizza’s ready for pickup and take a stroll on Main Street”).

More importantly, maybe, there are a lot of stores in those shopping centers. It’s chicken and egg. You can’t really shop in Flemington and then dine outside town, or have a nice dinner in town after some shopping in the area. And you need business owners willing to take a risk that opening up downtown will help bring in a customer base that can support everyone. I believe that the shopping centers within the town limits are also part of the town’s business improvement district, meaning official efforts to bolster business in town are not completely congruent with bolstering Main Street and the old town.

When I say “We go to Clinton because there’s stuff,” it works the other way, doesn’t it—there’s stuff because people go. I believe that adding people will definitely give a boost to Flemington’s economy. That’s what the new project will do: apartments, hotel rooms, and a restaurant in the old hotel and a retail and public space component. The expectation and hope is that this will draw both customers and visitors, and other people to do business in town. But it might be worth noting that Clinton has very little new housing and has had a healthy Main Street pretty much continually.

Clinton also has much less strip-plaza shopping on its edges. So while food shopping and other everyday errand-running pretty much takes place in the suburbs everywhere—the Main Streets don’t have small groceries or hardware shops or a ton of services—there’s still more of a reason to go into Clinton in the first place. Or at least, more of a draw.

I rattled off that list of Clinton businesses up above. One of the weird things I notice about Flemington is that a lot of the businesses have some quirk to them that just feels a little…weird, low budget, or something. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

The old coffee shop was called Factory Fuel, because the location is in the old pottery factory. I guess “fuel” is caffeine, but the name doesn’t immediately indicate what the place is. Jack’s Pizza has a full Latin American menu in addition to its Italian/pizza menu, which was added as the town’s Latino population grew. Maybe changing the name would have upset people, but “old-school pizzeria with an additional Latin menu” is less interesting than something that describes and advertises that. There used to be a Christian bookstore that also doubled as a coffee shop, or maybe the other way around. There was, of all things, a Polish delicatessen, which sold wonderful cheap imported deli hams, but had no chance in a dark little corner of a building at the end of the main drag.

The quirky misspellings and non-sequitur names, I don’t know. There was a Jamaican restaurant called Island Vybz (“Yeah look up this cool new restaurant called Island Vybz, but it’s spell V-Y-B-E-Z…no wait, no E, just V-Y-B-Z…”), the witchy coffee shop is called Alkemy Coffee, the bubble tea/ice cream/donut (maybe?) shop is called Little Egypt, because the owner is Egyptian. The thing is, these names and multi-concepts make it harder to describe or look up these places, so this isn’t just some kind of proper aesthetic thing, it’s a business consideration.

There have been a couple more over the years: places that try to do more than one thing, or have a too-cutesy name. And alongside that stuff you have a bunch of small stores that largely serve the Latino population. Not as in there’s any problem with that, but as in someone spending an afternoon in town finds an odd mix of very local places that cater to one segment of the community, and overengineered boutiquey places that don’t obviously cater to anyone. It’s worth noting that Clinton has a Latino convenience store too, actually, but it doesn’t feel like it stands apart in any way. There’s enough there that nothing standards apart it any way; it’s just all part of the fabric of a small-town business district.

I guess what I’m saying is, the businesses in Flemington tend to feel a bit amateur. As if they didn’t have a consultant or a mentor helping them set up. Maybe that’s because there just isn’t much of a business community in downtown Flemington. There are a few places that have hung on through the years, but there’s been a lot of vacancy and churn. So maybe part of what you need is a couple of really expertly run small businesses that can not only bring in customers to town, but show and tell the ropes to everyone else.

More abstractly, there’s maybe an identity crisis. Is Flemington the history-infused quaint New Jersey small town it had been seen as for a long time?, and which most of its residents understand it to be? Is it an up-and-coming destination? Is it a New Hope-style hip New Agey haven? There’s a little bit of all of that that you pick up, and maybe it’s too small to contain all of that.

Clinton, on the other hand, simply does quaint New Jersey small town very well. And yes, the whole question is how and why do they do it well, but the absence of a sense of uncertain identity is a positive. There’s an unselfconsciousness to it. The same is true of most of the businesses in Clinton. They don’t feel like they have a gimmick or a “concept.” They’re just businesses that obviously do a thing. The best stores and restaurants are the ones that are boring or familiar in concept but excellent in execution. Overengineered and poorly executed is never superior to simple done right. At least, you need a core of places like that to anchor a small downtown. I think you could say this, and it’s a good general heuristic: Clinton does boring things well; Flemington does interesting things poorly.

So those are some impressions and comparisons of these two towns I spent a lot of time in growing up and still visit on every trip back up to New Jersey.

What do you think?

Related Reading:

Canal Sprawl

Occoquan, Virginia’s Embrace of Old and New

The Rest of Somerville, NJ: Part 2

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