Picture Palmer Square as it is today: shops, restaurants, offices, and homes clustered across from Princeton University. Today the Square forms a collection of shops, restaurants, offices, and residential spaces, but its story belongs to the 20th century. Edgar Palmer, heir to the New Jersey Zinc fortune, built the original Square from 1936 to 1939, and he hired architect Thomas Stapleton to create a Colonial Revival design as the town's complement to the university across the street.
To make way for this plan, Baker Street was removed in 1929 and its houses—the center of Princeton's original African-American neighborhood—were moved to Birch Avenue; contemporary accounts described that neighborhood as "a dingy small-town slum. Stapleton consciously evoked American colonial architecture, drawing directly on features of the then-new Colonial Williamsburg. He emphasized buildings at the corners and on the cross-axis, and specified facades and materials—specialty woodwork and Ludowici tile—to follow Williamsburg's design.
Notice those choices laid out: the corner buildings, the tiles, the woodwork, and the view across Nassau Street toward Princeton University.