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FRUGAL TRAVELER
In Princeton, a Brief Ivy InterludeSee the article in its original context from
October 13, 1996
,
Section 5,Page
6
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THE novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once described Princeton as encircled by a ''ring of silence,'' with ''sordid Trenton'' 12 miles to the south and ''the suburban slums of New York'' 50 miles north. He was an undergraduate at the time, full of strong opinions and callow pretensions, desperate to kiss a pretty girl and get into the best clubs on campus. When he left the university early to join the Army in 1917, he went straight to Brooks Brothers in New York to replenish his wardrobe first.
Of course, Princeton, chartered by King George II of England in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, has changed since Fitzgerald's day -- welcoming women in 1969 and filling the greenswards between Colonial halls and Collegiate Gothic residential colleges with modernist structures by Robert Venturi and I. M. Pei. Still, if Fitzgerald were to return, he'd know it immediately, because Princeton remains a place apart from what he called ''the dirty gray turmoil'' of the everyday world.
Harvard and Yale were founded earlier, and have the same Neo-Gothic architecture and cloistered atmosphere; but Princeton's small-town setting gives it a heightened sense of removal -- which runs so deep that it has fostered a superstition. Fearing dire consequences (like the flu during finals), undergraduates never walk out of FitzRandolph Gate on Nassau Street at the north side of campus, separating gown from town. Passage is reserved for graduating seniors, for whom it is a rite symbolizing entrance into the real world.
But in the dog days of a New York summer, I was already in the real world. And I wanted out -- not for four years, but for a little getaway. I couldn't afford to go far or stay long, which is why Princeton appealed to me. It takes less than an hour and a half to get there on the train run by New Jersey Transit, for $14 round trip, off-peak. At Princeton Junction you catch a one-car shuttle to town. On board I learned that the shuttle is affectionately called the Dinky, and the small depot in Princeton the Dinky Station.
When I arrived I half-expected to be greeted by an upperclassman handing out freshman beanies. But in late August the campus was largely deserted, so I shouldered my bag and marched up leafy University Place, passing the cathedral-like McCarter Theater (with a late-September to May season) and the University Store on the west side of campus, where I could have bought a Princeton captain's chair for about $300. But my budget was too tight for that. In fact, it was only by making a few compromises that I'd been able to afford this Ivy League interlude at all, because Princeton isn't an intrinsically frugal destination.
Downtown there are just two places to stay, the large, venerable Nassau Inn (with a Norman Rockwell mural depicting Yankee Doodle in a feathered cap and rates for singles that range from $130 to $190); and the 15-room Peacock Inn on Bayard Lane, where I booked the cheapest single in the house for $80 (now $90) including breakfast. I'd have liked to stay for three nights, touring the university on foot and renting a bike to reach several Revolutionary War sites around town. But, amazingly, there are no bike rental shops in Princeton, so I stayed for two nights and got an economy car priced at $44 (from Stefanelli's Avis, a 10-minute walk from the inn) for a little shunpiking on my last day in town.
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