The building, designed by Eero Saarinen in the early ‘60s, has a storied past as the home of Nobel Prize-winning research at Bell Labs, its longtime sole occupier. (Key parts of the discovery of the Big Bang Theory happened there.) Those were boom times for the whole area, says Rutgers Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy dean Jim Hughes, also a speaker. Jim tells us 80% of all the office inventory that had ever been built in the State of NJ as of 1990 went up throughout the ‘80s. Shown above: the building’s future lobby.
They tore down New Brunswick’s Memorial Homes. The community survived.
As crowds cheered when the four Memorial Homes buildings collapsed into dust on Aug. 18, 2001, Linda Fogle Davis remembers crying. "They were laughing. I was crying," Davis said. "I was hurt. That was my home being demolished." Twenty-five years later, former...