A Free Ride at Princeton

I live on the edge of the "Gray Farm," just across the street from the "Butler Tract." If you were to walk up from the Boat House past Jadwin you would find me quite soon after Faculty Road changes its name to Hartley Avenue. The "Gray Farm" is a neighborhood developed as a "faculty ghetto" in the 1960s, consisting mainly of good $30,000 houses that now go for about half a million each. The "Butler Tract" is a graduate student ghetto of ticky-tacky rental property that is easily the best real estate deal in town. Using a tastefully placed screen of fast-growing evergreens the University has done a pretty good job of shielding us faculty from our neighbors; but we all know they are there and doing their graduate student thing — depressing our property values.

There is one other residential neighborhood in Princeton that has some architectural kinship with the Butler Tract; it consists of the few square blocks of housing available for residential vistors to the Institute for Advanced Study. Naturally, visitors to the Institute are rather grander types than Princeton graduate students and their housing is accordingly grander — yet very much of a genre. The really distinctive feature of the Institute housing is the classy address: Einstein Drive or, for second-class citizens, mere von Neuman Drive. The nomenclature of the streets in the Butler Tract, on the other hand, reveals the time-warp aspect of the real estate. If the houses look like barracks, that's because they are barracks, erected as "temporary" shelter just following World War II. Our Gradgrinds get to live on litte streets named Eisenhower, Marshall, Halsey, and King. That's General (not President) Eisenhower you understand, just as it is General Marshall and Admiral Halsey. Military historians will recall these leaders of our victorious forces on land and sea. Patton, alas, was already elsewhere taken by a early and obscure Princeton president, so they had to give his street to the mysterious Butler himself.

Just as I am unable to tell you who the "Gray" of the Gray Farm was, I cannot identify the "Butler" of the Butler Tract. It would take only two minutes work in the Mudd Library to find out, but I actually don't want to know. There are some small provinces of the imagination that should be preserved from the impositions of what we laughingly call "reality," and the imaginary "memory" of a Princeton of farms and open fields is one of them. I have never understood why publishers so frequently put authors' photographs on dust-jackets, since writers, in particular, invariably look worse than I imagined. I hope that Messrs. Gray and Butler were indeed farmers (or possibly tractarians) of good yeoman stock, but I fear the disappointment of learning that they were just shrewd land "developers."

The Butler Tract is now in its seventh decade of temporary existence. Its little wood frame potting sheds have proved more durable than the Woodrow Wilson School, the Music Building and various other imposing edifices of ashlar or marble built, torn down and built yet again during those decades. The number of famous professors distributed among many continents who once lived in the Butler Tract is now legion. I attribute the annoying limitations to my own celebrity to the fact that I myself lived there only for a few brief weeks of a sub-sub-sub lease. The Butler Tract was then known as "Married Graduate Housing." I hardly need rehearse the historical circumstances that have long since made this name both inaccurate and politically unacceptable, and given birth to the bogus grandiosity of "the Butler Apartments."

Princeton students are probably tired of hearing me insist that they are the world's most pampered. So I'll spare you the shtick about walking three miles barefoot in the snow to the one-room schoolhouse, and simply say that student life here is pretty sweet. Just when I thought that student sybaritism could go no further, however, the Graduate School has outdone itself by laying on a regular half-hourly bus service between Butler and the campus! Free, naturally. This is Princeton.

I have always thought that the great thing about living where I do is that I can walk to work. I continue to do so, but I have to admit that since discovering this scam I have taken to riding the bus home on a fairly regular basis. The buses are amazingly punctual, and from McCosh or Firestone I can get to the bus-stop behind Green Hall in just under two minutes. The ride home is fast, fun, and comfortable, not to mention upliftingly multicultural. The bus-driver and I are ordinarily the only native-speakers of a Western language, though not always the same one, of course. I've never been on the bus when Chinese was not the lingua franca, so to speak, of the majority. I wonder what Admiral King thinks about that.