The Moore family has lived in Princeton since her grandfather settled in the town in 1890. Moore attended local public schools and graduated from Princeton High School in 1973. Six years later, after withdrawing for academic reasons, she graduated from the University.
Throughout her campaign for Borough mayor, Moore, a Democrat, continually emphasized her community roots and advertised herself as a “proud graduate” of the University. Yet the two identities she championed, Princeton resident and Princeton student, had the potential to arouse conflicting allegiances. One of the most pressing issues of the election revolved around the University’s proposal for the construction of the Arts and Transit Neighborhood, which would require the movement of the Dinky — a proposal which Moore has opposed.
The controversy over the Arts and Transit Neighborhood reflects disconnect between the aims of the Borough and the aims of the University. Many residents see the University, the Borough’s largest taxpayer, as a detached institution that should take a greater responsibility for the cultural and economic well-being of the local community. Moore stands uniquely positioned at the center of the debate, as someone who has lived on both sides of FitzRandolph Gate.
“An education at Princeton teaches one to think critically, and as a graduate, I am not timid about expressing my views — even if they differ with the institution’s thinking,” Moore wrote on her campaign website.
For the first time since 1949, a University graduate is positioned to decide the Borough’s policy toward the University it houses. And because she is an alumna of a university she often politically opposes, it is important to understand her time as an undergraduate. By deconstructing Moore’s time at the University, perhaps her antipathy toward the University’s proposals can be deconstructed simultaneously.
Moore’s time at the University was marked by academic troubles her freshman year that required her to withdraw from the University. While Moore was originally set to graduate with the Class of 1977, she withdrew from the University for “scholastic reasons” in June 1974, according to University documents, after a freshman year in which she encountered obstacles as both an African-American and a female student. She later rejoined the Class of 1979.
“After a less than stellar freshman year, I decided that I would ... take a breather from all things Princeton,” Moore said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian last week. She spent the summer of 1974 working, and in the fall of 1974, she studied at the Boston Architecture Center before returning to the University with a “renewed spirit” two years later, she said.
During freshman year, a U. divided
The campus environment that welcomed Moore in the fall of 1973 was a different world from the atmosphere that exists today. Attending the University, according to Moore, was not something she had aspired to as a child. The prospect was not even realistic until 1969, when the University admitted its first class of women. Moore was in her early years of high school at the time.
Even before she moved onto campus, Moore’s childhood experiences placed her in a unique situation. She acknowledged that attending college in her hometown did not seem to play the same role in expanding her world view as it may have for her peers.
“My mother warned me of that dynamic, as she too had attended college in her hometown,” Moore said.
Despite the fact that Moore had lived her entire life in Princeton, classmate Audrey Little ’77 saw her as “very worldly and well-traveled” and a “very poised, radiant person.” Moore had traveled extensively with her family as a child and spent summers working in Trenton and at a local architecture firm.
Even as a child, while the University was still male-only, Moore was aware of its proximity. She heard of the all-white University’s refusal to admit prominent local African-American singer Paul Robeson.
Moore was also familiar with the University culture and academics. As a student at Nassau Street Elementary School, now the Lewis Center for the Arts, she shook the hand of former senator and star basketball player Bill Bradley ’65. She attended the football games of Washington Redskins star Charlie Gogolak ’66.
“I was familiar with various professors, the relationship to the institute ... and many area R&D and scholars,” Moore said. She and her mother would often pass homes in town renovated by her future architecture professor, Michael Graves. Graves declined to comment for this article.
To her peers, Moore was “something of a local celebrity,” recalled Adonis Hoffman ’76, who met the freshman Moore during his sophomore year. As a local, Moore already knew her way around town and was acquainted with some upperclassmen. In a time that, according to Hoffman, was marked by a clear town-gown dynamic, Moore was able to bridge the divide.
“I saw her at that time as a real liaison between students of the University and people in the community,” Hoffman said. He remembered Moore remaining involved with her church and volunteering at community centers while on campus.
Moore’s interest in art seemed to extend to her personality as well. Hoffman said she “brought a nice sense of fashion to the university,” and Little remembered her as “very artsy.”
On campus — or rather, on the edge of campus — Moore lived in the Princeton Inn, in what is now the Forbes College Annex. The trek from her dorm to her classes was, in fact, further than the walk from the center of campus to her childhood home. Her single-sex hall was located in “a service-like wing of concrete block, slab-on-grade, flat-roofed construction — clearly an afterthought to the grand Georgian hotel,” she recalled. According to Little, there was not much contact between Inn residents and other students at mealtimes, and the Inn community was generally an “insular group.”
Even within the all-female hall, there were divisions.
“What was obvious was that it was an entire hallway of girls, separated by race and a fire door,” Moore said. One of Moore’s high school classmates lived in one of the halls with other white girls, while Moore lived at the other end.
Housing was not the only arena in which racial and sexual divides were clearly visible.
Beyond her residential experience, Moore found a close-knit group in her academic department. Fellow Architecture concentrator Jim McNeal ’80 said the nature of the architecture program was “kind of isolating,” and he first got to know Moore in their hours spent in the studio. “We needed the fellowship,” McNeal explained.
McNeal, however, felt Moore was not the type to call attention to her minority status as an African American female. “She just moved in a positive direction at all times and in that kind of environment you can’t let things slow you down,” he said.
Of the 18 senior theses submitted to the architecture department in 1979, five were by female students, according to University records, and Moore remembered one other African-American female in her class. Anne Harman ’79, who also concentrated in architecture, said she admired Moore’s “trailblazing spirit” in a male-dominated department.
A “defining moment” of Moore’s freshman year came in her introductory architecture class. Moore remembered the professor telling the class, “I don’t know why you women and blacks are in this class.” She said she received grades in the “very unfamiliar range of a C- or D.”
“After all my years of nurture, achievement and experience, Princeton may have opened its doors, but some minds remained closed,” Moore said. After years of interacting with the University as a town resident, the Princeton experience as a student was not what Moore thought it would be. She was not stimulated by the newness of the place.
Moore then withdrew from the University.
A passion for urban planning
The future mayor said that her time away from the University built determination to succeed in her career.
“[My years off] changed my resolve that regardless of the attitudes or the predispositions of people who obviously were not like me, I wouldn’t let it change my continued pursuit,” Moore said. Architecture, specifically urban planning, was still her passion.
Upon Moore’s return to the University in 1976, she started the Coalition of Black Architectural Students “in memory of the words [she] heard” in her freshman year architecture class, in order to promote professional and minority educational development for minority students.
Moore said that she and her fellow COBAS members felt that their professors, all white middle-to-senior-aged males, did not necessarily share their design goals. Whereas they were interested in affordable public housing projects, Moore pointed to another “elitist” category of architecture.
“Either your clientele is likely to be a multimillionaire or you were doing work that had not necessarily been the focus of, or the byproduct of, some kind of social benefit,” Moore said. COBAS could take an alternative path, but “you have to use the skills that you’re not necessarily being trained to do.”
While Hoffman did not recall Moore giving explicit indication of plans to enter politics in her time on campus, Moore saw her involvement in urban planning and politics as intertwined.
“I studied architecture to address what I saw as social and economic problems through a focus on the design and development of the built environment,” she said.
Moore’s career goals were reflected in her senior thesis, which centered on urban revitalization. Titled “The Old ‘Moose Hall’: Preliminary Steps towards Renewing a Decaying Urban Neighborhood,” Moore proposed a renovation of a vacant Trenton lodge of the Loyal Order of the Moose, reimagining it as a community center.
“I conclude my urban design experience with a stimulating feeling, eager to see its implementation,” Moore wrote in her thesis conclusion. The city of Trenton demolished the Moose Hall in May 1979. Yet while her thesis design did not come to fruition, Moore would soon enter a career in design and urban planning.
Moore went on to earn her M.S. in Real Estate Development at MIT, and founded YAM Design and Development, LLC. After a stint as the Director of Education Programs at The American Institute of Architects in Washington, D.C., and numerous development and planning positions in Washington, D.C., Boston and California, Moore returned to Princeton in the mid-1990’s. She had been involved in numerous municipal planning committees, including the creation of Hinds Plaza and the renovation of the Arts Council before announcing her candidacy for mayor last spring.
Race for mayor
During the democratic mayoral primaries in June 2011, Moore claimed that opponent David Goldfarb would be impeded in his mayoral duties due to a conflict of interest. Goldfarb works for Drinker, Biddle & Reath, LLC, the firm representing the University in the Arts and Transit Neighborhood.
“Because I am a University graduate, I will consult with a broader University community in seeking common ground on difficult issues,” she wrote on her campaign website. “My multilateral relationships will allow me to keep the conversation going.”
Borough Councilman Kevin Wilkes ’83, who is running for mayor of the consolidated Princeton this fall, said that this local background has contributed to her familiarity with Princeton issues.
“Yina grew up in this town. This is her home community so she has a long and deep understanding of Princeton,” he said. Yet to a degree, Moore also grew up in this university, and her experiences here have also shaped her policies and her personhood.
Moore told the ‘Prince’ that she believed that student awareness of and engagement in town issues is very important. She said she had met some students who had seldom engaged in community affairs.
“[These students’] views of town for some seem to be pretty limited to Hoagie Haven and now the sports bar,” Moore said. “These same students are often fluent in the language and cultures of many other places and travel the country and world extensively.”
Last November, P-Votes made an effort to host an on-campus debate between Moore and her Republican opponent, Jill Jachera. A debate did not materialize, as Moore had previously scheduled to attend a community meeting on the proposed night of the debate. Jachera, who made an active push during the campaign to engage current undergraduates, met with students in a question and answer session at The American Whig-Cliosophic Society instead.
“What I did not do was forsake my civic responsibilities by not attending and participating in a very important community meeting in order to attend an event billed as a student forum with limited student attendance,” Moore said, citing her busy schedule as an obstacle. “My opponent wasn’t doing anything and I was already fully engaged in activities in the community.”
She explained that a video of a prior debate with Jachera was “quite available” on YouTube and “it was not going to add to the body of work or the dialogue [of the election].” Instead, Moore met with the Princeton College Democrats and several other students one-on-one to “engage them in local town-gown discussions.”
“She seemed genuinely interested in hearing about our concerns regarding town-University relations,” said Natalie Sanchez ’14, the president of College Democrats. “The fact that she is a Princeton alum probably has something to do with this.” Sanchez said College Democrats also campaigned for Moore with a table in Frist Campus Center and spoke with Moore’s son, also her campaign coordinator, at club meetings.
Despite her own unexpected freshman year experience, Moore acknowledged her sentimentality for the “less physical goals” of the University, referring to the relationships she developed through her years here.
“In terms of my experience, I enjoyed it. I really did,” Moore said, recounting the time one of her classmates brought her flowers and asked her to join his group for a class project. The team ended up designing an information system for a library, which Moore’s professor marketed later that year.
Many of her memories center on her architecture major, which greatly shaped her experience. Moore admitted that architecture was highly demanding and did not leave much time for other social activities.
“But I wouldn’t have changed that because I was involved in that since I was 13,” she said.
Today, Moore is trying to reconcile the town she knows as hometown and college town, Nassau Street and Nassau Hall.
“I think PU has pushed us to excellence and service and we need to push back,” she said. “This is a good thing.”
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