THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF LAMBERTVILLE

The outpouring of indignation, at a meeting of the city’s Zoning Board of Adjustment at the Phillip J. Pittore Justice Center last spring, was triggered by a development group’s proposal to convert the shuttered Strand movie theater in the downtown into a wedding hall and event space. Residents were appalled by the prospect of 150 wedding guests driving up the narrow, often-congested streets of Lambert Lane, North Union Street, and Coryell Street multiple times every weekend, with weddings blasting music and shouting and laughter into a mixed residential and commercial neighborhood until 10 p.m.

A team of consultants for the developers—Refined Hospitality of New Hope and Brickstone Realty Corporation of Philadelphia, and entrepreneur Andy Chalofsky—told the zoning board that weddings would have no significant impact on traffic, parking, and noise, an assertion that was greeted with derisive laughter and shouts of “Oh, come on.”

Then it was Jeff Tittel’s turn to speak. The former director of the New Jersey Sierra Club and an outspoken critic of the project, Tittel pointed his finger at the board members. “This board has the future of Lambertville in its hands!” he thundered. “A wedding mill would not be good for this town.”

The room erupted in applause. Before the zoning board voted on the variances the developers needed for the project, the developers’ attorney, Richard Mongelli, announced the company was withdrawing its variance application. They would “resubmit” an application, Mongelli told the board, “at a later date.”

Once again, developers had come to Lambertville with grand plans and met a wall of impassioned opposition. These days, residents of the picture-postcard village on the Delaware River are engaged in a pitched battle to preserve what HGTV last year described as one of the fifty most charming small towns in America.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a community celebrated for its throwback charm would be wary of change. Still, the twenty-first century is knocking on Lambertville’s impeccably restored, nineteenth-century double doors. Its booming popularity for both homebuyers and tourists—10,000 visit on peak weekends—has brought growing pains that include high property taxes, more traffic on narrow streets, insufficient parking, a dwindling supply of affordable housing, and simmering conflict on the question that inevitably occurs when a place is “discovered”: How much development is too much?

Lambertville Mayor Andrew Nowick has lived in the city since 2011 with his husband, Paul, and their three sons. When Nowick first ran for the part-time job leading city government in 2021, he had no prior experience working in government or holding public office. Still, he understood that, among the city’s residents, development was the primary issue. “I went door to door,” he says, “and I was made acutely aware that Lambertville does not want to be New Hope.”

It’s a common refrain. Lambertvillians have seen their sister town across the Delaware River surrender some of its gritty, funky identity to large hospitality firms’ sleek luxury hotels and restaurants, such as The River House at Odette’s and the expanded Logan Inn. Today, New Hope’s downtown is dominated by shops and businesses that cater heavily to tourists, traffic is often clogged with motorcycles and SUVs, and parking is scarce.

Melissa Hamilton, a chef and cookbook author whose father, Jim, played a central role in Lambertville’s renaissance in the 1980s and ’90s, says her father would want Lambertville to continue “to grow and develop.” But, she says, “He certainly would have opposed the out-of-scale, overdeveloped path its neighbor, New Hope, has chosen.” She says her dad would want to preserve the community’s “intimate charm and, most importantly, its human scale.”

The word scale is often heard in the city’s ongoing debate about its future. “What’s so remarkable about Lambertville is how much people love living here,” says City Council President Benedetta Lambert. Her late husband was a thirteenth-generation member of the family that helped found the community in the eighteenth century. “But now we’re at a crossroads. We have to figure out a way to bring in businesses and development that doesn’t ruin the small-town feel and scale that attracted people here in the first place.”

Residents new and old describe the compact, walkable community as “magical”—warm and neighborly, vibrant, energized by artists, musicians, and a wide array of cultural and civic activities. It’s an emphatically progressive place, with two food banks, two marijuana dispensaries, ubiquitous Pride flags, and large LGBTQ and Oaxacan immigrant communities. “This community has a vibe,” says Carolyn Gadbois, the owner of Union Coffee and a local homeowner. “Everyone who’s here is choosing to be here.”

Nowick aptly describes the city as “a Currier & Ives print.” Much of its famed architecture dates to the Victorian era. Grand Queen Anne, Italianate, and French Second Empire mansions built by factory owners and merchants line North Union Street, while Federal-style row houses constructed for mill workers fill side streets and the southern part of the city. The bustling downtown, overlooked by the soaring white steeple of the First Presbyterian Church (built in the 1850s), is filled with art galleries, antiques stores, and independently owned restaurants, cafes, and retail stores. Just steps from the downtown, the timeless Delaware River still casts its elegant spell on the community, which was born on its banks in the eighteenth century as Coryell’s Ferry.

Throughout the city, different eras of its economic and social history remain visible, like exposed layers of sedimentary rock. The Delaware and Raritan Canal, hand-dug by mostly Irish immigrants between 1830 and 1834, carried coal and other goods from Pennsylvania to New York City and Philadelphia. The train tracks traveled from the 1850s to the 1970s by smoking locomotives of the Belvedere-Delaware Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad, which turned Lambertville into a booming industrial powerhouse. Today, former factories where porcelain, rubber boots, silk goods, spokes and wheels, hairpins, crackers, and toilet bowls were once made have been skillfully repurposed into boutique businesses, dental offices, hair salons, cycle shops, restaurants, and yoga studios.

The canal’s towpath—once trod by mules pulling barges—is a happy highway traversed by bicycles and runners, innumerable dogs and dogwalkers, and anglers casting lines into the canal’s languid waters. People stop to shoot the breeze. No one seems in a terrible hurry. Even strangers greet each other with a nod and a smile.

“It’s a walkable city, but it has nature five minutes away,” Klimuk says. “It’s such a great balance. On a hot day, I can take a short walk and look at the amazing architecture and then go put my feet in the Delaware River and watch the ducks, the geese, and the birds. I have never felt unsafe here at any time of day.”

Gadbois says LGBTQ residents are woven into the fabric of Lambertville life. “You can be out, loud, and proud, and it’s a non-issue,” she says. “It’s a unique experience to feel this comfortable and safe in a small town.”

Kim Ward Bacso, owner of River Valley Realty, points to Lambertville’s strong sense of community as its special sauce. “To live in a place where you know everyone, where you get a smile from people as you walk down the street, where you don’t feel lonely—how do you assess the value of that to your mental health?” she asks. “This community is a jewel.”

It took some vision and a concerted campaign to make it that way. A half-century ago, Lambertville was just another American small town that time had left behind. The last of its factories had closed, jobs were scarce, and stores and historic buildings, such as the Lambertville train station, were shuttered. Its Victorian houses were decaying. Poverty was widespread.

In 1979, Mayor Phillip L. Pittore went to Lambertville native Jim Hamilton for help. Hamilton, the son of Lambertville’s doctor, was a Broadway set designer, entrepreneur, and charismatic bon vivant. “Dad went to Jim and said, ‘We have to do something,’” recalls Michelle Romeo, Pittore’s daughter, a member of the city’s planning board.

Hamilton spearheaded a multi-faced, multi-year campaign to revive the community, including the creation of Shad Fest to bring in tourism. The campaign took years, but was wildly successful. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Lambertville was thriving, and turning visitors into homebuyers.

Success, however, has its costs. Bacso says that since she launched her firm in 2012, an influx of affluent retirees has sent the average home price soaring, from $357,000 to $790,000—a 120 percent increase. Larger, well-restored homes and newly built condominiums often top $1 million, with frequent bids over asking price. “Demand far exceeds inventory,” she says.

Lambertville’s median family income is now $159,000, significantly higher than the state and national averages. Municipal property tax rates have climbed by about fifty percent since 2018, and now property taxes total $20,000 and up on well-restored large homes. Across the city, there is broad consensus that taxes and housing costs have conspired to squeeze out many longtime, blue-collar residents and put home ownership and even rentals beyond the reach of most of Lambertville’s restaurant and shop workers, teachers, police, and other essential workers.

The average rental price for a one-bedroom is $1,900, according to Basco, and they’re scarce. Two-bedrooms, renting for an average of $2,400, are even more scarce. At least forty-six apartments have been converted into Airbnbs and other short-term rentals for visitors, city officials say, and the city lost forty-four rental apartments in 2021 when Tropical Storm Ida flooded and ruined the Village Apartments at the north end of town. “We used to have economic diversity in Lambertville, but we’re losing it,” Bacso says. “We’re still an artsy community, but artists can’t afford to live here anymore.”

The well-known musician J.B. Kline, a native of the city, says housing costs have driven out many of his friends and neighbors from Lambertville’s mostly blue-collar past. “At least half of the people who grew up with me here have moved away,” Kline says. “Prices of houses and apartments have been going up, up, up.” Kline says most newcomers are over 60 years old and upper-middle class, with few young families.

Marleina Ubel is an exception. Ubel, 38, a senior policy analyst at New Jersey Policy Perspective in Trenton, bought a home with her husband, Chris Register, 33, on Cottage Hill in Lambertville in 2022, at a discount price of $375,000 from a friend, after renting an apartment in the downtown for several years. The row houses and mansions were far out of their reach. She and her husband, a PhD post-graduate researcher, don’t know many other couples in their 30s, and it’s not easy to find friends for their two children, ages 15 and 1. “We’re in love with this town, but there’s not much generational diversity,” Ubel says. “There would be more young families like ours if there was more affordable housing.”

Everyone agrees, at least in theory, that the city needs more affordable housing. But the city is densely built and has little open land. In recent years, more than a dozen condo developments of two, three, or four units have filled in scattered gaps between homes, and they’re generally priced at $700,000 and up.

When the family owners of Finkles, a century-old hardware store, retired last year and sold their properties on Coryell Street to Refined Hospitality and its partners, the developers put forward plans for several major building projects at the store and six adjoining properties. At a raucous public meeting in May 2025, the developers unveiled their original plans to residents before formally submitting them to the city: a forty-nine-room, three-story hotel and spa, a wedding venue, and a two-story parking garage alongside the Delaware and Raritan Canal and tow path. Irate, shouting residents left Brickstone president John Connors Sr. red-faced and visibly shaken.

When he protested that the project was a continuation of Jim Hamilton’s vision for Lambertville, one resident responded: “Jim Hamilton is a saint here. I would not invoke him. I would caution you.”

Within days, “Big Hotel! Big Mistake!” signs sprouted on lawns and windows all over the city. The developers soon retreated on the hotel proposal, saying they “heard your concerns” and “powerful emotions.” At the meeting in March they came back with a revived proposal that still included the wedding venue, only to be met with the intense opposition that led the development team to withdraw that plan as well. “It was a sad day for us,” Connors says, “and we think it was a sad day for the town.”

Connors and his partners turned down a request from River Towns to discuss their alternative plans for the two-acre site, which includes the former Strand Theatre, a large parking lot, and the former Finkles warehouse on the river side of the canal. Just across the canal, the former Finkles hardware store has been leased to local retailer Lambert & Hope.

Other development proposals in Lambertville continue to trigger strong pushback. City officials say Genesis Investment Properties of Hamilton, New Jersey, which owns Lambertville Station restaurant and hotel and several other properties in the city, approached them several years ago to discuss a massive development idea for its parking lot and surrounding property, including condominiums, additional hotel rooms, retail stores, a parking garage, and an elevated promenade along the river. “We told them it would never fly,” Nowick says.

Proposals for larger condo developments, as well as a 2020 plan to build an apartment building where the police station now stands and build a new, multi-story municipal building downtown, also went down in flames because of community opposition.

One project, however, is proceeding despite strong resistance and a “no” vote by the city council. The national homebuilder K. Hovnanian plans to construct 160 townhouses and forty units of affordable rental housing at the old Lambertville High School site on Connaught Hill. (See accompanying story, page 62.) The sprawling twenty-five-acre site, up a steep road from Route 29, also includes land once used as a town dump and by the Taurus electronics factory—an apparent source of the carcinogenic “forever chemical” PFAS.

The city had designated that untended, wooded site as “an area in need of redevelopment” in 2018, viewing it as a partial solution to its legal obligation to create its “Fair Share” of affordable housing units under New Jersey’s landmark Mount Laurel doctrine. But after high levels of PFAS were discovered in the well water on Connaught Hill in 2024, the city council voted to withdraw its approval to develop the site.

K. Hovnanian sued, and in 2025 New Jersey Superior Court Judge Robert A. Ballard Jr. ruled in favor of the builder, citing Lambertville’s need to meet its affordable housing obligations. In July 2025, the judge ordered the city to allow the 200-unit project to proceed.

It’s estimated the K. Hovnanian project will bring an additional 600 people to Lambertville, which would be a fourteen percent increase in the city’s population. While it appears ground won’t be broken any time soon, the fight over the housing plan has left bruises and bad feelings, with opponents and the city council blaming Nowick for not making the PFAS and flooding issues the focus of the city’s legal argument before the judge. These critics contend that Nowick actually wanted K. Hovnanian to win its lawsuit, as a way to partly satisfy the city’s obligations and to bring in significant new tax revenue.

“I think Nowick finds the Mount Laurel stuff scary,” says Beth O’Brien, a Connaught Hill resident. “He didn’t lead. He’s operating out of fear.”

Lambert, the city council president, has publicly clashed with Nowick over the project, as have other city council members. “Andrew is not always transparent with the council and the public, and that’s frustrating,” she says.

Nowick rejects the criticism. He says state officials and the court told the city it was “out of compliance” with its “Fair Share” program requirements for new affordable housing units. It simply wasn’t realistic, he says, to believe the project could be stopped. “Fair Share is a very powerful legal force,” Nowick says. By reversing earlier approvals, Nowick says, “the council put me in a very awkward position.”

Whatever happens with the K. Hovnanian project, it will not end the city’s need for more affordable housing or the debate over development. Under a complex Fair Share formula, Lambertville still will have an “unmet need” for fifty-three units of housing, according to city officials.

Former mayor Fahl, who did not seek a second term in 2021, says Lambertville is failing its “legal and moral obligation” to create housing for working-class city residents “who can’t afford $700,000 condos.”

Fahl says affluent homeowners who want Lambertville to be “pressed in amber” have created “a culture of no” that also denies local restaurants and store owners tourist revenue they need to thrive. She contends opponents of development proposals are “very loud and make a lot of signs,” which “creates the perception that everyone agrees with them.” But that, she says, is not true.

Carolyn Gadbois, who also serves as vice president of the Greater Lambertville Chamber of Commerce, shares that view. “I’m a homeowner here,” she says, “so I naturally think, I don’t want another 100 cars driving down the street, I don’t want more parking problems. But I’m also a business owner, and most of the businesses operate on small margins and could use more revenue. We need tourist dollars to keep the stores and restaurants alive. We can’t expect the whole economy and tax revenue to come from the residents.”

Amy Coss has a contrasting perspective, although she also runs a business: Sojourner, a quirky shop on Bridge Street. Coss (a contributing writer for River Towns) began working with her late mother at the shop in 1990, and has been deeply involved in the Shad Fest poster auction and other community activities.

“More people coming into town isn’t necessarily better for business,” Coss says. “You can actually get too many.” She says some of her longtime customers from out of town call her to complain they tried to stop in but could not find parking. “That makes them less likely to come back,” she says.

Tittel, the former Sierra Club director, insists that he and other residents who opposed the Finkles and K. Hovnanian proposals are not against all development. “I moved to Lambertville so I could walk to restaurants and stores,” he says. “I want these amenities. I want tourism. But I believe in compatible, appropriate growth and development.”

Places that throw open the door to developers in pursuit of rateables and tourist dollars, he says, wind up sacrificing their identity and quality of life. “Development should enhance the community,” Tittel says, “not kill the golden goose.”

In the coming months, Lambertvillians will have the chance to make choices about their future. The city’s planning board, city council, and the mayor all have agreed to rewrite the city’s master plan. Nowick has formed a planning subcommittee to determine the scope of the master plan update. “We want to start over, completely rewrite it, and tighten things up,” Nowick says. “It’s a perfect moment to look at where we are and where we’re going.” The process will include community meetings to solicit the public’s input.

Planners have discussed ideas for replacing the shuttered Village Apartments, off North Main Street at the north end of town, with a new, multi-family housing project. (City officials say nearly all the previous residents who lost their homes in the flooding caused by Tropical Storm Ida in 2021 have resettled outside of Lambertville.) There have also been preliminary discussions about turning the nearby CVS shopping center on Cherry Street into a new, mixed-used development with both housing and retail stores.

None of those projects will happen tomorrow, or even in the next year. City Councilman Evan Lide says creating a new master plan “gives us the chance to think about what the city could look like in ten and twenty years.”

Nowick concedes there’s much left to do to address the affordable housing problem, and that the city’s budget is tight. But the total assessed value of Lambertville’s properties has soared to nearly $1 billion, doubling its tax revenue over the past six years, and Nowick says the city’s finances are “stable.” In 2022, both Moody’s and S&P downgraded the city’s bonds because of a high debt load and insufficient reserves, but last year the rating services upgraded back to AA, crediting “improved budgetary management and oversight” and rising tax and other revenues.

It remains to be seen whether the city’s rating will be downgraded this year as the result of an error that city officials made by assigning a non-taxable property a value of $28.7 million, which led to $651,000 in potential tax revenue that could not be collected. Nowick says he takes responsibility for not detecting the error—it went unnoticed by city officials for more than a year—but it should have no long-term impact. “Lambertville is in a very good spot financially,” Nowick says. “We like our small-town feel, our way of life. We do not need to depend on major new developments.”

Yet as the complexity of the city’s problems and finances grow, Nowick believes Lambertville has outgrown its governing structure of a part-time mayor and city council and needs to hire a full-time city manager. “I am actually doing the mayor’s job full time, but it’s not enough to manage the city,” he says. “We really need a business manager.”

Councilwoman Kaminsky agrees. “We may need a larger, more professional government structure,” she says.

Michele Romeo, a lifelong Lambertville resident and member of its planning board, has witnessed the arc of the city’s evolution from down-on-its-luck former factory town of the 1960s to Best Small Town fame of the twenty-first century. At times, Romeo says, she and other Lambertville natives worry the city’s revival has succeeded only too well. “The locals were afraid when the city began changing. There was resentment of the new people moving in,” she says from her home on Cottage Hill, overlooking the downtown. “But the new people have improved the town. They have revived the old houses, made them beautiful again.

“Lambertville has changed, but in an important way, it really hasn’t. It’s still a small town where people really care about each other. When developers come in, they need to understand that people here are very passionate about preserving what we love about it.

“That,” she says confidently, “will not change.”

William Falk wrote about the Walking Purchase, an historic theft of land from the Native American Lenape tribe by the sons of William Penn, in the Spring issue of River Towns. He lives in Lambertville.