Trenton Keeps On Making It: LEED-Hopeful Sterling Building Could Become Garden State Capital's First LEED Building

Two trends with which gbNYC is fully on-board, in no particular order: green building and urban core revitalization in New Jersey, and real estate developers getting their proletarian blog on in support of those projects. The good folks behind the renovation of Trenton's Sterling Building -- that would be Urban Word LLC, Trenton Makes LLC and WSP Associates LLC -- aren't attempting anything remotely as ambitious as Jay Amato's Zero-Energy Building at Red Hook Green, and the Sterling Building's program-specific blog isn't quite as spirited as Red Hook Green's, either. But relative bloggy worth aside, the Sterling Building, which broke ground on Wednesday, looks pretty excellent. It has registered for LEED Core and Shell certification, and could become Trenton's first LEED building. More importantly, though, it's another sign of intelligent green life in Trenton's urban center.

The Sterling Building itself dates back to the 1930's, and while the two-story, 5,600 square foot structure isn't a stunner on its own, the green retrofit it's receiving -- and its location on Trenton's revitalization-ready South Broad Street retail corridor -- are more than noteworthy. At the risk of repeating ourselves -- which is to say, I'm about to repeat myself -- cities without dense, functioning mixed-use cores can't really be green cities, regardless of the quality of the buildings in those cores. As can be said of the rest of Trenton, the South Broad Street corridor (which is currently part of Trenton's Urban Enterprise Zone) has seen better days, but developer Roland Pott sees promise there. "There’s a lot of new residents moving in, and small-business owners are opening up stores to service the immediate community," Pott says. "Our hope is the corridor will eventually begin to serve not only [the] immediate community, but also become a place for the regional community to visit." From a bunch of different perspectives, that would be a good thing. But what sets the Sterling project apart is that it offers both retail space and loft condominiums.

The raw space for those condominiums is impressive (check the picture above left for proof), and the green features on display in Sterling's overall design -- there's a list of them at the project blog here, but they run the usual gamut from rooftop solar to bamboo flooring and low-VOC finishes -- should be seen to great advantage there. Stephen and I never make any bones about pulling for New Jersey (in anything, really), but the Sterling Building is especially easy to pull for. This is in part because I'm a dork -- if it wouldn't take a long time and hurt a lot, I'd get "Intelligent adaptive reuse in an urban center, near mass transit" tattooed on my midsection -- but also because projects like the Sterling Building seem exactly like what Trenton needs. Rest assured we'll keep an eye on it.