A Tale of Two Edge(less) Cities: Morristown, Princeton, and the Dynamics of Wealth, Sprawl, and Centralization in Suburban New Jersey

With more than half of Americans now living and working in the suburbs, we must better\ud understand the national and local forces behind metropolitan development and change. This thesis focuses on more accurately modeling the histories and realities of the clusters of suburban commercial office and retail spaces known as edge or edgeless cities. Building on significant research on the general trends leading to the creation of edge(less) cities, I ask how the historic built forms and local elite institutions that predate job suburbanization have shaped the creation of these edge(less) spaces. Therefore, my thesis analyzes commercial real estate reports, histories, planning documents, and journalistic sources in order to examine the intersection of national transportation, economic, and social shifts and existing elite built forms in the historical\ud narratives of Morristown and Princeton, New Jersey. My thesis concludes that overlapping\ud economic, social and transportation trends have shaped New Jersey suburbanization patterns and New Jersey's historic towns and local elites have responded to these larger trends in order to\ud locally structure this suburban growth into a particular sense of place