May 15, 2000
by Dick Prentke
If your vision of Route One centers on the odoriferous dairy, the Solar Motel, and the Colonial Diner, you are showing your age. A recent New York Times article observed that the area is hot: More than 800,000 square feet of office buildings were added in the last year, and there is more to come. The university has recently sold 98 acres of the Princeton Forrestal Center to the Patrinely Group, a Houston development company whose Northeast regional manager is Princeton resident Walter F. (Jan) Thomas. His first 154,000-square-foot building is completed, and there are plans for an additional million square feet of “Princeton Corporate Campus @ Forrestal,” which, as its name implies, is being designed to attract the growing number of technology companies in the area, as well as mainstay companies in the pharmaceutical and financial-services sectors.
If your appetite for Cliff Ransom news was whetted by his Nude Olympics observations in our last column, you won’t be disappointed to learn that he has extended his personal tally of “truly fabulous antiquities” (and, no, he is not referring to any of our classmates). The list now includes the Parthenon on the Acropolis, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the city of Palmyra in eastern Syria, Abu Simbel in Egypt, any number of Mayan sites in Chiapas and Quintana Roo, and, as the most recent addition, Bagan, a collection of 2,217 temples, stupas, pagodas, and monasteries dotted across a 40-square-mile, dry, dusty plain in Myanmar (a.k.a. Burma). As proof that son Clifford III (“Cliffo”) has inherited his wanderlust, father and son joined together for the first two weeks of Cliffo’s six-month walkabout through southeast Asia. With any luck, the pair will reunite about now to wander across the Taklamakan Desert in western China on The Great Silk Road.
35 Years Ago: Departments were selected and rooms drawn (how did those lacrosse guys once again find themselves at the top of the “random” list?) We “enjoyed” reading period and prepared for finals that would end our sophomore year.
© 2000 Dick Prentke and The Princeton Alumni Weekly. Used by permission.
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