THE STAIRS – The walkability of Frenchtown took a leap forward in November of 1888 when a wooden stairway was built above Fourth Street to help young scholars climb up to and down from the Hillside Academy.
You can see them in the center of this bad photo. That's Milford Road on the left and the school in the upper right.
The unnamed “Man About Town” columnist for the Frenchtown Star wrote, “It is an improvement along with the new iron bridge, and the steam fire engine. That's doing pretty well for a third-class town in one year.” (The bridge was the creek bridge on Kingwood Avenue.)
After the Hillside Academy burned down in 1923, the stairs enabled Everittstown Road kids to climb down to their new venues of learning. The stairway was still operational in the 1930s. But the stairway was dismantled and the school property was sold into private ownership in the 1940s. The first few steps, which are made of cement, are still there on old Reading Avenue, which is so overgrown it's invisible in summer.
The loss of the stairs was a blow to pedestrians, who have to walk down to the main part of town on Everittstown Road, which has no sidewalks and, in places, no shoulders. It was an issue for Borough Council in the 1970s and it's still an issue. (Brad, forgive me for bringing it up.)
The terrain and lack of shoulders would make the installation of a sidewalk a costly and painful feat of engineering and land acquisition.
From "Rick's Frenchtown Encyclopedia"
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