Can We Create A New Kind Of Downtown In Abandoned Suburban Offices?

Inside the historic old Bell Labs building in Holmdel, New Jersey, a developer is creating a “metroburb”–a self-contained, indoor Main Street that will house stores, a food hall, and tech company offices. The question is: What’s a downtown without a city? In the latter half of the 20th century, around 5,000 researchers and engineers went to work every day in suburban Holmdel, New Jersey, at Bell Labs, the research and design arm of AT&T. The work done in the lab became the foundation of ...