Hollands’ move to Mill Hill a history maker
Mayor Arthur Holland and his young wife (Betty) were idealistic newlyweds with a baby daughter in 1964 when they decided to restore a house in Trenton’s crumbling, if historic, Mill Hill neighborhood.
Holland wanted nothing more than a sturdy house in an old section like Georgetown in Washington D.C., where she had worked, and Mill Hill filled the bill. She and the mayor, an ex-seminarian, gave little thought to the neighborhood being mostly black.
But the media saw the significance and symbolism behind the mayor of an aging American city moving in with his poorest and most disgruntled constituents and Art and Betty Holland became worldwide news. The day after word of the Hollands’ planned move hit the Trenton newspapers in February, America’s two big news services were calling the couple’s home on Tyler Street to hear more from the mayor.
“It was a big story,” Betty Holland recalled the other day. “There were big headlines: ‘White mayor moving to black neighborhood,” and before long every time I picked up the phone it was some reporter. When The New York Times called, I said, ‘Art, this is really serious.’ ”
On Feb. 24, four days before the move to 138 Mercer St., Holland’s story — along with a picture of him, Betty and 10-monthold Cynthia Holland — appeared on the front page of The New York Times.
Life, Look, Ebony and other magazines, plus a host of reporters from the rest of the media, were on hand to record the historic event and interview the mayor, his wife and their former and new neighbors. ****
Actually, critics, including some family members, thought the Hollands had lost their minds, found the move from comfortable Tyler St. to Mill Hill’s Mercer St., especially with an infant, in two words — unnecessarily scary. Still, Art and Betty loaded up their belongings and moved into their new home on Feb. 28, 1964, exactly 60 years ago. The scene proved a reversal of Norman Lear’s The Jeffersons, about an upwardly mobile Black family moving into a deluxe apartment in the skies of New York City’s upper East Side.
The Hollands paid $7,000 for a house that needed $20,000 in electrical and other repairs. Still, Betty Holland had the fixer-upper she desired and Art Holland had the neighborhood that matched his affection for all people.
Newspapers expected trouble but nothing untoward occurred during the Hollands 24-year stay on Mercer St. Well, political pundits claimed the move cost Holland his reelection bid two years after when Carmen Armenti won the mayor’s race.
Holland regained the mayor’s chair in 1970 and held the position until he passed away in 1989. By then, the Hollands had resold their Mill Hill home (1987) and moved to Hiltonia.
Mill Hill rebounded and remains one of the city’s most vibrant areas inhabited by a variety of persons from all ethnicities and backgrounds.