[3] Sections within the city, such as Chambersburg, Wilbur, Stacy's Mill, and Stuyvesant Heights, were autonomous villages or towns eventually absorbed by or annexed to Trenton.

North Trenton attracted a large middle-class, professional population, which coincided with the construction of modern, 'planned' neighborhoods situated around parks and green space.

During this time North Trenton attracted a large middle-class population, and a variety of immigrant groups primarily from southern and eastern Europe.

North Trenton was regarded as a middle-class 'melting pot' peopled by a vibrant professional class which formed an important economic and cultural foundation for the city.

North Trenton's diverse catalog of residents also included Russians, Middle-Easterners, Jews, and Anglos of English and Scottish descent.

In 1939, a government study recognized North Trenton as one of the most successful and harmonious 'integrated' urban areas in the country, and designated it as a 'model' of economic and social vitality.

African-American painters, poets, and writers organized the North Trenton Round-Table, an arts society that published its own journal and staged theatrical performances from the mid-1920s to the early 1950s.

Samuel Alito, the late Supreme Court Justice of the United States, was born and raised in North Trenton, as was Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of U.S. forces in the first Gulf War (1991).

By the late 1960s, however, economic and social changes saw a steady exodus of middle-class families from the North Ward, while numbers of poor migrants from the Southern states filled the vacuum.

Several important sites remaining in North Trenton reflect the area's pre-1968 heyday, such as the Battle Monument (a tall granite shaft modeled after Nelson's Column in London) which commemorates the Revolutionary War victory of Washington's troops over the British.

Our Lady of the Divine Shepherd, built in 1940, was designed by the French-born architect Paul Neas, and served as the only African-American Catholic church in Trenton until it was merged with Blessed Sacrament Parish in 2002.

The Polish Falcon Hall, built in 1910, was designed by the Polish-born Frederyk Poszki, a royal architect who fled Russia on the eve of the Communist Revolution.