Turntable Junction
Reference
Established circa 1966 by Ted Merritt, Turntable Junction is named for the old CNJ turntable located near the South Branch Station. It comprises a small strip of retail shops plus several stores and restaurants located in some of the surrounding homes. On the site of a large nearby foundry, Merritt later started Liberty Village, a Williamsburg-like period attraction that was instead converted into the nation's first factory outlet shopping center.
The view above looks across the old CNJ turntable, which was made into a brick patio, toward a strip of shops running along Fulper Road. (In my highly-compressed track plan, the CNJ Freight Station occupies this area.)
By 1972, above left, the area closely resembles the way it does now, above right, although some of the buildings in the strip of shops across the top were demolished in the 1990s; all of the shops in the strip down the right side still exist.
Today, most of the shops have closed. As of March 2019, investors from Brooklyn have purchased the shopping village for $3.1 million; there is some talk of tearing everything down and building a civic plaza. The adjacent Liberty Village is also mostly empty and was at risk of bankruptcy until Namdar Realty Group, a New York investment firm, purchased it for $2.7 million in July 2019.
Owing to space constraints, I'll only model some of the shops that run down the right side of the aerials, shown below.
The Model
Presently I've no clue how I'll model the shops, although I do have a Miller Engineering brass gazebo kit I'll use for the bandstand.