Stoneybrook -- fictional or not?

[virgoscorpio]

I don't know if this has been posted elsewhere, so I apologize if it has.

OK -- so Stoneybrook is a fictional city, we know that. But does anyone know if Ann M. Martin based Stoneybrook off of Stony Brook, the town around where she grew up in Princeton, New Jersey?

If you look up Princeton (and Stony Brook), you will notice that it looks and feels similar to the fictional town.

[greer]

I wrote a longish blog post about this on my blog recenty... The link's in my signature

[virgoscorpio]

Thanks for this -- I just read it your post. I guess my assumption was correct!

To the moderators: you can delete this threat now, if you want!

[lilafowler]

Stoneybrook definitely has a lot in common with Princeton. I grew up about 15 miles from Princeton and it does have the upper middle class, weekly-grocery-shopping-at-Whole-Foods vibe you get from the BSC books, though it's not quite as small as Stoneybrook is described.

If you do a board search (for "Princeton," I guess), you'll find a few posts I made when I was driving around the area very frequently this summer and kept making the most random BSC connections. Several of the local names (streets, towns, businesses) that show up in the BSC books can be found on a map of the Princeton area, and the books just sound more New Jersey than they do Connecticut, if that makes any sense (Stamford isn't all that much closer to New York than it is to Boston, but Boston is practically an exotic foreign land compared to NYC in the books).

[greer]

My guess is that Princeton was a lot smaller in the 50s/60s, when Ann was living there.