For most of the last two decades, driving past the Union Hotel meant driving past a problem. The building at the center of Courthouse Square sat with its upper floors dark starting around 2008, when the restaurant downstairs finally gave out and the top three floors went vacant and without power. If you have lived in Flemington through any stretch of the years since, you have probably heard "the Union Hotel is finally getting fixed" more than once, followed by nothing.
On July 15, 2026, it actually happened. The building reopened as a 100-room boutique hotel under Marriott's Tribute Portfolio brand, run by Concord Hospitality, and it did not come back alone. It anchors a rebuilt block called Courthouse Square, and its return changes more about downtown Flemington than the addition of one hotel usually would.
What's Actually Inside The New Union Hotel
The hotel has 100 guest rooms, including 10 suites, and is pet-friendly. At the center of its food program is Jersey Prime, a modern Italian steakhouse built around in-house dry-aged steaks, house-made pastas, and a raw bar. Downstairs, JP's Speakeasy leans into the building's history with a prohibition-era feel and a craft cocktail list. Guests now earn and redeem Marriott Bonvoy points at an address that spent most of the last eighteen years unable to host an overnight guest at all.
That history is not incidental to the building's appeal. The Union Hotel first opened in 1814 and became a gathering place for well-to-do stagecoach travelers through the 19th century. Its most famous moment came in 1935, when national reporters covering the Bruno Hauptmann trial across the street at the Hunterdon County Courthouse stayed there. Mark Laport, president and CEO of Concord Hospitality, described the reopening this way when it was announced:
"The Union Hotel represents the kind of destination travelers are increasingly seeking."
For residents, the more relevant point is that it is now a destination for a Tuesday dinner, not just for out-of-town guests.
The Decade Nobody Quite Believed
The reason this reopening felt improbable to a lot of Flemington residents is that it took so many false starts to get here. The borough first selected a developer in November 2012, with a plan for a 50 to 55-room hotel, a ballroom, and a ground-floor steakhouse and pub. That developer defaulted on the redevelopment agreement in 2015 and was removed from the project.
In 2016, the borough selected Jack Cust, whose initial proposal called for demolishing the Union Hotel entirely and replacing it with a hotel, retail space, underground parking, and a college campus. That plan drew enough local opposition that Friends of Historic Flemington filed multiple lawsuits, arguing the borough had skipped required public process. The dispute dragged on until 2020, when Cust unveiled a scaled-back version: the building's height came down from 87 feet to 63 feet, the historic Potting Shed structure was preserved, and the educational component was dropped. Stabilization work on the old hotel began that November. The last lawsuit between the developer and preservation advocates was not settled until September 2021.
None of that is ancient history. The height reduction, the stabilization work, and the final lawsuit settlement all happened within the last six years, which is part of why so many residents treated "reopening soon" as a rumor rather than a plan.
Courthouse Square Is Bigger Than One Hotel
The Union Hotel is the visible piece, but it sits inside a much larger redevelopment. Courthouse Square is a 443,291-square-foot project that also adds 206 residential apartments and roughly 22,000 square feet of new retail and restaurant space to downtown Flemington. That is a meaningful number for a borough this size. It means the population walking Main Street on a given evening is not just hotel guests and longtime residents out for dinner, but a new cohort of people who now live there.
The retail buildout is not finished. Later this year, Courthouse Square is set to add Fieldhouse Social, a sports-entertainment venue with duckpin bowling, golf simulators, interactive darts, and shuffleboard, along with large-screen game viewing and self-serve beer and wine walls. Until that opens, downtown's evening options are still filling in. It is worth knowing that the picture as of this August is a hotel and two of its venues operating, with more retail space still to be leased and built out around them.
The Other Downtown That Never Waited
Here is the part of this story that most coverage of the Union Hotel misses. While Main Street's anchor building sat empty for close to two decades, a few blocks away a different kind of downtown was already working. The Stangl Factory, a converted early-20th-century pottery works, has spent years operating as a working artisan hub without needing Main Street's revival to justify its existence.
The building itself has real history. It served as the Fulper Pottery Company's factory number two starting in 1924, and its three large kilns are the last known commercial pottery kilns of this type in New Jersey. Today the space is home to studios, a co-op gallery, and a rotating cast of small businesses. Flemington Pottery, located at 12 Stangl Road, marked its fourth anniversary in May 2026 with a spring sale featuring 25 local artists selling functional pottery, sculpture, and jewelry. That is not a legacy business coasting on history. It is a young, active studio that built its own following independent of whatever was or was not happening on Main Street.
The result is that Flemington residents have effectively been navigating two separate downtowns for years, each with its own rhythm and its own reason to visit.
| Main Street corridor | Stangl Road corridor | |
|---|---|---|
| Anchor | Union Hotel, vacant 2008 to 2026 | Stangl Factory, converted pottery works |
| What's there now | Jersey Prime steakhouse, JP's Speakeasy, Fieldhouse Social (opening later in 2026) | Flemington Pottery (4 years running), rotating artisan market and gallery |
| What it's used for | Civic life, courthouse business, Main Street festivals | Pottery classes, gallery visits, small studio shopping |
What Changes Now That Both Are Running
The reason this moment is worth noticing, rather than just cataloging, is that for most of the last decade these two corridors operated on completely different timelines. Stangl kept its calendar full while Main Street's biggest building sat dark. Main Street's civic traditions carried on anyway. The Corn, Tomato & Beer Festival closed off Main Street on August 8 this year the same way it has for seasons past, festival tents and vendors filling a block that had an empty landmark building looking over it.
What is different now is that after that kind of festival day, there is finally somewhere to walk to afterward that did not exist a year ago. A drink at JP's Speakeasy. Dinner at Jersey Prime instead of the drive home. That sounds small, but it is the difference between a downtown that hosts an event and a downtown that holds people after the event ends.
It is also not a finished picture. Fieldhouse Social has not opened yet, and Courthouse Square's retail space is still filling in. What changed this summer is that Flemington now has two active downtowns running in the same season for what may be the first time most current residents can remember, rather than one that works and one that is still waiting.
If you have lived here through the years when "reopening soon" meant nothing, this is worth a walk down Main Street to see for yourself, even if it is just for a drink at JP's Speakeasy after a Saturday afternoon at Stangl.
If you ever want to talk through what these kinds of downtown shifts mean for property values or timing in Hunterdon County, Christine Cura is always glad to have that conversation. Let's Connect.
