Three Women, Historic Potteries, and a Legacy of Lead in the East Trenton Neighborhood

When three elderly women who grew up on the same East Trenton block all developed Alzheimer's disease, their families began asking hard questions about what they'd been breathing, drinking, and growing in their soil for decades.

Kimberly Booker moved back to Trenton from Ohio in 2014 to care for her aging grandmother, Rebecca Delores Lyles. What she found broke her heart twice over.

First came the slow, devastating progression of Alzheimer's disease. "You grieve twice," Booker explains. "You grieve when you see the loss of the person they once were, and then you grieve when they're no longer with you physically."

But as Booker watched her grandmother fade from the vibrant community leader to someone who no longer recognized her own granddaughter, another pattern emerged that was equally troubling: her grandmother's sister and best friend were experiencing the same decline.

All three women had spent their lives on or near Klagg Avenue in East Trenton. All three developed Alzheimer's disease in their 80s.

"Is there a correlation?" Booker asks. "Three ladies that lived right here having the same diagnosis --- it's mind-blowing."

Rebecca Lyles was born in New York in 1936 but moved to New Jersey when she was just three years old. She spent her entire life on Klagg Avenue, becoming what Booker describes as "a pillar of the community." Lyles worked tirelessly on voter registration drives, served on the North Ward Committee for decades, and maintained a close friendship with former Mayor Doug Palmer.

"Every election campaign season, she was out at the polls, getting people to register to vote," Booker recalls. "She was really, truly active in the community."

Lyles had learned carpentry and farming from her great-grandfather in South Boston, Virginia, skills she brought back to her East Trenton home. "She grew her own food," Booker says. "Unfortunately, there weren't raised beds back then, so it was in the ground."

That detail --- growing food directly in the soil --- would later take on new significance.

The last ten years of Lyles' life told a different story. "She didn't know where she was, who she was, who I was," Booker says. "It was just heartbreaking." Lyles passed away on January 1, 2024.

Now, Booker is caring for her 86-year-old aunt, Alimeta, who lived in Ohio for 60 years before returning to Trenton with the same diagnosis.

The third woman in this tragic pattern was Lyles' best friend, who also grew up in the neighborhood. When Booker called to tell her about her grandmother's death, the friend didn't recognize her voice. "She was telling her son, 'Some lady on the phone saying that Dolores Lyles passed away. I don't know what she's talking about,'" Booker recalls. "It broke my heart because she had the same thing."

The Lead Connection

While Booker acknowledges she doesn't have concrete medical documentation linking her family's diagnoses to environmental factors, emerging research suggests her suspicions may be well-founded. Studies have shown that cumulative lifetime lead exposure is associated with accelerated cognitive decline, and evidence from animal models and human observational studies suggest that childhood lead exposure may raise the risk of adult neurodegenerative disease, particularly dementia.

A study published in Environmental Health Perspectives that tracked over 8,000 elderly Americans found an association between blood lead levels and subsequent Alzheimer's disease mortality. Separate research published in Science Advances concluded that childhood lead exposure is strongly associated with lower cognitive functioning at older ages.

The connection becomes even more concerning when considering the timing. Within the next ten years, the generation of children with the highest historical lead exposures --- those born in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s --- will begin to enter the age at which dementia symptoms tend to emerge.

Booker's concerns about environmental factors aren't unfounded. Last year, researchers came to her backyard and pulled soil samples. "Not just Rutgers, but DEP also came," she says. The two organizations that came to collect data in the East Trenton neighborhood were Rutgers (EOSHI) with Dr. Brian Buckley and Ph.D student Sean Stratton, and the U.S. EPA Region 2 on-scene coordinator, Joel Petty. "There has been evidence of lead in the soil, yes."

Her neighborhood sits in the heart of what is now a federal Superfund site. The EPA officially announced in July 2025 that it has placed the entire East Trenton neighborhood on its Superfund National Priorities List due to widespread lead contamination from historic pottery operations. The contamination dates back to over 70 potteries that operated in the area from the 1850s to the 1920s, with lead-based glazes scattered by wind and settling in yards, gardens, and public spaces.

The EPA has measured lead levels in soil as high as 1,200 parts per million in East Trenton. EPA standards before 2024 considered anything over 400 PPM to be elevated lead levels in the soil. In January of 2024, the standard was lowered to 200 PPM. Testing of 130 residential properties in the area has found elevated lead levels throughout the neighborhood.

The potential connection becomes more troubling when considering how people lived in the neighborhood for decades. Like many residents of her generation, Lyles grew vegetables in her backyard --- vegetables that may have absorbed lead from contaminated soil.

"My grandmother grew her food in the ground," Booker emphasizes. "She was a city girl, but her grandparents were in the country, so every summer when they were little girls, they went to Virginia, and her grandfather was a farmer and a master carpenter, so he taught her everything he knew."

Those skills served Lyles well in Trenton, where she maintained a productive garden. But what seemed like healthy, self-sufficient living may have inadvertently increased her exposure to environmental toxins.

Booker wishes she could get more definitive answers about the potential environmental connections to her family's health struggles. "I wish I could have her be a part of a study, because this is just mind-blowing to see that so many of our loved ones are being diagnosed with this."

Her concerns have reached elected officials. When Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman honored Lyles at a community event, Booker shared her observations about the pattern of illness in the neighborhood. "She said we have to hold these elected officials accountable and whatever needs to be done, they need to fix it."

Moving Forward

While the EPA's designation of East Trenton as a Superfund site offers hope for cleanup, the process involves years of planning and remediation, with other complex contamination cases remaining works in progress after years of effort. For families like Booker's, answers may come too late.

"Most of the ones that grew up on the block, they're no longer here," Booker says. "They have passed."

As she continues caring for her aunt while grieving her grandmother, Booker remains focused on the possibility that environmental factors contributed to their suffering. "I'm not a scientist," she says. "I just look at how my grandmother, my aunt, and now her best friend all developed the same devastating disease."