Howard Gillette Jr.: Assessing the City of Camden's Prospects
... After 50 years of widespread economic devastation, unfathomable urban poverty, and racial strife, maybe leveling the place is Camden's best shot at survival after all.
Leave it to a historian to suggest a brighter future without implosion.
Howard Gillette Jr. didn't intend to depress, he insists as we chat about his bleak book at City Coffee downtown.
The Rutgers University-Camden professor mostly wanted to learn how Camden had come to be the eyesore that suburbanites scowl at as they ride PATCO each day.
Gillette was one of them, once.
"You see it from above," he says, "but you don't want to come down. It's the smallest city with the most big-city problems in the country."
The mess, he learned, wasn't made overnight. It won't easily be cleaned.
But Gillette can't help remembering something he heard Ed Rendell, of all people, say in the 1990s.
Camden's future, Rendell predicted, will depend on empty-nesters.
Gillette was stunned.
But wouldn't you know it? One of his own scholarly colleagues recently upped and moved from idyllic Moorestown to the swanky Victor building on the Camden waterfront.
"That was unimaginable back then," Gillette says, "so the things that are unimaginable now could happen."
Going, going, gone
So what caused Camden's fall?
Some blame the 1926 opening of the Ben Franklin Bridge for dividing, and conquering, the city.
Gillette thinks the riots of 1971 did far more lasting damage.
Not that the intervening years were particularly pleasant.
His chart on Page 42 says it all.
1950 population: 124,555 - 97,900 white, 17,434 African American.
1950 jobs: 59,489.
1980 population: 84,9100 - 26,003 whites, 45,009 African American.
1980 jobs: 27,926.
During the 1960s, Gillette writes, 12,000 well-paying, skilled, industrial jobs skipped town.
In that same decade, 28,000 white residents hightailed it to the suburbs.
I don't generally pity politicians, but it's hard not to feel sorry for those who've tried to right this ship.
"It looked like the Vietcong bombed us to get even," Mayor Angelo Errichetti remarked in 1973.
In the 1960s, Mayor Al Pierce began the shameful trend of pimping out the city's assets to pay for ever-mounting bills and budget shortfalls.
Twenty years later, Mayor Randy Primas sold off the North Camden waterfront for a state prison.
It meant money and jobs. It meant Camden was drowning and willing to grab at any life preserver floating by.
Prisons, sewage plants, trash incinerators - if the state or suburbs needed a dumping ground for its waste and distaste, they had it in Camden....
So could Camden wind up looking like Hoboken or Jersey City? Could it one day compete with Collingswood?
Could it become a racially and economically integrated success story?
"It's not inconceivable," Gillette says, then adds a cautionary coda.
"Historians," he points out, "are really bad at looking to the future."
Read entire article at Philadelphia Inquirer
Leave it to a historian to suggest a brighter future without implosion.
Howard Gillette Jr. didn't intend to depress, he insists as we chat about his bleak book at City Coffee downtown.
The Rutgers University-Camden professor mostly wanted to learn how Camden had come to be the eyesore that suburbanites scowl at as they ride PATCO each day.
Gillette was one of them, once.
"You see it from above," he says, "but you don't want to come down. It's the smallest city with the most big-city problems in the country."
The mess, he learned, wasn't made overnight. It won't easily be cleaned.
But Gillette can't help remembering something he heard Ed Rendell, of all people, say in the 1990s.
Camden's future, Rendell predicted, will depend on empty-nesters.
Gillette was stunned.
But wouldn't you know it? One of his own scholarly colleagues recently upped and moved from idyllic Moorestown to the swanky Victor building on the Camden waterfront.
"That was unimaginable back then," Gillette says, "so the things that are unimaginable now could happen."
Going, going, gone
So what caused Camden's fall?
Some blame the 1926 opening of the Ben Franklin Bridge for dividing, and conquering, the city.
Gillette thinks the riots of 1971 did far more lasting damage.
Not that the intervening years were particularly pleasant.
His chart on Page 42 says it all.
1950 population: 124,555 - 97,900 white, 17,434 African American.
1950 jobs: 59,489.
1980 population: 84,9100 - 26,003 whites, 45,009 African American.
1980 jobs: 27,926.
During the 1960s, Gillette writes, 12,000 well-paying, skilled, industrial jobs skipped town.
In that same decade, 28,000 white residents hightailed it to the suburbs.
I don't generally pity politicians, but it's hard not to feel sorry for those who've tried to right this ship.
"It looked like the Vietcong bombed us to get even," Mayor Angelo Errichetti remarked in 1973.
In the 1960s, Mayor Al Pierce began the shameful trend of pimping out the city's assets to pay for ever-mounting bills and budget shortfalls.
Twenty years later, Mayor Randy Primas sold off the North Camden waterfront for a state prison.
It meant money and jobs. It meant Camden was drowning and willing to grab at any life preserver floating by.
Prisons, sewage plants, trash incinerators - if the state or suburbs needed a dumping ground for its waste and distaste, they had it in Camden....
So could Camden wind up looking like Hoboken or Jersey City? Could it one day compete with Collingswood?
Could it become a racially and economically integrated success story?
"It's not inconceivable," Gillette says, then adds a cautionary coda.
"Historians," he points out, "are really bad at looking to the future."