September 10, 2026 A ride down Broadway in Camden City, NJ

Like many of my friends, I have had a minor relationship with the City of Camden. My relationship was down Cooper Street to the Rutger's University Campus where I went to college in the early 1970's and got my BA in Art. I remember driving from Collingswood through North Camden and crossing a little bridge near the Ben Franklin Bridge Plaza onto Cooper Street. I passed a seedy sad old hotel, some deserted churches, and a scattering of brick row homes, a few small stores and one or two long past their heyday graceful mansions. Once or twice, I drove to the south side of town and took photos of the deserted, graffiti covered, burned out empty streets behind the Walt Whitman house and south of what was then Mickle Boulevard.

My second time of travel through Camden was by the Broadway bus from 8th and Pine in Philadelphia where I lived at the time, to the library in Gloucester City. Broadway was dying. The department stores were burned out from the riots, there was one Ben Franklin 5 & 10. There were also a few eating shops no doubt for the workers at City Hall and Cooper Hospital. That would have been the 80's.

The Rand Transportation Center with the speedline replaced the bus stops and the shops all slowly disappeared from the city. A few times, I returned to a pizza place where poets used to meet under the leadership of a local colorful character named Rocky Wilson. He was a storyteller, poet, puppeteer, dancer, and all around aquarian hippy on a seemingly permanent trip.

When I retired in 2006, there was no need for me to return to either of my old cities, Philadelphia or Camden, until I began to donate books to the Free Books Project which at time was held at the Newton Friends Meeting located between Cooper Hospital and the Ben Franklin Bridge plaza.

Once again, I was driving down Broadway, this time from Woodbury to the Newton Friends Meeting where a hopeful group maintained a garden and from which they distributed free books to all the little free book libraries and book arks throughout Camden City. Broadway was a desperate and desolate stretch of road that would be a perfect setting for a zombie movie because clusters of homeless and drug addicted broken and collapsed people gathered on street corners near the few little corner shops that remained open. I would estimate their numbers in the hundreds from one end to the other of Broadway, that is from The New York Shipyard to the Bridge Plaza.

My sister works at the Hilton Garden on the riverfront in Camden City and I have had the occasion to drive her to work or to pick up her paycheck and our route is down Broadway from where she lives in Clarksboro - I can't manage the 676 overpass. The cars there drive so fast and are so aggressive I am afraid. The whole waterfront at the Hilton Garden is one of those all white corporate buildings on campuses (as they are called now) with a nice walkway along he river, in particular the American Water Building. The Rutgers Campus too has spread out and built dormatories and other buildings from the old campus down to the new corporate campuses. There is, of course, the Acquarium and the waterfront music venue along the river as well and the courthouse complex.

Along Broadway, however, the addicts have been disappearing and my sister has said it is the fentanyl killing them. She takes the bus most of the time and so did the addicts, but they have gone the way of overdoses, amputations and disease and they have thinned out. Along Broadway, too, the brick row house neighborhoods have been disappearing and are replaced by some new buildings and a great number of empty lots between little forlorn clusters of brick homes, some with a sad little effort of homemaking, little gardens or holiday decorations and neat sidewalks. My heart aches for the children raised in such places. It is far down below the city childhood I endured but there are similarities. The lonely and abandoned feral cats and dogs wandering around hoping for a handout, or a home, the magic of childhood that allows these poor children to find beauty in the wild weeds of the empty lots. I did it too - my gravel beach near the garages at the end of my brick canyon.

Back in the old days (70's) when I used to take the bus from Philly to Gloucester City, there were often old timers who would lament the city that had been with the ethnic neighborhoods and stores, the department stores, the library - and they would point to the burned out hulks or empty lots and paint their pictures of the lost world. They blamed it on the "Blacks" which of course was unjustified but they couldn't look beyond the riots. Those oldtimers made me so nervous on the bus because they weren't discreet at all and I was always afraid they would offend the other passengers and get me into a ruckus I didn't deserve.

Well those oldtimers are long gone and no people even remotely like them ever take that bus anymore. There are workers on the bus, though, like my sister and the people who work at the port which isn't New York Shipyard anymore, but HOLTEC, a shipping and cargo port with two and three stoy stqacks of cargo containers going onto ships to cross the ocean or coming from across the ocean.

The death of the city is such a deep and complex evolutionary tale that there is no way to pin the blame on anyone, neither the usual suspects - rapacious realtors and neglectful landlords, nor lazy and destructive residents who don't do their bare minimum of care. Maybe it was just old age. The city that once was a thriving metropolis just got old and died.

Well it is being replaced by something new which I will be long gone before it is realized. Once I knew people who lived in Camden, went to school in Camden and taught in Camden, but I don't know them anymore and have no idea where they went or what happened to them. When I pass my old campus, my memory of my college days there has become so faint it is almost as though it was a different person.

And so it goes.......

wrightj45@yahoo.com