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Preface
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
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Preface There is a scene in William Dean Howells’s Hazzard of New Fortunes in which Mr. and Mrs. Basil March, new to New York City and intoxicated with its vitality even as they are frightened by its unknown qualities, take a ride on the newly constructed elevated line. As they are whisked high above the city, they become captivated by the scenes they view through the windows of the tenement buildings that crowd the tracks. ‘‘What suggestion ! What drama! What infinite interest!’’ Howells writes to represent the Marches’ reaction to these glimpses of working people who would otherwise remain invisible to their genteel lives. That excitement is tempered, however, by the realization of the costs the tracks had extracted from the streets below in order to make their guilty pleasures possible. ‘‘They kill the streets and the avenues,’’ Basil March remarks, ‘‘but at least they partially hide them, and that is some comfort.’’1 A century later, generations of proper suburbanites can replicate daily the Marches’ experience: seeing the city, glimpsing the energy lying behind its foreign nature, and yet still keeping their distance. In the area around Camden, New Jersey, commuters traveling between southern New Jersey’s suburbs and Philadelphia on the PATCO Speedline may catch similar views of the urban scene. As they do, they literally look down on the losses of an entire generation. Amid the occasional towering church spire signaling the aspirations of an earlier era lie the debris of disinvestment: abandoned factories and buildings, empty lots piled with old tires or garbage, even overgrown cemeteries neglected and unattended. As trains approach the waterfront and passengers look south, quite another image appears: the lush green of a new baseball diamond, the regal dome of an aquarium, and beyond , a battleship docked to receive tourists anxious to relive past glories. But turning to the other side of the tracks, to North Camden, observers take in another view, more consistent with the city as a whole. There, the premier waterfront residence is reserved for prisoners of the state. Nearby streets retain all the marks of decline and decay. A drive through Camden from the south offers a similar perspective. xii Preface As one travels the few miles on the I- Connector, it is hard to miss the spire of Saint Joseph’s Polish church. The new towers of an incinerator, a cement plant, and a cogeneration factory dominate the skyline, however. Cars passing through won’t be bothered by the smoke emitted from the stacks. Their drivers won’t contemplate the homes displaced or the neighborhoods disrupted to make their commutes easier. Like the Marches, they may be stimulated by what they see, but they remain safely distant. What they know—or think they know—of this city assures them that it is best to keep that distance. Far more than the Marches, they have learned through repeated media accounts that the city is not just poor and badly run. It is a dangerous and inhospitable place marked by crime as well as corruption. Like so many others, my first impression of Camden after living for some years in Washington, D.C., came from a distance. My interest was not captured fully until I responded to a challenge in the form of an advertisement promising the best wine in the Delaware Valley. The claim appeared in a circular irreverently titled ‘‘Corkscrewed,’’ with the intriguing subhead, ‘‘No one finds us by accident.’’ So it was that I gathered a group to visit Triangle Liquor at what had once been the heart of Camden’s commercial sector, Broadway and Kaighn Avenue. There we found, in a cellar below the typical ghetto trade of cheap wines, pints, and big bottles of malt liquor, a stunning collection, as promised, of vintage wines at reasonable prices. Over time, as I returned, I got to know the owner, Stanley Brown. He had bought the property in the early s on the presumption that Camden had no place to go but up. A decade and a half later, when I met him, he readily admitted his mistake. The streets outside confirmed his error. While a few old businesses survived from an earlier generation—Penn Fish across the street and Gold Star Shoe Repair down the street, both run by the college -educated relatives of the original owners—most everything that had once made the area a magnet for shopping and recreation had changed. A movie theater down the street—one of eighteen...