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Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2003
CAMDEN (25 alt., 118,700 pop.) is utilitarian in architecture and arrangement of streets. The key to the city's early development was Philadelphia which at the time of Camden's birth was the largest city on the continent. In fact, Camden grew out of the necessity for crossing the Delaware in order to get to Philadelphia; and the main east to west streets have always been long, broad thoroughfares leading to the ferries.
The heavy river traffic over bridge and ferries remains an important factor in the city's life, but Camden has acquired individual importance as
he leading industrial, marketing, and transportation center of southern New Jersey.
Almost 300 factories, ranging from small shops to great plants occupying solid blocks, have been crowded into the city without control by any zoning plan. Industrial buildings line the water front in a phalanx and spread out into the residential sections.
Camden represents a job and a home. It might be called a two-story brick town, but there is beauty as well as naked utility in its brickwork. There are diagonally patterned brick sidewalks in the older residential districts -- sidewalks with as many bumps and hollows as a path across a vacant lot. And there are simple, flat-roofed brick houses, relieved by white marble steps and lintels, shaded by sycamores, and possessed of all the graciousness of the Greenwich Village houses for which New Yorkers pay extravagant rents.
There are also rows upon rows of tight boxlike houses without space between-the typical home of the Camden worker. Of red or sometimes yellow brick, they differ little except as they may have large porches with heavy, round columns, or small porches with slender posts, or no porches at all. A utilitarian brown is the almost universal color for any style of porch.
Some variation is found in the occasional use of mansard roofs and bay windows and, more rarely, in the substitution of serpentine rock -- distinguished by its peculiar yellow-green color -- or brownstone for brick. Placed at regular intervals on many of the block-long cornices are wooden pinnacles that resemble helmet spikes of the old German army.
Camden's busy shopping center is in character with the working population. No large department stores and few smart shops here, but an abundance of smaller stores whose enterprising managers use every means to increase trade. It is not unusual to find the price of scrapple written in yellow paint on the sidewalk. On week-end nights several of the shopping streets resemble an oriental bazaar with flamboyant posters on store windows, multicolored neon signs flashing.
With a less than average quota of office buildings, Camden's lawyers, doctors, and other professional workers have followed the example of many merchants and established themselves in the first floors of old houses. Cooper Street, where front porches encroach upon the sidewalk in almost every block, summarizes the city's growth. Once lined with homes of the best people, it retains the houses along its eastern section, but sitting rooms have been converted into real estate offices and beauty parlors; westward toward the river, the facades of tall buildings that might pass for office structures are in reality the fronts of leading factories.
Camden is compact enough for neighbor to meet neighbor in the two subway stations. There are second-floor apartments above stores just across the street from the towering City Hall. Prevailing breezes carry to office workers in this fine edifice -- which is locally known as the "Milk Bottle" -- the odor of coffee beans roasting in a nearby factory, thus creating an atmosphere of cafe au lait for Camden's municipal government.
Side streets in some of the more congested sections barely manage to serve as passageways. It is not unusual to find brick houses fronting on little alleys no more than 6 or 8 feet from curb to curb. Unlike many other industrial cities, Camden seems to make a point of keeping streets and sidewalks neat and clean.
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