One of the goals of this blog is to provide another place for community discussion to happen. When I started this blog, I thought that would mean community voices from Camden (and I still do). What I didn’t realize was that the blog would be read by families across South Jersey, often by folks who had deep historical ties to Camden and its employers. I firmly believe that the surrounding community needs to be in dialogue with Camden, in part because of the tenuous historical relationship, and would be pleased if a small part of that regional discussion took place here. In that vein, I was recently contacted by Joseph Russell, a South Jersey native who contributed this guest post to explain his interest and ties to Camden: 

I grew up in a part of South Jersey where you could barely get anywhere without a car. There’s a bus that takes you to a train station, but my parents never talked about anything like that. When I got my license at 17, it was probably something akin to the promise of personal freedom that my parents’ generation bestowed on having your own car. The freedom to get out, to explore wherever you wanted, go wherever you pleased. And for a good number of years, that was my reality. I drove to college, I drove to other cities and states; I got out. It was only when I got my first job that the realities of a car-dependent life hit me. Suddenly spending hours of my life every week in my car wasn’t a liberation, but a chore. I was losing my life to being stuck in a metal box just to get to work and back.

Fast forwarding ten years, I find myself in a much different place. I still have a car, but I take the train to work in the morning. In what’s become somewhat of a demographic cliche, I’ve ditched the ultra-car-dependent lifestyle, moved to an old suburb with a downtown rich in shops and restaurants, and dove headlong into appreciating the history and ever-changing social fabric of my region. During my college years, I started to take the train into Center City and fell almost immediately in love with it. I started to read everything I could about the dynamics of the city, about the play of old and new, about the competing dreams for what could be. And though I am still deeply in love with Philadelphia and its past and future, it is at this point in my life as an enthusiast of the urbane that I’ve started to turn my gaze towards that other city at the heart of our region: the City of Camden, the city invincible.

Growing up, I never heard much about Camden. It’s easy to live in a bubble in South Jersey, going from your house to your job to the malls and back without having to go all that far. But while the southern part of the state is good at suburban sprawl, it’s bad at producing the kind of interesting things that hold the attention of people like me. It is mostly unwalkable, and even though there are busses, they are slow and infrequent. There are few legitimate Main Street-style downtowns. What counts as something resembling a commercial district in most towns is often a wide street with large shopping plaza on either side, or, of course, a shopping mall. Having lived just outside of Boston for a few years, a ten minute walk from a subway line into the city’s downtown, there was no way I could return to South Jersey and live anywhere but in a dense, walkable old town on a train line.

But it is not only with these eyes that I look toward Camden. I also look with the eyes of a neighbor. I live only a few miles from the city, and travel through it whenever I go to Philadelphia. I’m sure most people don’t think much about the city, but I find it it hard not to reflect on its daily realities and to contemplate its place in our region. I’ve searched to come up a reason why it matters to me, why I bother to contemplate at all, and I think I’ve found a semblance of an answer. Given the suburban sprawl that has so dominated the culture in New Jersey, I think of Camden as the promise of an interesting city that most of the rest of South Jersey certainly is not. For example, it’s strange to me that Cherry Hill, one of South Jersey’s other large communities, does not have a “downtown”. It’s as if car culture has so engrained itself in the state that urbanity is treated with distrust at best and malice at worst. But for those of us who enjoy a different taste of life, who are fascinated by old places with rich histories and so many resources that could be poised to be reborn in this new era of city-loving Millennials and a slowing of exurban development, Camden represents something that’s almost hard to qualify. Something more of an urban spiritual kinship.

Present-day Camden is of course a little different than a dreamily reimagined city. But even though it’s easy to not think about Camden, to relegate its problems to the abstract in the form of news reports and flippant magazine headlines, the surrounding suburbs do in fact have a working relationship with the city. Its sons and daughters get their education at Rutgers-Camden, Camden County College, or Rowan University’s Camden campus. Parents take their kids to Adventure Aquarium. People of all ages go to concerts at the Susquehanna Bank Center and baseball games at Campbell’s Field. Its babies are born in great numbers at Cooper University Hospital. And all these institutions, in addition to bigger names like L3 and Campbell’s, provide jobs for the surrounding area.

That surely is not nothing. Even other cities in New Jersey have taken notice. Several columnists from the Trentonian have recently covered Camden from various angles, albeit a little haphazardly, and have written about how its waterfront has come together while Trenton’s has languished. And while there’s no doubt that the city’s waterfront has been the main economic driver of the city when it comes to drawing visitors, it’s time to connect to the rest of the city. I believe the surrounding communities can support it. Despite all the positioning of the city as a foreign place in newspaper articles, there’s more city-suburban interaction than many people might realize. And I know the city’s citizens are ready for it. They’ve been resiliently standing by all this time, waiting for Camden to shine again. If you pay attention, you can read about community groups standing up to city violence, rallying to support a beloved children’s garden, getting the work of the city’s artists out there, or giving the city’s children positive, community-building things to do.

Personally, I don’t think there’s any reason it couldn’t happen. There’s no reason the stretch of small businesses on Haddon Avenue that make Westmont and Collingswood great places to live and visit can’t extend into Parkside and into downtown Camden. There are, in fact, already small businesses there. You can go and support them today. There’s no reason Broadway can’t be a great shopping district for the area. Our parents tell us that it once was. There’s no reason we can’t support the residents of the city trying to make as good a life for themselves as they can, just like anyone else in South Jersey is in their own towns.

As much as some would believe otherwise, we’re all in this together. We are a region. We have common goals and dreams. Especially today, when people like me are turning to the older communities that our parents left, there is no reason we can’t try our hardest to help return Camden to its prosperous past.