PHILADELPHIA: DOWNTOWN CAMDEN

Downtown Camden, NJ, was cut in half and demolished for the automobile. In the 1960s, construction of the “North-South Freeway” (I-676), a portion of which is seen here, displaced 1,289 families in Camden (at least 5,000 people), 85% of which were families of color. Adjacent urban renewal projects flattened much of the commercial core on Broadway and displaced thousands more.

Before WWII, Camden had grown as an industrial center due to its proximity across the river from Philadelphia and its railroad connections to the rest of the eastern seaboard. Much like its neighbor Philadelphia, Camden’s waterfront was home to a diverse, working-class mix of European immigrants and African-Americans, employed in the many nearby jobs, including at Campbell’s Soup, RCA Victor, and the New York Shipbuilding Company. 

Because of this diversity, in the 1930s Downtown Camden had been redlined, meaning the federal govt had officially labeled it “hazardous for investment.” As explained in previous posts, redlining grades were explicitly based on race. Noted in the official govt comments describing the neighborhood, despite Downtown being “the heart of the city... solidly built up with old brick homes of similar design,” the fact that there was an “infiltration of questionable residents... 50% negro and 50% foreign born” meant that the neighborhood was “hazardous.” Ultimately, redlining is a self-fulfilling prophecy as property values collapsed, tax-bases were depleted, and municipal services curtailed. 

After the War, in the 40s and 50s whites fled to the newly-built suburbs, lured by new highways and subsidized mortgages from the GI Bill; meanwhile, people of color, were forced to stay in the purposefully decaying city-center, as these new suburbs were built with “restrictive covenants,”  which wrote into the deeds of new suburban houses that they were to be sold to “members of the caucasion race only.” (Continued below.)

In addition to white flight, after WWII, due to the collapsing land values exacerbated by redlining, and following the trends incentivized by federal labor, industrial, and transportation policy, many of Camden’s largest employers left the city for the surrounding suburbs. For instance, Campbell’s Soup, headquartered in Camden and formerly one of the city’s largest employers, shut down its massive cannery in the city (as well as its other domestic production facilities), eliminating thousands of jobs and decentralizing (and eventually outsourcing) production. Moreover, the splurge of federal highway construction had severely cut into the ridership and profitability of the railroads, meaning that both passenger and freight lines alike were eliminated in favor of private automobiles and trucking, further isolating Downtown Camden.

By the 1960s after both white and capital flight, Camden went all-in on remaking its downtown for suburban commuters, demolishing hundreds of buildings over dozens of blocks to build the massive approach to the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. Utilizing dual funding streams from both the 1956 Federal Highway Act (which provided 90% federal financing for the highway) and the 1949 Federal Housing Act (which provided 66.3% federal financing for “urban renewal” and “slum clearance” projects), New Jersey officials coupled highway construction with “slum clearance” projects, wiping out whole blocks, as seen in the second image. Between 1963-1968 approximately 3,000 units of low-income housing were demolished in Downtown Camden, to be replaced with around 100 units of “Section 8” housing. (Source: Poverty & Race Research Action Council, 2002.)

Even before the large-scale freeway and “urban renewal” projects of the 50s and 60s, Downtown Camden had already suffered significantly from America’s haphazard and maximalist adoption of the automobile as the absolute preferred method of urban transportation. This was mainly due to the opening of the Delaware River Bridge in the late 1920s (now known as the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), which connected Camden to Philadelphia across the river. Unlike the great East River bridges of New York City—which served as catalysts for the development on both sides of the river, in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan alike—the effect of Philadelphia’s bridge was to decimate its neighbor, Camden. 

Whereas in NYC, the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, and Queensboro bridges were all built primarily to serve rail transit, pedestrians, and commercial vehicles (originally, at least*); in Philadelphia, the Benjamin Franklin Bridge primarily served automobiles, with comparatively meager transit provisions (a short, three-station shuttle train between Camden City Hall and Market Street and dedicated streetcar tracks that were never used before being replaced with more car lanes). Thus, while in New York City the bridges tied the communities on both sides of the bridge closer together, in this instance the bridge turned Camden into a suburban on-ramp for the larger Philadelphia across the river.** 

Later extensions to the bridge train, rebranded the “PATCO Speedline” in the 60s, on the Philly side only further served the area immediately around Center City, while on the Jersey side extensions only served massive suburban park-and-rides. Thus, while PATCO is built to and operates at rapid transit standards, in effect it acts as a suburban commuter train to Center City.

In the 1930 aerial in the second image the original bridge landing Camden can be seen (featuring the never-used streetcar station, pedestrian plaza, and manicured lawns). By the 1950s (as seen in the first image) mid-century transportation engineering had already begun, as the plaza had been wiped out in favor of expanded vehicular access. The bridge pelted downtown Camden with automobiles as it became the primary conduit to and from Philadelphia and the new New Jersey suburbs. The air quality had significantly deteriorated due to exhaust and what had previously been residential streets became clogged with bridge traffic. In the end, the government determined that automobile access to the bridge was more important than Downtown Camden itself, so the neighborhood was razed.

Footnotes

*Though, of course, Robert Moses and his Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority eventually reconfigured the bridges, removing the streetcars on all four and eliminating rail on the Brooklyn and Queensboro Bridges entirely.

**To some extent, Philadelphia had waited too long to build its bridge. Whereas the East River bridges in NYC had been built between 1880-1910—when automobiles were still just a novelty—the Ben Franklin Bridge was built in the late 20s, at which point cities had already begun deprioritizing transit at the expense of cars.