The Other America

By KEVIN FEDARKO CAMDEN

I dream'd in a dream a city invincible

to the attacks of the whole rest of the earth.

-- Walt Whitman, Camden, 1891

Twenty-four years have passed since Father Michael Doyle first came to serve the people of Camden, N.J., yet this Irish pastor still cannot bear returning to his adopted home in daylight. One would think a quarter-century would be time enough to harden even a priest to the visual brutality of a city so broken that its people, like many of its buildings, have buckled and collapsed. But each time he goes away, Doyle finds he must slip back in darkness, like a burglar in his own home. "I have to come back at nighttime and start gently with my bed and my office," he confesses. "You see, I can't ever get over the tragedy of this place."

Night puts a dark mask on this city's abandoned row houses, gutted factories and boarded shops, a failed cosmetic for a busted-up prizefighter of a town that crumpled along with its industries. The forces that flattened Camden may be the same ones that have pounded scores of other industrial centers throughout the Northeast in the past 20 years, but a particular sorrow attends the destruction here. Camden is a city of children; nearly half its population is under 21. This is a town that, with fewer than 100,000 residents, has more than 200 liquor stores and bars and not a single movie theater.

The story of Camden is the story of boys who blind stray dogs after school, who come to Sunday Mass looking for cookies because they are hungry, who arm themselves with guns, knives and -- this winter's fad at $400 each -- hand grenades. It is the story of girls who dream of becoming hairdressers but wind up as whores, who get pregnant at 14 only to bury their infants. "We're a graveyard for everyone else's problems," says Doyle, "and there is a feeling that this is somehow acceptable because those who live here are poor. Well, it's not acceptable. God made the Garden first, and then he made the people. He didn't make some desolate nest and then say, 'Here, cope.' "

But surely that is just what God must have said to Camden. To wander through its neighborhoods is to wonder what America should be doing with towns like this, towns that cry out for help yet seem beyond saving. The city demands a kind of urban triage: Is this one worth reviving, or should what little cash that is earmarked for redevelopment go into places that show greater promise of survival? Many American cities have sinkholes that are just as run-down, burned out, crime ridden and drug infested. The difference is that this describes all of Camden, not just part of it.

The sad fact is that most people here equate success with escape. The city's population has fallen by 35,000 in the past generation. Even among health-care workers and social workers, church people and teachers, Doyle is the exception; nearly all live in the suburbs. "Camden is a city of broken wings," Doyle says. "Those with the initiative and the strength leave." Those without it die young.

Baby Nigeria Collins died in October 1986, a month and a day after she was born. She lies today in the far corner of Camden's Evergreen Cemetery, across the street from the Merit gas station and Memory Discount Florist. Baby Nigeria is surrounded by a thicket of tin markers that sprout from the graves of 92 other infants. A hundred yards to the west is a second batch of buried babies. To count their graves -- 196 of them -- you must stoop to collect the dozen-odd markers someone has uprooted and strewn amid Styrofoam cups and broken beer bottles. A few more yards, and there is another patch, and another, and another.

Twenty babies out of every thousand born here never reach their first birthday, more than twice the national average. Most are lost to a combination of lack of prenatal care, drug exposure, premature birth and neglect. "In suburbia, people get upset if their child doesn't have the right color hair," says Eileen Gillis, a neonatal nurse at Cooper Hospital, where two-thirds of Camden's infants are delivered. "Here, if I get a baby with all of its parts intact, I'm thrilled."

Like children everywhere, Camden's young make wish lists, but their wishes are different from most children's. They wish they knew their fathers' faces and not just their names. They wish for something better for their own kids, % which many of them already have. And they wish they didn't have to dodge the gunfire of drug battles in their neighborhoods.

Nikkeya J. -- her street name is "Legs" -- is one of dozens of girls who solicit along the downtown boulevards. Often they are the only sign of life in this city after dark. Nikkeya is only 17, but her cheeks and brow are marked by scars, reminders of pimps and Johns who have beaten her with extension cords, wine bottles and a baseball bat.

Nikkeya has been turning tricks -- six or seven a night at roughly $50 a throw -- since she was 13 years old. "I been stabbed, raped, stomped, kidnapped and beaten up," she says. "The only thing that's never happened to me is that I never been shot, and I never died. I figure I know just about everything there is to know. I probably know more than the President." But Nikkeya also knows what she has missed. "I can't play hopscotch, double Dutch or ride a bike," she confesses. "And I've never been to a zoo."

If the streets are home, the gangs are family. Between 30 and 40 drug posses have carved up the city and easily outgun the police with their arsenals of Tech 9s, 45s, M-16s, Uzis and Glocks. Gangs with names like Eight Ball, Hilltop and Puerto Rican Connection use children to keep an eye out for vice- squad police and to ferry drugs across town. Says "Minute Mouse," a 15- year-old dealer: "I love my boys more than my own family." Little wonder. With a father in jail and a mother who abandoned him, the Mouse survived for a time by eating trash and dog food before turning to the drug business.

Minute Mouse has found that dealing drugs -- "trapping," as it's known in the street -- is the fastest route up. An eight-year-old "watcher" on a bicycle can earn $50 a day, while a "carrier" clears up to $400 for a single trip to Philadelphia. Drug profits rapidly compound, which is why in a city where two-thirds of the adults rely on welfare, teenagers in the heaviest drug areas drive Mercedes, Lincolns and -- Minute Mouse's car of choice -- Toyota Corollas.

The costs, of course, are even higher. Adolpho, 17, carries for a dealer in a section of north Camden known as the Danger Zone. Scissor-like scars cut edgewise across his knuckles, and the skin around his throat is mottled with burn marks from the time he put a match to an aerosol can in a street fight. Adolpho has seen five friends die in drug wars. Each time a child is killed, his epitaph is added to the graffiti murals adorning the walls of north Camden's vacant lots. "It can happen at any time to anybody," Adolpho says. "It can happen to me, it can happen to you and it can happen right now."

Camden's destitution lends its prosperous past an evanescent air, so starkly does it clash with the town of today. Up until 1945 or so, this city was a monument to the gusto and grit of a nation laboring to create itself. Camden built everything from battleships to toilet seats, and people here claim you could find more industry per capita in these nine square miles than anywhere else in the world. This was the home of the Victor talking machine, Campbell's soup and the Esterbrook pen. In the cavernous shipyards, 35,000 men once toiled, hammering out eight vessels at a time. Bard of it all was Walt Whitman, whose spirit trembled at the call of an industrial giant that thrived on the energy, poetry and power of machines. Whitman loved the noise of Camden, and his poems sang the glorious, churning, clangorous, whirlwind mess of it all.

In the '50s and '60s the city's white middle class headed for the suburbs, drawn by visions of power mowers and the PTA. Left behind were blacks, Hispanics and poor whites, who found themselves pauperized as the town's industries -- and jobs -- slowly disappeared. Similar stories were repeated over much of the Northeast and Midwest, but in many inner cities pockets of prosperity somehow managed to persevere. In Camden everything was hit, and almost nothing survived.

Now silence hangs over the factories and the shipyards, punctuated only by the hoot of Delaware boat whistles and the crunch of demolition crews -- in the past several years, the city has razed more than 1,200 abandoned homes, nearly 5% of its housing stock. On the worst blocks, two-thirds of the buildings have collapsed or burned. "I think of Camden basically as a doughnut," says Joe Balzano, CEO of the South Jersey Port Corp. "Everything worthwhile is on the edges, and the center is hollow."

The suburbs along the ring of that doughnut, with the help of lobbying leverage and clever zoning laws, are able to treat central Camden as a dump. Today the main inner-city industry is scrap: Camden exports 1.2 million tons a year. The waterfront is lined with piles of twisted metal -- rusty foothills to the backdrop of Philadelphia's skyscrapers directly across the river. And in March of 1990, Camden County opened its first trash incinerator, where 1,500 tons of garbage from the suburbs is trucked each day and turned to steam. To complete the sense of a town left to pinch out a living on refuse, two prisons -- one county and one state -- dominate the center of the city and the waterfront.

Perhaps the most compelling symbol of Camden's role as trash heap is the Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority, which processes 55 million gallons of raw sewage each day. Camden's suburbs used to treat their own sewage, but several years ago they began shutting down their 46 treatment plants and pumping all the waste into Camden instead. Says William Tucker, a professor of psychology at Rutgers who has lived in Camden for 20 years: "The stink is enough to kill you."

Some business leaders prefer to characterize the relationship between city and suburbs as "symbiotic." The city provides services, says James Wallace, president of the Chamber of Commerce of Southern New Jersey, and the suburbs provide the tax base: "Each without the other simply could not get along." But the argument that this is a fair trade is offensive to the people of south Camden whose neighborhood reeks of human excrement. Every year these residents, the majority of whom are poor, must pony up $275 for sewage treatment -- the same amount that rich suburbanites pay in communities with names like Tavistock and Haddonfield.

For all the sorrow and the danger, the stench and the dilapidation, it is sometimes easy to ignore the most visible sign of change in Camden -- a project that many people are convinced is the seed of a new city. Investors have pulled together roughly a quarter of a billion dollars that will bring to the Delaware waterfront the headquarters for GE Aerospace, plus a hotel, waterfront park, the nation's second largest aquarium and an office tower to contain the world headquarters of Campbell's Soup. The hope, says Thomas Corcoran, president of the Coopers Ferry Development Association, is that the complex will strengthen the tax base, bring in new jobs and restore to the residents a much needed sense of civic pride.

Given the prime swatch of real estate directly across from Philadelphia, the project has generated plenty of interest from future tenants and developers. But there remains the disturbing possibility that Camden's waterfront may become a daylight colony of suburbanites surrounded by a sea of urban decay. The ripples, say the skeptics, might never extend beyond the edge of the Delaware.

The reclamation of the rest of Camden, for the moment, rests in the hands of humbler agents. Dotted throughout the city are a number of tiny oases where abandoned homes are restored and sold at cost to families in need of housing. One such venture is Heart of Camden, which has so far rescued 55 of the city's 4,000 abandoned homes. Three years ago, the group also decided to bring in youths from the state juvenile facility to help with the renovations; they now manage their own operation.

The homeowners in HOC are turning their hands to the task of building more than just houses; they are also being given the chance to become the carpenters of their own futures. But the children of Camden, like all poor children in all dying cities, need more than pilot projects and symbolic gestures. "Camden is the purest distillation of our policy of not-so-benign urban neglect," says Congressman Rob Andrews. "We cannot afford to just write off 10% to 15% of the American public as irredeemable. Anyone who has any compassion must feel this."

Perhaps compassion is a good place to start with in this place where the gears of a nation grinding out progress have ceased to turn. A place where childhood is a luxury few children can afford. A place that is the antithesis of what Walt Whitman once celebrated. For whatever else is true of Camden, it takes a lesser-known native son to sing its song today -- one who elegized his gritty world with a tenderness that transcends it.

the blind musician

extending an old tin cup

collects a snowflake

-- Nick Virgilio, Camden, 1928-89