There are 14 Camdens in the United States, 13 of them much smaller than Camden, New Jersey. In fact, the sum total of people in all of them, is much less than 79,000 which is the present population of this city. Situated on the Delaware River directly across the water from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, it was incorporated as a city in 1828 with only 1100 people in it.
From the linkage in 1834 of the Camden Ferries (which sailed back and forth to Philadelphia) with the railroads that linked Camden to Perth Amboy, New Jersey and ferries to New York, Camden was conceived and grew. From 1834 to the end of the century, the population starting at 1100 doubled every decade reaching 75,000 people in 1900. A quarter of a century later, the bridge that we now call Ben Franklin was being built. It entered the city one block from City Hall and put a knife through Camden's heart. The City never recovered. North Camden, already surrounded by water on three sides, north, east and west, was now cut off by a flow of traffic on the south side. It was an amputation. North Camden began to fester. All of Camden eventually went down. Thus, the poorest town in the USA today.
But in the lingo of real estate promotion, the three most important words are location, location, location. Camden sits on the mile-wide Delaware River deep enough for the big ships of the world. Center-city Philadelphia is five minutes away by road. Atlantic City one hour. New York one and half hours.
Besides its people, its location, its river, it also has Walt Whitman laid to rest within it. Arriving on May 20, 1873, he lived in Camden for 19 years and finished Leaves of Grass here, celebrating besides himself, the massive movement of America, in migration and manufacture, invention and democracy. He put the whole U.S. adventure to the music of his words. "I will never regret," he said, "that I was left over in Camden, it brought me blessed returns."
So the story of Camden is in a way "A Tale of Two Cities." Maybe, the Tale of Three Cities. The way we were. The way we are. The way we hope and hope and hope to be.
It is no easy task to sustain hope against the onslaught of all that is wrong here and all that is going wrong. The concentration of poverty. Thousands of ugly abandoned houses as well as stores and factories. Awful facilities like prisons and the regional sewage treatment plant. Trash burning, scrap yards, car crushing, aluminum melting. All of these, hurtful to real estate enhancement in the suburbs, are placed in the city in a pattern of racial and environmental injustice that is barbaric. The breakdown that poverty brings is the source of crime: two hundred open-air drug markets, the high murder rate, and the prostitutes traveling the truck routes 24 hours a day. Also the trucks with all their destructive pollution ploughing through streets where children walk to school and prostitutes hang.
Sacred Heart Church and School sit in the midst of all this and there our mission is to proclaim hope. Trust in God. We stand there to proclaim against all odds that there is life before death and there is life after it. With God's help. Amen.