Bolstering a Renaissance in Camden’s Parks

Camden locals take in the view from the top of Cramer Hill Waterfront Park, formerly the Harrison Avenue Landfill. Image courtesy of Camden Community Partnership.

“A guaranteed inheritance we owe future generations is an improved and sustainable public realm. Camden’s parks and trails are visual and experiential metaphors of the decency, grit and soul of our residents.” — Honorable Victor Carstarphen, Mayor, Camden City

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the addition of a new city to the Reimagining the Civic Commons network: Camden, New Jersey. After years of disinvestment in the public realm, Camden’s community leadership is refocusing efforts to expand and improve parks and open spaces across the city.

Camden has a sincere commitment to the public realm, having built and improved 20 parks in the last 5 years. Camden’s focus on investments in nature, green spaces and parks as well as expanded access to public space for people in long-disinvested neighborhoods demonstrate a powerful example of the deep intersection between environmental justice and the public realm.

RCA Pier Park, a former parking lot, is perfect for flying kites along the Delaware River. Image courtesy of Camden Community Partnership.

We know that parks are places of respite, of human connection, of improved health, and that they boost equitable economic development and resilience in the face of climate change.

For many years, Camden residents experienced a reduction in access to nature, green spaces and parks; in recent years, public and private sector organizations have worked together to remediate developed and sometimes polluted land to return parks and nature access to those residents.

Camden youth paddle the Cooper River near Pyne Poynt Park during ”I Paddle Camden”. Image courtesy of Camden Community Partnership.

Camden was once described by the 19th century naturalist John Jay Audubon as a series of villages connected by greenspace and natural corridors. Water and nature are ever-present: the city is almost an island, and the Cooper and Delaware Rivers course through the city. Once a bustling industrial city, Camden faced the same industrial decline after the mid-20th century that so many other American cities endured. For decades, the city’s greenspaces, natural areas, rivers and parks were neglected and sometimes outright abused, with industrial dumping and contamination; in some places, private companies and other municipalities began to haul their garbage for disposal in those same space, an action called “short dumping,” which still costs the city $4 million a year to clean up. Residents of Camden’s primarily low-income, Black and brown neighborhoods became disconnected from and distrustful of government and institutions.

Before and after images of the newly revitalized and expanded Whitman Park. Previously abutting the long shuttered Camden Labs, the site was a hotspot for illegal dumping and environmentally hazardous. After image courtesy of Camden Community Partnership. Before image courtesy of NJDEP.

In recent years, interest in neighborhood revitalization and the benefits of access to nature, parks and greenspace has grown. Public-private partnerships have successfully braided together an impressive amount of federal, state, local and philanthropic funding, despite the fact that the City of Camden does not have a stand-alone parks or recreation department (Camden County does have a parks department and is responsible for approximately half of all parks in the region). These partnerships have resulted in the transformation of some of Camden’s most contaminated, neglected and underutilized land into beautiful new parks: a parking lot became RCA Pier Park; a prison site became Cooper’s Poynt Park and a formerly contaminated laboratory was remediated to expand Whitman Park. Building on this momentum, a collaboration of local, state and federal government agencies, philanthropy, the private sector and community organizations created the Camden Parks and Open Space Plan in 2020.

Cooper’s Poynt Waterfront Park was the culmination of efforts to remove the former Riverfront State Prison., a barrier disconnecting residents physically and psychologically to the river. Before image courtesy of nj.com. After image courtesy of Camden Community Partnership.

Perhaps the greatest investment in environmental remediation is Cramer Hill Waterfront Park, a 62-acre former garbage dump that ceased operations 50 years ago but was never properly remediated. Located at the site where the Cooper River flows into the Delaware, Cramer Hill Waterfront Park was constructed over the capped and vented dump, and the shoreline and former wetlands on the shores of the river was remediated and reconstructed, restoring access to nature for nearby Cramer Hill neighborhood residents–access that had been cut off almost a century prior.

Recreation opportunities that were formerly unthinkable in the presence of the contaminated Harrison Avenue Landfill now abound after extensive remediation to create Cramer Hill Waterfront Park. Images courtesy of Camden Community Partnership.

Sustaining funding for inclusive parks

Core to a cohesive, equitable parks system envisioned by the Camden team is the development of an overall operating plan that guides robust programming and long-term maintenance of civic assets, which is currently not the responsibility of any local agency or partnership. What is needed is ongoing maintenance and funding sources that will stand the test of time, providing needed investment in the city’s civic assets, in service to a healthier and more equitable city.

Capital and maintenance investments in parks are currently the purview of both Camden County and Camden City, and while both have funds for capital improvements and basic maintenance, neither has sufficient funding or staff to creatively program parks or provide high-quality maintenance. And while many other groups, some of which work side-by-side with residents to help maintain individual parks, a more cohesive and systemwide plan for long-term parks operations and maintenance funds is a major ambition for the Camden Civic Commons team.

Residents, local leaders and officials volunteer for frequent clean-up’s around Camden, but a long-term maintenance strategy is much needed across the city. Image courtesy of Camden Community Partnership.

The Camden team is convened by the Camden Community Partnership, through generous support from Subaru of America Foundation and William Penn Foundation, with members from the city, county, school district and community organizations. Together, they are excited to learn from and interact with the other cities in the Reimagining the Civic Commons network.

“As we work towards a sustainable, inclusive operating plan for parks, we look forward to seeing how other cities have addressed funding and maintenance challenges” said Dana Redd President and Chief Executive Officer of Camden Community Partnership. Redd is also focused on ensuring that outreach and engagement is customized to Camden’s unique and underserved neighborhoods throughout the civic commons work.

“We need to ensure that throughout this work, we pull in different community organizations, leaders and residents into the process. It’s extremely important and it’s something that was reaffirmed for us when we joined Reimagining the Civic Commons.” — Dana Redd, chief executive officer, Camden Community Partnership

Flipping the script

While a long-term funding strategy is an ambitious challenge in its own right, the challenge of addressing years of disinvestment and the many broken promises made to Camden’s residents loom just as large.

Local youth from across Camden participate in the annual multi-day Peace Games at Von Nieda Park in the Cramer Hill neighborhood. Image courtesy of Camden Community Partnership.

The Camden team knows it must rebuild trust from the community through action, providing well-maintained public spaces and responding to community members’ needs as it works to effectively program and maintain its public realm. Another focus is inviting residents to be a part of the solution, so they can advocate for public spaces that serve multiple local needs, which Dana Redd describes as being part of “purposeful, authentic, inclusive community outreach that gives residents a voice throughout our work.”

In order to achieve effective socioeconomic mixing, the demographics of Camden’s majority Black and brown neighborhoods will require alignment with efforts to invite and attract new people to Camden, as well as work to attract regional staff of many of the large companies that have relocated to Camden. Given the quality and caliber of the parks being constructed in Camden today, there is tremendous potential to use programming, staffing and events strategies that can attract visitors from other places.

Locals enjoy “Family Fun and Fitness Day” at the Camden Athletic Fields, one of the many programs produced by Connect the Lots. Image courtesy of Camden Community Partnership.

The Camden Civic Commons team hopes that the path to sustainable parks funding is also an exercise in building trust — and ultimately, building advocates for public space — a way to flip the script about Camden.

“As we do this work, we are seeing that parks and public spaces are becoming more important to residents,” said Dana Redd. “Before, there was disinvestment in certain neighborhoods that built distrust, and that had a ripple effect across neighborhoods. Now, we want programming and maintenance distributed more equitably, so we can build up civic pride and ownership in these spaces.”

We look forward to sharing our learnings with Camden as much as we look forward to learning from them — and are certain that Camden’s history of the remediation of nature and parks are the building blocks of a more just future that includes culture, recreation and connection.

Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners. In addition, Camden’s participation is supported by Subaru of America Foundation and William Penn Foundation.