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.