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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.