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In Camden, Campbell Co. Says It May Go if Sears Building Stays
By KAREEM FAHIM
CAMDEN, N.J. - For decades after it was built in 1927, shoppers drove to the Sears, Roebuck & Company store on Admiral Wilson Boulevard just beyond the center of town. A colonnaded temple to both commerce and the automobile, the store, in the classical revival style, had a lot with parking spaces for about 600 cars.
But in 1971, as the middle class fled the city, the store closed, and reopened at a mall in nearby Moorestown. In the years afterward, most of the drivers who stopped by this despondent stretch of freeway were visiting seedy strip joints. And the old Sears building went on to become a car dealership, then an office. Today it is vacant, vandalized and in need of repair.
Now, amid an effort to revive a city mired in a crippling cycle of crime and unemployment, the Campbell Soup Company, Camden's longtime and most prominent corporate resident, has proposed expanding its presence and transforming the area where the empty store sits into an office park.
The soup company is prepared to spend $72 million to improve its headquarters, and has also promised to help lure developers to an adjacent office park with the help of $26 million in state funds. But the company's pledge comes with one nagging caveat: The Sears building, which is listed on state and national historic registries, must come down. If not, Campbell Soup, which has been an enormous presence in the city since 1869, may abandon Camden and go elsewhere.
Brick Houses, Winding Paths and Unexpected Sharp Elbows
Photographs by Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
By JEFF VANDAM
Published: December 31, 2006
The 16-block enclave of Sunnyside Gardens in western Queens, a co-operative garden community built in the mid-1920s and home to about 8,000 people, has always had a close-knit feel.
That closeness was built into its master plan, which called for modest, two-story brick houses and the occasional apartment building separated by shaded, intimate walkways. Among those who strolled along these paths was the pioneering urban historian Lewis Mumford, one of the original co-operators.
Yet in recent weeks, some of the talk in Sunnyside Gardens has turned sour over the subject of whether the community should be designated a historic district, a move that would protect it from future changes.
Community leaders have been working for four years to win the designation, and their efforts finally seem ready to pay off. The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission is poised to schedule an initial hearing on the subject. In response, however, some residents have begun to argue against the change, on the ground that it would spur unwanted gentrification and thus force out the very people who give Sunnyside Gardens its special character. These opponents say they are getting considerable flak from their neighbors.