By DEBORAH HIRSCH
Courier-Post Staff

For at least the past two years, North Camden has been buzzing with a steady lineup of community meetings to solicit opinions on a neighborhood plan, the design of an upcoming park, or what to do with undeveloped waterfront.

Earlier this week, community leaders and stakeholders gathered once again, this time using maps that they’d created to talk about how to improve the neighborhood.

Hopeworks ‘N Camden Executive Director Jeff Putthoff, who coordinated the meeting, said the idea was to use visual representations to start defining North Camden and what it could become.

“A lot of people are creating stories about North Camden and they’re going to be creating more when the prison comes down,” Putthoff said.

Demolition of the Riverfront State Prison began Thursday.

Members of the group presented maps highlighting everything from parcels tied up in liens to blocks where residents had recently planted trees.

One from the N.J. Conservation Fund bore a single arrow pointing to the only public access to the waterfront.

Another came from 40 children in an after-school program at Cooper’s Poynt School, who used colored circles to mark places they thought were dangerous or safe. Green dots, indicating positive places, covered most of the schools. But the waterfront was filled with red.

Putthoff said it was interesting to see how the existing community is so divorced from the waterfront, which many people talk about as a great asset for future development. The challenge will be figuring out how to make that area important and accessible to current residents so that they aren’t isolated when development gets going, he said.

Other maps showed nonprofit housing developments, the homes of residents who attended local churches and the density of vacant homes per block.

Zoe Selzer, a project coordinator for the Walter Rand Institute for Public Affairs at Rutgers-Camden, said it seems scary to see all that vacant land, “but at the same time it shows a lot of potential.”

“This is how you develop North Camden without using eminent domain because there’s so much land that isn’t being used,” Selzer said.

Edgar Alejandro, who moved to the 600 block of State Street about a year ago, said he came to the meeting because he wants North Camden to look just as beautiful as the downtown waterfront.

“We need to build that front so when people look at it, they go, “Wow, we want to go there,’ ” he said.

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An informational gathering was held this past Saturday at the future home of the Hopeworks C.R.I.B. and over 50 people were present, expressing interest in the bulbs, having their front porches painted, adding weather stripping to their front doors and helping with some painting of the 8 abandoned homes on the block.

Keep watching! Can you imagine what these four blocks will look like in April when 6000 red bulbs shoot forth?!!!!

Here are some pictures from our Saturday gathering:

Look What Is Happening In North Camden!!