A blighted building in Camden advertised condos ‘coming soon’ for years. Now the mayor wants to demolish it.

Camden Mayor Victor Carstarphen said Thursday that he wants to demolish a long-vacant property that has stood for decades as a symbol of deindustrialization and more recently became a flashpoint in the city’s soured relationship with Philadelphia developer Carl Dranoff.

Development rights to the blighted, 10-story structure at North Front and Cooper Streets, formerly known as RCA Building No. 8, were once held by Dranoff but last week reverted to the city under a legal settlement struck between him and the city earlier this month and approved by Camden’s City Council.

“My vision would be to have this knocked down and redeveloped,” said the mayor, after announcing his vision at a news conference Thursday in the shadow of what he described as the “notorious structure.”

“It sends a message that we’re restarting,” he said afterward.

The property was built around 1920 by the Victor Talking Machine Co. and later became part of the RCA electronics company’s sprawling complex, housing RCA’s metal-manufacturing operations. Once a symbol of Camden’s history as a manufacturing hub, it has since become a sign of urban decline. The city regained control of the property after RCA vacated it in the 1990s and has sat vacant ever since.

Dranoff had once hoped to use the development rights he secured from the city under a deal in the early 2000s to convert the property into a condominium complex.

But the property had significant environmental hazards, and the Camden Redevelopment Agency has said it lacked the funding to address them. In 2015 the city set up a chain-link fence around the perimeter of the building to protect passersby from falling debris and to keep trespassers out.

City officials nodded to those unfulfilled plans Thursday. Council President Angel Fuentes motioned toward the banners on the building’s facade, faded by years of sun, advertising “condominiums coming soon.”

“It’s really sad,” Fuentes said, describing those plans as “absolute lies from Dranoff.”

Dranoff has maintained that it was city entities — not him — who held up the project for decades as it was their responsibility to cover the cost of remediation before he could move forward with redevelopment.

» READ MORE: A long-running legal battle between Camden and developer Carl Dranoff has settled — but they’re still fighting

The city offered no immediate timeline for its plans Thursday, and the mayor emphasized that officials would need to assess the state of the property and conduct environmental studies before proceeding with a new project. Nor is demolition a certainty — Carstarphen said it’s possible the building could be rehabbed from its current condition. But the mayor said he would make redevelopment a priority.

The legal settlement enabling Camden to move forward ended more than five years of litigation with Dranoff over the site and the developer’s ill-fated attempt to sell a neighboring luxury apartment complex known as the Victor Lofts to Denver-based real estate company Aimco.

Dranoff needed the city to transfer a tax-abatement agreement to Aimco in order to complete the $71 million transaction. The city has said that as officials reviewed that request, they discovered Dranoff had failed to provide years worth of financial documents required by law.

In a lawsuit, the city accused Dranoff of abusing the tax agreement and robbing Camden of millions he owed the city by hiding profits from the Victor development into another entity he controlled.

The city also alleged Dranoff had been holding Radio Lofts “hostage” to gain leverage in negotiations over the sale of the Victor building.

Dranoff denied those claims and in a lawsuit of his own, accused Camden of violating its contract with him. He rejected Camden’s argument that he’d been hiding profits, saying he’d simply followed the terms of the agreement that city officials were aware of and signed off on in 2002.

He attributed his troubles with the city government to a “vendetta” held against him by South Jersey power broker George E. Norcross III over separate real estate deals in Camden. Norcross has denied wrongdoing.

The settlement cemented this month secures Dranoff’s preferred understanding of the financial agreement governing how much he owes the city from the Victor building’s profits — the arrangement he maintained had been in place from day one.

But under the deal, he also agreed to pay the city $3 million plus additional tax payments of $150,000 in each of the next two years on the apartment building. Dranoff also agreed to transfer ownership to the city of a parking lot adjacent to Radio Lofts. The city, putting the assessed value of those two properties at more than $4 million, said Dranoff had provided a total of $7.75 million in monetary and property assets.

As is customary in a settlement, both Camden and Dranoff agreed “they are admitting no liability or wrongdoing whatsoever.”