The redevelopment project that was supposed to save downtown Camden will be torn down to make way for a park

Camden County's announcement that it will demolish its Aletha Wright administration building to make way for a park is good news -- and a bittersweet reminder of the starring role the site once played in downtown Camden's postwar urban renewal dreams.

The block-long, shoebox-like structure on Broadway between Federal and Market streets was built on the site of the venerable Camden County Courthouse in the mid-1950s to house Lit Brothers department store.

Camden civic and business leaders hoped this brand-new branch of the landmark Philadelphia emporium would help their city maintain its fading position as a regional  retail powerhouse; Broadway between Kaighn Avenue and Federal Street had been South Jersey's premier shopping destination for the first half of the 20th century.

So eager was Camden to accommodate Lits that it surrendered one of its only open places -- Roosevelt Park, on City Hall's west side -- to a pioneering mixed-use, but monstrously ugly, parking garage/office/retail complex called the Parkade Building.

A block-long, five-story behemoth, the Parkade walled off the grand west entrance of City Hall from the rest of the downtown Camden streetscape, much as the Lits building did so from the east.

And while Lits proved a popular shopping destination after it opened in 1956, the arrival of the Cherry Hill Mall in 1961, combined with Camden's accelerating economic decline, led the struggling Philadelphia chain to close the store by 1973.

The county took possession of the shuttered store and by the late 1970s opened an administrative facility for social service programs there. But workers complained of poor ventilation and other issues in windowless spaces that had been designed for selling merchandise.

Meanwhile, by the early 2000s the Parkade was blighted, vermin-infested and mostly vacant; it was demolished and replaced by a reincarnated Roosevelt Park in 2012.  The park has since become a lively venue for special events, such as the Camden Jam Arts and Music Festival.

And  once the administration building is torn down, possibly as early as 2019, a park will be created in its place. Bookends of landscaped public spaces will set off Camden's signature Art Deco City Hall.

But with most of the city's heart already razed for educational and medical facilities -- as well as parking garages and lots -- the disappearance of what was once Lit Brothers will remove perhaps the last vestige of the era when everyone went downtown to shop.