Inquirer Anniversary: A blow to Camden, but dreams persist

To mark the 180th anniversary of its founding, The Inquirer is reprinting an article from its archives every Monday for 18 weeks. Today's offering, the 17th in our series, was published Aug. 25, 1989, and describes the closing of the Campbell Soup Co. plant in Camden.

The soup-can water towers of Campbell Soup Co. that for a century have dotted Camden's skyline have been a symbol of the company's presence, even as other corporate citizens fled the city or closed.

But now the historic plant on the site where Campbell was founded in 1869 has become obsolete and will be shut next summer.

"Yes, it hurts. Yes, we will recover," Camden Mayor Randy Primas said yesterday after the company announced the shutdown.

Indeed, city fathers, corporate boosters and Campbell officials said the closing did not minimize the company's commitment to the City Invincible.

Nor does the decision jeopardize the city's $500 million waterfront development project - of which Campbell's $35 million world headquarters is an anchor.

In addition, they said, the 16 acres the plant occupies on Market and Front Streets is prime for further development.

Jim Wallace, president of the Chamber of Commerce of Southern New Jersey, said the waterfront project - which includes a state aquarium, a hotel and eight office buildings - remained on schedule.

But city officials acknowledged that the loss of the plant's 940 jobs - about a third affecting Camden residents - would have an immediate effect on the city, where 16 percent of the population is unemployed.

"That's hard to absorb," said Thomas P. Corcoran, executive director of the Cooper's Ferry Development Association, which oversees the city's waterfront development. "You can't minimize the impact on the workers and their families."

Campbell officials said that about a third of the 940 employees are eligible for early retirement and that the company intends to negotiate with union officials for transfers, alternative job training, job placement and severance pay and other benefits.

Economic analysts said plant employees would have trouble finding work with comparable salaries and benefits because Camden County's manufacturing sector is not expanding - despite a low unemployment rate of 3.3 percent.

"It's unlikely they'll be able to find as good an employer as Campbell Soup," said Thomas P. Hamer, director of the Center for Economic Data Analysis at Glassboro State College.

Bob McHugh, a spokesman for Gov. Kean, said the state Commerce and Labor Departments were considering establishing a plant-closing team to assist Campbell workers with unemployment benefits.

Camden County Freeholder Director Robert E. Andrews said the county-administered Job Training Partnership Act program would offer job-training and placement services to Campbell workers, possibly with federal funds.

Campbell said it would close the plant as part of a corporate streamlining to make the company more competitive.

It is a tale that has been oft told in recent decades, as pillar after pillar has been torn from Camden's industrial framework.

City business leaders said the plant's closing was a natural step in Camden's eventual evolution from a factory town to a service economy, a process that has gone on nationwide. City officials said the Campbell plant, in time, would have been at odds with downtown redevelopment, creating traffic snarls between outgoing delivery trucks and incoming tourists.

"We knew, long-term, that place didn't belong there. Sooner or later it would have been incompatible with downtown development," said a city official who asked not to be identified. "It would have been better later, around three or four years, when the city could have absorbed the blow.

"I do think Campbell might have closed six or seven years ago had it not been for its commitment to Camden. They wanted to see if it could work."

Campbell donates $2 million to charities in the city of Camden and is the linchpin to the waterfront development project.

Primas termed the closing "devastating," but said Campbell's $85 million in expansion projects for other facilities in the city would somewhat offset the blow. So will future development of the 16-acre plant site, he said.

"In the long term," said Primas, "the land will be put to use employing others."