Much of Camden’s downtown was demolished for ‘urban renewal.’ Now, a push to make it a place for people again.

The Camden Youth Jazz Collective was playing hot licks under a spring blue sky.

People beneath umbrellas at bistro tables tucked into fried fish from a food truck operated by Corinne’s Place, the city’s homegrown, James Beard award-winning soul food restaurant.

Pretty much everybody listening, munching, or walking at Third and Market Streets during lunchtime Thursday was smiling, and so were Cynthia Primas and Nate Echeverria.

“This is creative placemaking,” said Primas, founder and executive director of the IDEA Center for the Arts at 217 Market, one of a cluster of new and established small businesses in the neighborhood. The plaza-like spaciousness at the intersection of Third and Market, where the concerts will be held every Thursday for the next 18 weeks, reflects the area’s historic roots as a public marketplace.

“We’re making opportunities for people to hang out downtown,” said Echeverria, executive director of the Camden Special Services District. The nonprofit is partnered with IDEA in the placemaking efforts, for which expansion planning is underway.

“We’re also showcasing homegrown talent,” Echeverria said. ”There’s a lot of it in Camden.”

But Camden has a shortage of intact commercial and mixed-use downtown blocks like those around Third and Market — the kind of real estate that is well suited for small, start-up firms.

Between Cooper Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard, and from Front to Seventh Streets, government buildings, parking lots, isolated structures, and disconnected remnants of once-dense residential and retail blocks dominate the streetscape — a legacy of grand, and futile, urban renewal plans.

Most of the shopping district along Broadway and Federal Street was leveled decades ago. The former Lit Brothers department store, hailed as downtown’s savior when it opened in 1955, closed in 1972 and later was converted into the county’s Aletha R. Wright Administration Building. And soon, it, too, will be torn down.

The site will then temporarily become a staging area for construction of the $250 million NJ Transit project to improve the nearby Walter Rand Transportation Center.

Camden County, which owns the property, will seek input from the city and residents about the future of the site, spokesman Dan Keashen said.

The three-story, shoebox-like former department store has obscured the eastside view of Camden’s signature building — the 22-story, Art Deco-style City Hall — for nearly 70 years.

Likewise, the blocklong Parkade Building, constructed to help persuade Lits to come to the city (and also hailed as a boon to downtown), walled off views of City Hall’s west side. It was demolished a decade ago. Renamed Roosevelt Plaza Park, the site of the demolished Parkade now features trees, lawns, vendors, art work, and public events.

The former department store/administration building site could be transformed into a park, as well, opening up views of City Hall from both directions. No decisions have been made, said Keashen.

Camden County Commissioner Louis Cappelli remembers his grandmother taking him along while she went shopping at Lits. He said public and private interests are working together “to give Camden the downtown it deserves.”

The county hopes the new transportation center will be “the impetus for residential growth and economic growth” by construction of multistory buildings connected to the new center, he said.

Primas and Echeverria said city leaders have recently been far more attentive to small-scale, incremental improvements, as well as arts and culture events, as tools to reinvigorate downtown.

“We want to create an atmosphere that’s welcoming,” said Mayor Vic Carstarphen. “We want more small businesses. We want beautification. We want more people to be part of Camden rising.”

Meanwhile, the Rowan University/Rutgers-Camden Board of Governors has commissioned a Downtown Camden Master Plan. The process began last August; a final public meeting session will be held in the coming months, according to the plan’s website.

The joint board was established in 2012 to coordinate continued expansion of the ”eds and meds” ecosystem of Camden’s two major universities, as well as to promote economic development and community engagement.

Former Mayor Dana L. Redd was the Joint Board’s CEO and president until last October, when she became CEO and president of the Camden Community Partnership, a nonprofit that has long been involved in redevelopment on the downtown waterfront and elsewhere in the city.

“I’m smiling from ear to ear because there are so many positive activities now happening,” she said. “The Cooper Health expansion and the transportation center projects will be transformative. The placemaking is happening. It takes a collaborative effort to have a thriving downtown.”

Rosemari Hicks opened her coffee shop, Nuanced Cafe, at 225 Market St. in 2020.

The pandemic and concerns about proposed changes to Market and Federal Streets did not make for easy going.

“But I wanted to be here, because Camden is a beautiful, creative, amazing place to do business, and as a person of color, I wanted to be part of a generation bringing back the city,” she said.

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Like her neighbor, Primas, Hicks supports the latest proposal for two-way traffic on both of the major county-owned streets that carry traffic into and out of downtown, as well as to and from the waterfront. Market is currently one way westbound and Federal, one way eastbound.

Hicks also said that although “placemaking is always a good idea, it needs to be organic, and not led by established organizations that tell you, ‘This is what we’re doing,’ rather than ‘What are your needs?’” she said.

Primas, a longtime arts educator, opened IDEA in September 2020.

“We expose younger kids to the performing arts, and we give older kids and young adults interested in media arts an opportunity to learn skills including music production, sound engineering, animation ... and help them find out what their talents are,” she said.

“In this space, which was an empty shell — there was nothing here — kids work with artists who look like them and really care for them. We have become that ‘third place’ where they can feel comfortable being themselves.”

Shellie Mason, the newly elected president of the Cooper Grant Neighborhood Association, said the new businesses and the placemaking efforts “are bringing something positive” to her part of downtown Camden.

“We’re excited about it, and we are looking forward to working in partnership with them,” she said.

Among the music makers at the inaugural concert last Thursday was Carleton Harris, a saxophone player who’s also an instructor at IDEA.

“We got the chemistry going,” he said. “We had a crowd gather around a group of musicians on the street who wanted to have some fun. It was like, ‘We’re here to liven up your day. So let’s do it.’”