Rutgers is seeking to preserve history — and boost downtown Camden’s future

Rutgers-Camden has started work on a $60 million project to upgrade facilities, better connect the state university campus and its host city, and preserve a distinctive streetscape along a major downtown thoroughfare.

On the north side of the 400 block of Cooper Street, five deteriorating residential buildings owned by Rutgers will be incorporated into a new three-story structure for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The Cooper Gateway Project also will include facade preservation and repurposing of at least five vacant, two-story rowhouses, also owned by the university, along the 400 block of Lawrence Street, which parallels Cooper Street immediately to the north.

“This represents a substantial investment in the future of our institution, our students, and the people of Camden,” Chancellor Antonio D. Tillis said at the groundbreaking last month.

Once a fashionable residential area, Cooper Street has lost a number of beloved buildings, but enough still stand, have been repurposed, and augmented by new structures to provide a sense of place in the heart of Camden.

» READ MORE: How far can the revival of Camden's Cooper Street go? | Kevin Riordan

”The number one priority of the Cooper Gateway project is to continue engaging with, and be a part of, the community,” said Rutgers senior vice chancellor for administration and finance J. Robert McKee.

Rowhouses along Lawrence will become offices and guest accommodations for visiting faculty, and the 400 block of Cooper “will be functioning buildings for faculty and staff and spaces for use by community organizations,” McKee said.

Long seen by some city residents as an inward-facing institution and inattentive steward of real estate holdings in the Cooper-Grant neighborhood, Rutgers-Camden has been working since 2010 to improve the appearance of the campus and its surroundings.

And after decades in which the city focused primarily on waterfront development, and enormous swaths of land between Cooper Street and MLK Boulevard were cleared for development, the city is taking a more nuanced and community-oriented approach to encourage private investment downtown.

In collaboration with the Camden Community Partnership and the Camden Business Improvement District, the city hosts “placemaking” events to bring crowds downtown and nurture cultural and commercial enterprises on Market Street and on nearby cross streets.

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

“There’s more foot traffic and a great kind of arts community developing here,” said Nate Echeverria, executive director of the Camden Business Improvement and Special Service districts.

“Downtown Camden is undersupplied with food and beverage businesses, so there’s a huge opportunity here,” he said. “There are ground-level spaces available, and we are looking to find entrepreneurs to fill vacant storefronts.”

The photographer Erik James Montgomery, known for his evocative portraits of Camden residents — and his foundation to help young people learn the art and business of photography ― is one such entrepreneur. He recently opened a gallery, JPEG, in a former real estate office at Third and Market, as well as a studio a block away.

“The art scene in Camden is on the rise,” said Montgomery, who credits Rutgers with helping create a nurturing climate downtown.

At the May 23 grand opening of a Citizens Bank branch in the high-rise dorm Rutgers built a dozen years ago at Fourth and Cooper, Camden Mayor Victor Carstarphen said the city “is once again becoming an economic engine for the region.”

The Cooper Gateway project “is a win, overall … and we’re eager to see how it unfolds,” said Benjamin Saracco, treasurer of the Cooper-Grant Neighborhood Association.

“But this outcome is due at least in part to sustained public, faculty, and student advocacy,” he said, adding, “we have pushed back numerous times against Rutgers for poor maintenance of properties that have contributed to blight and made the neighborhood less attractive to developers.”

Members of the city’s Historic Preservation Commission, which reviewed the Cooper Gateway plans and made suggestions, declined to comment. The commission has long been critical of the way the university has handled its properties.

“In a perfect world, these buildings would be entirely preserved,” Saracco said. “But at least preserving the facades is a fair outcome.”

The house at 413 Cooper will be preserved in its entirely, as will substantial portions of the four others, said Michael Hanrahan, a principal with the architectural firm Clarke Caton Hintz, in Trenton. Work should be well underway by the end of 2024, with completion expected within two years, he said.

Cooper Gateway is in sync with the Downtown Camden Master Plan, a collaborative undertaking by Camden County, the Camden Community Partnership, and the Rowan University / Rutgers-Camden Joint Board of Governors, said Dana L. Redd, the partnership’s executive director.

“Looking back, the institution [Rutgers] was more inward-facing,” said Redd, who served as mayor from 2010 to 2018. “But over the years and particularly now, with Chancellor Tillis, Rutgers is more outward-facing in terms of growing the campus, and collaborating with the city.

“We’re all trying to give Camden the downtown it deserves.”

The Tabernacle of Faith Church of God in Christ is celebrating its 50th year in a monumental brownstone house of worship that has been a Cooper Street landmark since 1892.

Bishop Tyrone McCombs, pastor there since the 1980s, was instrumental in helping restore a former bank building on Cooper Street as the university’s signature Camden building.

“What Rutgers is doing enhances the image while protecting the history that’s there,” he said. “It’s a unique opportunity because the institutions are enabling these buildings to be part of the future.”

Most of the investments have been made by public institutions such as Rutgers and Rowan Universities, as well as the LEAP Academy University School. But private money helped renovate the long-vacant, art deco-style Pierre apartments; transform the former Victor Talking Machine Co. office building into the American headquarters of the global metal recycling firm EMR; and build the 11 Cooper apartment complex.

From about 1880 to 1920, Cooper Street was Camden’s very own Gilded Age boulevard, a showcase of wealth and mansions on large lots from Second to Seventh Streets, said Charlene Mires, a Rutgers-Camden professor of history who curates the Learning from Cooper Street website.

“But because of the smaller houses on Lawrence Street, there was a diversity of human experience on the block,” she said. “Black people who were migrants from the South in the 1890s, and people from almost every other phase of migration and immigration, lived on Lawrence Street.”

The houses on Lawrence and Cooper “have survived through the rise and fall, the struggles … and [soon], revitalization,” Mires said.