A new documentary film by T.J. Paradiso 

How do you rebuild hope in the so-called "meanest" city in America?

Come with me on a little journey... travel into a city that could be right next door, Camden, NJ.

Like many U.S. cities in the late 1960's, Camden was a victim of deindustrialization, joblessness, middle-class flight, and depopulation that gave rise to one America's toughest urban hyper-ghettos of the 1970's through today.

Between the infamy of drug crimes and high murder rates, urban blight, and disintegrating schools and failed infrastructure, lies Camden, a city and a people waiting to be reborn.

"The biggest little city in the world," Camden was once the city of firsts! Camden companies and residents created everything from the televisions to battleships, and Camden was home to RCA, Esterbrook Pens, and New York Shipbuilding, and once boasted more jobs than people. The poet Walt Whitman's final resting place, the city across from Philadelphia, Camden, is still headquarters to the Campbell Soup Company.  But now, Camden is most known from media reports about its continued listing as the most dangerous city in America.

Camden is the target of so much angst and misunderstanding, and as New Jersey grapples with how to revitalize the city, I decided to find out the truth about my family's former home. The son of Polish, Irish, and Italian Americans, I decided to return to the city where we once lived to discover the new face of Camden's identity, and how efforts to rebuild the city are progressing, or failing.

Travel along with me as I discover what "revitalization" means to people in and around Camden, and find out what gives them hope!

Come on a little journey of life in America...

NOTES

Principal filming wrapped in December, 2009.  Release Date: Fall, 2010.

I DREAM’D in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth;

I dream’d that was the new City of Friends;

Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love—it led the rest;

It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,

And in all their looks and words.

 

--Walt Whitman (1819–1892).  Leaves of Grass.