The adjoining rowhouses at 421 and 419 Cooper Street were among the first to be built on the north side of Cooper Street as Cooper family descendants began to divide and sell their inherited property during the 1840s and 1850s. A broker and volunteer firefighter living in Philadelphia, Joseph R. Paulson, and his wife Mildred K. Paulson bought these lots in 1847. At least one house existed on the property by the end of 1848, when Joseph Paulson, at the age of 36, drew up an agreement that revealed expectations of an early death: he placed the properties in trust with his mother-in-law, Hester Keen, with instructions that she collect rents to support his wife and children, a son also named Joseph (then 13 years old) and daughter Emily (then age 5).
A death notice for Joseph R. Paulson appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 29, 1849. The family invited relatives, friends, and members of the Humane Engine Company in Philadelphia to his funeral “from his late residence, Cooper Street, near Fifth, Camden, N.J.” They proceeded from there back to Philadelphia on the Arch Street ferry for his burial at Monument Cemetery. His cause of death was not made public. The property on Cooper Street, as he intended, remained a source of rental income and periodically a home for his descendants for the next 75 years.
A Soldier's Family during the Civil War
From 1863 (perhaps earlier) until at least 1869, 421 Cooper Street was the rented home of the Harbert family: Samuel C. Harbert, a dealer in agricultural implements in Philadelphia; his wife, Georgianna; and daughters Mary Virginia and Ella. During the first two years of the Civil War, Harbert served as regimental quartermaster in the New Jersey Fourth Infantry Regiment. The New Jersey Fourth participated in the defense of Washington until March 1862 and then advanced into Virginia and saw action in battles that included Yorktown, Bull Run, and Fredericksburg. Another Camden soldier, 17-year-old Thomas James Howell, demonstrated affection for Harbert's daughter Mary in letters he wrote home before being killed at the Battle of Gaines Mill on June 27, 1862.
Harbert mustered out of the New Jersey Fourth in January 1863 and thereafter served as an officer in the U.S. Volunteers Paymaster's Department Infantry Regiment until November 1865, reaching the rank of major. He also served on the Camden City Council from 1869 to 1871, when the family relocated to Philadelphia, his place of business. Samuel (1818-1888), Georgianna (1821-92), and the daughters are buried in Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia.
Family Legacy
As the original owner, Joseph Paulson, intended, the Cooper Street property supported his wife during her lifetime and upon her death conveyed to their two children. The siblings, adults by the time of their mother’s death in 1875, then divided ownership of the houses on their inherited land. Joseph Paulson, bearing the same name as his father, became the owner of 421 Cooper Street and a smaller house at the back of the property facing Lawrence Street. The homes continued to be rented to tenants.
Hazards of Youth in the 1880s
From around 1883 until 1892, the home at 421 Cooper Street was rented by the Kean family (sometimes spelled Keen, but apparently not related to the property owners). William C. Kean, a clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his wife Sarah, headed a family with two daughters and five sons living at home during this period. Sarah Kean's brother, Robert W. Downing, served as Comptroller for the Pennsylvania Railroad, which by 1888 also employed one of the Kean sons, then 17-year-old Charles A., as a clerk.
Camden newspapers recorded some of the experiences of the Kean sons, illustrating some of the hazards of youth the late nineteenth century. In 1884, 18-year-old Edmund suffered a severe contusion of his foot during a rough ride on a ferry boat in fog. In 1885, he made the news again for impertinence to the pastor of Trinity Baptist Church, which expelled him. In 1888, 15-year-old Harry and 13-year-old Joseph (known as Josie) were involved in a tree-cutting accident at their grandparents' farm near Woodbury, with Josie suffering axe cuts to his ankle. ("The shoe saved the foot from being entirely cut off, " the Camden Morning Post reported.) One of the boys, Robert (known as Bertie) did not live to adulthood. He died in the 421 Cooper Street home in July 1890 at the age of 13 from causes not publicly reported. The Camden Morning Post described him as "a bright and promising lad and his affection nature made him a favorite with his companions." As customary, his funeral service also took place at home.
In 1893, the Camden city directory announced the Kean sons as "removed to Philadelphia," and their parents were also across the river by the time of the 1900 Census (at 527 Broad Street, an area favored by transportation magnates). One of the Kean sons, William Jr., became a real estate developer of homes in the Germantown section of Northwest Philadelphia.
Security for a Widow
The Paulson family returned to 421 Cooper Street by 1897, opening a new period when the house again served as a source of income for a widow with young children. Mary A. Maxwell was 27 years old when she married a widower 30 years her senior, Joseph R. Paulson—the son of first owner of 421 Cooper Street. Joseph lived in Philadelphia, listed in public records variously as an optician, cutlery maker, and jewelry merchant.
With Joseph, Mary had two children and together they moved back to Camden and the 421 Cooper Street home. By the 1900 Census, the household consisted of Joseph, age 64; Mary, age 34; their sons Joseph Jr., age 6, and Charles, age 5, and a housekeeper, 55-year-old Clara Brewer. By 1905, Brewer's place had been taken by 21-year-old Rachel Ball, an African American who like many others in the early twentieth century had migrated north from Virginia. The family also added a daughter, Ruth, born 1902. The Paulsons lived at 421 Cooper Street for at least a decade and then, by 1910, made another move to the more fashionable suburb of Haddonfield. Still, they retained ownership of 421 Cooper Street.
In 1911, when Joseph died, the family's former home became a source of financial security for Mary and her children. Mary rented out 421 Cooper Street to other families while living next door at 419 Cooper Street, the other half of the Paulson family property that had passed to Joseph’s sister, Emily. The house at 421 for almost a decade became the rented home for another extended family headed by a widow, Clara Starn, until that family moved in 1920 to Merchantville. It remained a source of income for Mary Paulson and her family until 1925; its change of ownership that year warranted a story in the Camden Courier-Post to note that the property had been in the hands of only two families--the Paulsons and the Coopers--since Camden's earliest history.
1920s Disruption, Opportunity, and Renovation
During the 1920s, a series of disruptions and transitions led Camden boosters to view Cooper Street as a potential business corridor. Construction of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), completed in 1926, caused demolition of nineteenth-century homes in nearby blocks. Near the Delaware waterfront, the Victor Talking Machine Company demolished a block of Cooper Street homes to expand its factories. Commercial-scale buildings such as the Wilson Building, Camden's first skyscraper (620 Cooper, completed 1925), and the Plaza Hotel (500 Cooper, completed 1927), began to appear. Controversially for longtime residents, Cooper Street was widened in anticipation of increasing automobile traffic.
In the midst of these transitions, 421 Cooper Street changed from a family home to an office building. It was one of a series of renovation projects managed by Julia M. Carey, a 26-year-old daughter of Irish immigrants who had worked as a stenographer and notary before finding new opportunity in real estate sales during the 1920s. On behalf of the Bell-Oliver Corporation, she sold three Cooper Street houses--321, 421, and 521--to investors and stayed on to manage and remodel them. The renovations by the "energetic realty lady" were reported in the Camden Courier-Post of September 11, 1926: at 421 Cooper Street, Carey turned the home into an office building, and leased an office there for herself. (Meanwhile, she turned 321 Cooper Street into an eight-unit apartment house and 521 into offices for lawyers.)
It appears likely that Carey was responsible for the Mission Revival-style ornament that obscured the original facade of 421 Cooper Street. This Spanish-influenced style, which originated on the West Coast, had been rare in Camden but made two other appearances on Cooper Street during the 1920s: in a new commercial building at 525 Cooper and in the Chalcar Apartments building in the 200 block. The renovation of 421 Cooper Street, with enlarged windows and structural changes necessary to install the new Mission Revival ornament, is visible in an aerial photograph of the vicinity of the Delaware River Bridge approach taken c. 1926. The completed renovation can also be seen in the 1947 advertisement published at the top of this page.
Julia M. Carey lived at least briefly, c. 1929-1931, in one of the apartments she created at 321 Cooper Street. She remained involved with the neighborhood until at least 1940, when the Camden city directory listed her as having a real estate office at 521 Cooper.
Helen's Beauty Shop
After the renovation of 421 Cooper, the building had a variety of office tenants, including an insurance agency and promoters of the new Arlington Mausoleum in Pennsauken. But the business tenant who became most well-known to Camden during the 1930s and 1940s arrived in 1933, when Helen Waters opened a beauty shop on the second floor. She vigorously promoted her business with display advertising and flattering promotional articles in the Camden newspapers, encouraging the women of Camden to come to her for the latest in hairstyling and cosmetics.
By the time Helen opened her shop at 421 Cooper, she had been widowed and her work as a beautician supported two daughters. The 1930 Census found her at age 30 living at the Harding Villa Apartments on Federal Street while her daughters Patricia and Dorothy, then aged 9 and 10, lived with her parents Daniel and Lida Chester elsewhere in Camden. Helen, who had an eighth-grade education, worked as a beautician for Binder's Beauty Shop in Philadelphia before opening her own establishment at 421 Cooper Street, where she and her daughters also came to live. In 1938, Waters added cosmetics and facials to her business. Her daughters both graduated from high school, including at least one year at Mount St. Mary's Academy run by the Sisters of Mercy in Plainfield, New Jersey. In 1940, living with their mother at 421 Cooper, Dorothy worked as a typist and Patricia as a telephone operator. Patricia actively promoted a women's basketball league in Camden for former high school players.
Other businesses and organizations, including the Camden County Real Estate Board and the Camden County Democratic Party, had offices in 421 Cooper while Helen operated the shop and lived upstairs. In 1945, after both of her daughters had married, Helen bought the building but retained ownership only until 1947. When she put 421 Cooper Street up for sale, it offered an office suite on the first floor, additional office space on the second floor, "plus three nicely planned apartments with modern tile baths." Helen continued to operate her beauty salon in the building until at least 1950, but after its sale she moved behind it to 426 Lawrence Street.
Residential, Professional, Commercial
During the second half of the twentieth century, 421 Cooper Street served all elements of the transitions noted in the justification for naming Cooper Street a historic district on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places in 1989. Its next owner, Ernest F. Birbeck, was an optician who moved his practice from the Plaza Hotel, then nearby at Fifth and Cooper Street, into 421 Cooper in 1950. He commuted from Pennsauken until he retired in 1967. His business tenants included a hearing aid center and a eyewear shop whose co-owner, B. Morozin, became the next owner of 421 Cooper. Under Morozin's ownership in the early 1970s, Rutgers-Camden students lived upstairs in space advertised as "dorm style" with a kitchen, dining room and air conditioning, for up to 10 people.
The Rutgers connection to 421 Cooper Street continued when another office tenant, lawyer Joseph Liebman, purchased the building in 1977. Liebman, a graduate of Rutgers Law School in Camden, lived in Philadelphia but according to information published in the Courier-Post had an office in 421 Cooper Street for fifty-five years. After one more change of ownership to another Philadelphia attorney/investor, Raymond Quaglia, Rutgers acquired the building in 1999.
On February 27, 2020, the Camden Historic Preservation Commission voted unanimously to dismiss with prejudice an application by Rutgers to demolish 421 Cooper Street. It further recommended reconstruction of the building, including restoring the facade.
On March 6, 2020, a request from Rutgers for emergency demolition of 421 Cooper Street was declined by the Historic Preservation Office of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection on the basis that the building's condition resulted from long-term deterioration.
On June 11, 2020, the Camden City Planning Board voted unanimously to deny Rutgers' request to demolish 421 Cooper Street.
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com).
Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
Cooper Street Historic District, National Register Nomination, U.S. Department of Interior.
Digital Photographs Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia.
New Jersey State Census, 1885, 1895, 1915, and U.S. Census, 1870-1950 (Ancestry.com).
Property Report, 421 Cooper Street, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Structures Survey, 421 Cooper Street, New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services.
Note on sources: The historic structure report for this property dates it as “before 1885.” This research updates and corrects the record.
A death notice for Joseph R. Paulson appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 29, 1849. The family invited relatives, friends, and members of the Humane Engine Company in Philadelphia to his funeral “from his late residence, Cooper Street, near Fifth, Camden, N.J.” They proceeded from there back to Philadelphia on the Arch Street ferry for his burial at Monument Cemetery. His cause of death was not made public. The property on Cooper Street, as he intended, remained a source of rental income and periodically a home for his descendants for the next 75 years.
Philadelphia CommutersFamily Legacy
As the original owner, Joseph Paulson, intended, the Cooper Street property supported his wife during her lifetime and upon her death conveyed to their two children. The siblings, adults by the time of their mother’s death in 1875, then divided ownership of the houses on their inherited land. Joseph Paulson's daughter, Emily, became the owner of 419 Cooper Street and a smaller house at the back of the property facing Lawrence Street. The homes continued to be rented to tenants.Camden and Philadelphia newspapers (Newspapers.com)
Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society, Ancestry.com)
Camden County Property Records
Cooper Street Historic District, National Register Nomination, U.S. Department of Interior.
Inland Architect and News Record, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, the Art Institute of Chicago
Manuals of the Legislature of New Jersey, 1896-97
Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project, Athenaeum of Philadelphia
Structures Survey, 527 Cooper Street, New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services
U.S. and New Jersey Censuses (Ancestry.com)
On January 17, 1910, the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that “Dr. and Mrs. Frederick A. Slack are now settled in their handsome new home at 411 Cooper Street.” On a street dominated by nineteenth-century rowhouses, the Slacks’ new residence stood apart with a distinctly more modern and grand appearance created by yellow-orange Roman-style bricks and a substantial front porch with sandstone balustrades. Unknown at the time, 411 Cooper Street was the last single-family home that would be built in the area that later became the Cooper Street Historic District.
The Slack family continued the trend of Cooper Street as a home for medical professionals. Frederick Slack, 35, was a dentist whose office was in Philadelphia; in 1910 he and his wife Lorell, 28, had a two-year-old son, Frederick Jr. The lot on Cooper Street, and perhaps the house as well, appears from deeds to have been a gift to Lorell from her uncle, Camden funeral director Fithian S. Simmons, who bought several properties on Cooper Street during the first decade of the twentieth century. He conveyed 411 Cooper Street to his niece on April 22, 1909, for the token sum of $1.
The Slacks occupied the home for its first decade as their family grew to include a second son, Thomas, born in 1912. They also employed domestic servants, showing a preference for Black help in the classified ads they placed in local newspapers. The domestic workers connect 411 Cooper Street with the history of Black migration from the South: in 1910 the U.S. Census recorded the household as including Estelle C. Williams, 18, who was born in Virginia, and in 1915 the New Jersey Census recorded Jessie Ryan, 20, also born in Virginia. In addition to live-in help, the Slacks employed laundresses up to two days a week.
While living in Camden, the Slack family spent summers at a cottage in Ocean City and visited Lorell Slack’s family in Millville, Cumberland County, on holidays. Around 1920, however, they moved to Philadelphia’s more fashionable western suburbs. By 1930 they lived in Lower Merion, Montgomery County. Their oldest son, Frederick Jr., in later life invented a method of repairing fingernails with acrylics and founded the company that became Nail Systems International (NSI).
Manufacturing and Business Leaders
The next two occupants of 411 Cooper Street connect the house with key manufacturing and business interests in Camden. Morris E. Noecker, president of the Noecker & Ake Ship Building Company, previously lived near his shipyard at Twenty-Seventh Street opposite Petty Island. His experiences illustrate Camden’s history as a place of business opportunity during the early twentieth century. Noecker, who was born in Leesport (Berks County), Pennsylvania, had come to Camden in 1902 and started the shipyard in 1905, specializing in building barges and other wood watercraft. On Cooper Street, the Noecker household included Morris, age 51; his wife Lizzie, age 49; and three grown children in their 20s, a daughter and two sons, all born in Pennsylvania.
The Noeckers occupied 411 Cooper Street for just three years before moving out of Camden to Collingswood. Starting in 1923 and for the rest of the 1920s, 411 Cooper Street became home to a member of the Taylor family, which had operated the Taylor Bros. flour and feed business in Camden since 1865. G. Wilbur Taylor and his family had been displaced from their earlier home in the 500 block of Linden Street by construction for the first bridge between Camden and Philadelphia, the Delaware River Bridge (later named the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), completed in 1926. At the Linden Street address, their household in 1920 consisted of G. Wilbur, 55; his wife Emilie, 50; daughter Gwendolyn, 27; and two servants, Emma Clare, a 61-year-old widow who had been born in Maryland to parents from France and Germany; and Bella Chambers, a 52-year-old Irish immigrant. Cooper Street proved to be the last home for the elder Coopers. Emilie Taylor, a lifelong Camden resident active in the Daughters of the American Revolution, died in 1928 after an illness of three weeks. G. Wilbur Taylor died in 1930. Shortly before his death, Taylor initiated construction of an elevator in the home, suggesting either infirmity or plans to join other properties on Cooper Street in converting to commercial use.
Mixed Use during the Great Depression
The house at 411 Cooper Street stood vacant in 1931 as the Great Depression deepened. Its uses throughout the 1930s were temporary and commercial, in keeping with a movement by Camden real estate interests to establish Cooper Street as a business thoroughfare. In 1932, the funeral home Joseph H. Murray and Son temporarily moved into 411 Cooper Street after a water heater explosion damaged its usual location across the street at 408 Cooper. A restaurant called Four-Eleven opened in the building in 1934 but closed in 1935 after neighbors objected to its application for a liquor license. A gas explosion during renovations in 1936 ended a planned purchase of the building by Paul Slaughter, the president of Hunting Park Motors in Philadelphia By 1937 an undertaker, Bertha Kephart, operated her business on the first floor, and the upper floors became business and professional offices, most connected with construction and real estate activity.
During the 1940s, 411 Cooper Street gained a new family in residence, although some office uses remained in the building. Francesco D’Imperio, a physician and World War II veteran, acquired the building to use as both his office and home for his family, which included his wife Antoinette and two young sons. While Francesco advanced in his career as a gastroenterologist, Antoinette became known for her work on behalf of postwar orphans in Italy, which earned the Star of Solidarity award from the Italian government. In the 1950s, the D’Imperio family joined the trend of professionals moving from Camden to the suburbs; by 1954 they lived in Haddonfield and by 1960 they moved to Cherry Hill, where Dr. D’Imperio also located his practice.
Apartments and Redevelopment
From the 1950s through the 1970s, 411 Cooper Street housed offices and rental apartments; among the tenants in 1973, Cedric Wiggins was a student at the Rutgers School of Law and became chairman of the Black Law Student Union on the Camden campus.
In the early 1990s, following the introduction of historic preservation tax credits, Rutgers University entered into a partnership with a redevelopment firm, Vintage Living, to rehabilitate both 411 and 321 Cooper Street into modernized offices. The location of 411 Cooper, directly across the street from a new federal courthouse then under construction, positioned the building well for legal offices. The Camden County Bar Association moved in, as did several attorney’s offices offering bankruptcy and immigration services. By 1998, however, back taxes owed on the property forced a sheriff’s sale and led to title transferring entirely to Rutgers.
Under Rutgers ownership, 411 Cooper Street became home to various university offices, including the Walter Rand Institute for Public Affairs, which continued to occupy the building in 2022.
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com).
Camden City Directories (Camden County Historical Society and Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
Cooper Street Historic District, National Register Nomination, U.S. Department of Interior.
Digital Photographs Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia.
New Jersey State Census, 1915, U.S. Census, 1910-1950 (Ancestry.com).
Property Report, 411 Cooper Street, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Rental Income for an Artist’s Family
The Camden houses, managed as rental properties, provided steady income for Atwood, a married woman whose husband, an artist, was frequently absent and dependent on patrons for income. Jesse Atwood, born in New Hampshire, was an itinerant portrait painter who became best known for a journey to Mexico to paint General Zachary Taylor during the Mexican-American War. He also painted portraits of presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, and promoted this work to entice other patrons as he traveled.
According to Who's Who in American History, Hannah and Jesse Atwood came to Philadelphia from Rhode Island around 1830, which may have been shortly after their marriage. The Atwoods appear to have lived in the wood-frame house that stood at 413 Cooper Street in the late 1840s; during that time, Jesse Atwood created a bust from his portrait of Zachary Taylor and offered it for sale. They lived in Camden again between 1855 and 1860, but otherwise they lived in Philadelphia. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, other tenants occupied the row houses on Hannah's Cooper Street land (spanning 413, 415, and 417 Cooper). From 1861 to 1863, the occupants of 413 Cooper included William T. Doughten, who moved to Camden in the 1850s to establish a lumber business at Kaighn’s Point. (Doughten next purchased a home up the street at 427 Cooper.)
Jesse Atwood died in Philadelphia in 1870, at the age of 79, and Hannah lived until 1883. Both are buried in Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. Hannah's will specified the houses at 415 and 417 Cooper Street as bequests to her granddaughter Clara Fisher, without mentioning the adjoining property at 413. Although Atwood envisioned the houses as an ongoing source of independent income for her granddaughter, Clara's husband sold 413 Cooper Street to its tenant, Restore Lamb, in 1883, and Clara sold 415 and 417 Cooper Street by 1888. Hannah Atwood's long record of ownership on Cooper Street faded from memory.
New House, New Style, New Family
At the time of Hannah Atwood’s death, Cooper Street was undergoing a transformation to a more fashionable residential address. In the early 1880s, the Camden City Council approved a resident’s proposal to move the curb lines of Cooper Street properties into the street by twelve feet on each side, thereby creating room for gardens or lawns in front of every house. The more bucolic thoroughfare touched off an era for construction of new, more fashionable homes. At 413 Cooper Street, an older wood-frame house gave way to a Second Empire-style house with a stone façade and mansard roof, described by the Camden Courier as a “comfortable dwelling replete with modern conveniences.” Restore Lamb, the tenant who bought the earlier wood-frame house, carried out the redevelopment project in 1883 shortly after his daughter, Lizzie, died in the old house of typhoid fever at the age of 25. He then sold the new house in 1884 to a commission fish merchant, Albert Rowe, who moved from Second Street with his wife, Henrietta, and two children. They employed at least one domestic servant, an Irish immigrant named Kitty Keelan.
The house at 413 Cooper Street changed hands again in 1887, opening a long-term period of occupancy by the family of lumber merchant Harry Humphreys that lasted into the 1920s. Humphreys, in his early 30s when he bought the home, had recently opened his own lumber business on the Camden waterfront after years working for other firms. The Humphreys family, which had been living nearby on north Third Street, also included Humphreys’ mother, his wife, and a young son. The family employed domestic servants, usually young, female Irish immigrants.
Harry Humphreys’ mother, Evaline, died in 1892, but the family also expanded with two additional children who grew up in the Cooper Street home. Harry Humphreys took an active role in civic affairs as well as in business, serving on the Camden Park Commission and for a time as a city councilman. He served as a vestryman of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church a block away on Market Street. The Camden Morning Post once described him as a man with a memorable smile: “… he was a man who seemed always in the brightest of moods, a man who found a rare satisfaction in his associations with other men, a man who knew nothing of cynicism but ever made the most of the good things which life has to offer.”
Humphreys parted with the home at 413 Cooper Street in the 1920s, when he was in his 60s, in a decade when Camden real estate interests sought to transition Cooper Street into a commercial corridor. (Humphreys’ cousin, Louis Humphreys, was a leading real estate broker.) After selling the house to a pair of lawyers in 1928, Harry Humphreys and his wife, Susanna, divided their time between the new Walt Whitman Hotel in Camden and the home of a married daughter in Merchantville.
Office Building
The two lawyers who bought 413 Cooper Street, Joseph Beck Tyler and A. Moulton McNutt, may have been responsible for the new commercial façade that obscured the structure’s earlier history as a family home. Beginning their purchase in 1928, the building primarily housed office tenants but retained at least two rental apartments that were documented by the U.S. Census in 1940. In addition to the Tyler law firm, which grew to include two grown sons in the 1940s, the building housed offices for an insurance agent, an engineer, and a mortgage company. During the 1940s, its business tenants included an optician and a dentist. Like the owners of the building, these business and professional people maintained offices in Camden but lived in the suburbs.
By the late 1960s, the building had passed to heirs of Tyler and McNutt and notices for sheriff’s sale and foreclosure appeared in the Camden Courier-Post. It was acquired in 1980 by Nise Productions, notable as the producer of the television program Dancin’ On Air–but Camden served only as the mailing address for the show, which was telecast on Channel 17 from a studio in West Philadelphia. Nise Productions sold the building to Rutgers University in 2009.
The distinctive stone house at 427 Cooper Street replaced an earlier brick house that stood at the same location from at least the 1850s. The north side of Cooper Street filled with rowhouses during the late 1840s and early 1850s as members of the Cooper family sold their inherited land.
Earlier Brick House
Early owners of the lot at this address included Thomas W. Dyott Jr., a Philadelphia wholesaler of patent medicines who bought the property in 1852 (in addition to the adjacent corner lot at Fifth and Cooper, which he had acquired in 1846). In business with his father, also named Thomas, Dyott sold remedies such as Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup for quieting babies and cures for rheumatism, liver ailments, and other maladies. His father had immigrated England in 1805 opened a drug store, claimed to be a doctor, and became one of the nation's leading purveyors of patent medicines. Seeking bottles for his remedies, the elder Dyott also went into the bottle manufacturing business and by the 1820s had a thriving complex of factories in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. That venture grew into a company town called Dyottville but collapsed in bankruptcy after a run on its bank during the panic of 1837. The patent medicine business remained active during the 1850s as T.W. Dyott & Sons.
City directories document Thomas Dyott Jr. as a Camden resident at "Cooper above Fourth" from 1855 to 1857, and his lot at 427 Cooper Street included a brick house by the time he sold it in 1860. Documented that year in their next home in Philadelphia, the Dyott family included Thomas, his wife Sarah, four children ranging in age from 8 to 16, two Irish immigrant domestic servants, and two boarders. Dyott also sold his adjacent corner lot at Fifth and Cooper Streets to a new owner in 1860.
The next owner of 427 Cooper Street, builder Thomas Atkinson (later a mayor of Camden), resold it just two years later. This transaction in 1862 opened a long period of ownership by William T. Doughten, a pioneer in Camden’s riverfront lumber industry. Doughten had moved to Camden from Gloucester City in the 1850s to establish a lumber business at Kaighn’s Point. Before acquiring 427 Cooper Street, Doughten and his wife, Abigail, had rented another home in the same block, a less substantial wood-frame house at 413 Cooper Street. At the new address, by 1870 their household included two sons and two daughters, two unrelated women seamstresses, and a domestic servant, Phebe Oney, described in the 1870 Census as “mulatto,” born in Delaware and illiterate. Although the family moved elsewhere in Camden in the 1870s and 1880s, Doughten retained ownership of the house as an investment property. Among the tenants was a dentist, Alphonso Irwin, who had his home and office at 427 from 1881 until 1885, when he purchased the house next door, 425 Cooper Street, which still stands.
New Streetscape, New House
The property changed ownership in 1889 during the greatest takeoff of Camden’s population, which nearly tripled between 1880 and 1920, from about 41,000 to more than 116,000 people. Cooper Street also changed in the early 1880s after residents persuaded the City Council to move curb lines toward the center to create twelve-foot front yards for the length of the street. The more pastoral setting touched off a trend of new houses that stood in contrast to earlier rowhouses as much larger, fashionable statements of their owners’ success and ambition in business.
In place of the earlier house owned by Doughten, real estate broker James White built a new house designed to serve as both his office and residence for himself, his wife, and two daughters. The Whites engaged the Philadelphia architectural firm Moses & King to design a distinctive home that incorporated a strong statement of Richardsonian Romanesque style with a stone arched window on the first floor but also ornamental touches that could be described as Queen Anne, a style that gained in popularity in the United States following its appearance at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The residence thus combined two architectural statements in one building, speaking to two purposes as home and office. Moses & King were known for designing churches as well as residences, which may help to explain the stained glass installed over the front door.
The White family remained at 427 Cooper Street until the 1920s. After the death of James White in 1902, his wife Margaret became one of several widows heading households in the 400 block of Cooper Street. Her family in the first decade of the twentieth century included a married daughter, the daughter’s husband, and a grandchild. The house they occupied changed in appearance with the addition of an ornamental front porch that obscured the heavy Romanesque arched window of the first floor.
A Commercial Future
By the 1920s, suburbanization and the construction of the Delaware River Bridge—later the renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge—were changing Camden, and so too the occupants and fates of houses on Cooper Street. By the middle 1920s, demolition made way for the bridge and construction of the new Plaza Hotel at Fifth and Cooper Streets signaled a more commercial future for the area around the White family home, an evolution pursued intensely by Camden boosters and real estate interests.
The house at 427 Cooper Street became a medical office as well as a home in 1922 when Mary White sold it to a doctor, Oscar Grumbrecht, and his wife, Mary (who held title to the property). After the Grumbrechts moved again to another house on Cooper Street in the mid-1920s, 427 was divided and rented to tenants. As Camden became a recorded-music mecca with the rise of RCA-Victor, the tenants included a World War I veteran named Edwin Wartman who lived at 427 Cooper from 1929 to 1931 while working as a Vitaphone recording system operator (and later a movie projectionist). During the Great Depression, 427 became a boarding house with boarders and lodgers including factory workers, waitresses, and a draftsman employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA). By the 1940s, the building housed businesses that included a dealer in hearing aids and a real estate agent, and in the 1950s its tenants include a lawyer’s office.
By the 1970s, 427 Cooper Street reflected the overall decline of Cooper Street properties and appeared frequently in legal notices for sheriff’s sales to recover back taxes. Finally, in 2008 absentee owners with a Florida address sold the property to Rutgers University. A renovation project completed in 2011 joined 427 Cooper Street with the house next door (429) to create offices for the Rutgers-Camden Department of History and the Department of Philosophy and Religion.