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.
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)
The office building at 315 Cooper Street reflects Camden’s transitions and needs during an era of industrial decline. Built in 1966, the building first served as headquarters of the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56, creating a tie between Cooper Street and Camden’s longstanding role in the food processing industry. In the 1980s, the building became home to the Camden County Juvenile Resource Center (later known as the Camden Center for Youth Development). The modern building took the place of a c. 1855 Greek Revival-style home owned by prominent Camden residents, including John W. Mickle, the namesake for Mickle Street and the former Mickle School. During a period as a rental property in 1870-71, the residence served as home to the Collegiate School of Camden, a private school. From the 1920s through the 1940s, before it was demolished for construction of the office building, the house at 315 Cooper Street was a hub of men’s club activity as headquarters for the Camden Club and later the Moose Lodge.
During the 1850s, the north side of Cooper Street began to fill with houses as Cooper family heirs sold their land for development. Among this first generation of structures in the 300 block, 315 Cooper Street ranked as one of the largest and most substantial. A double-lot, brick, Greek Revival residence, 315 Cooper Street first served as home for a retired physician from Cape May, Joseph Fifield, and his wife, Lydia. After Lydia Fifield’s death in 1858, the home was owned briefly by Albert W. Markley, a recent president of the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank in Philadelphia (who lived at other times at 218 and 420 Cooper Street).
The 315 Cooper Street house gained a notable new connection in 1861, when it was purchased by John W. Mickle, whose family roots extended to seventeenth-century settlement in the region that became South Jersey. Mickle, a retired sea captain with extensive investments in turnpikes, railroads, and ferry operations, lived a scant few months in 315 Cooper Street before his death later in 1861. But he brought with him an extended household that included widows of his brother and nephew, who remained in the home through the end of the 1860s. John W. Mickle’s memory lived on in Camden through the naming of Mickle Street and the John W. Mickle School. Mickle was honored not only for his prominence in business but for his public service in the New Jersey State Assembly and in the convention that drafted the New Jersey Constitution of 1844. His survivors also recalled his seafaring days carrying trade between the Port of Philadelphia, Europe, and South America. His distinctions included transporting Princess Charlotte of France to join her father, Joseph Bonaparte, while he lived on an estate in Bordentown, Burlington County.
Collegiate School and Boarding House
The heirs of John W. Mickle rented 315 Cooper Street to tenants beginning in 1870, although family members returned to live there intermittently when it was not otherwise occupied. For about two years beginning in 1870, the home became a girls’ boarding school. The Ladies’ Department of the Collegiate School of the City of Camden at 315 Cooper was an extension of a private day school that Reverend Martin L. Hoffer, a Presbyterian minister, had been running since 1868 in a former Odd Fellows’ Hall at Fourth and Market Streets. Hoffer, who lived in Beverly, Burlington County, had previously operated a boys’ boarding school in Beverly and a military boarding school for boys in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His Collegiate School in Camden offered instruction in classical and commercial subjects for boys and girls (in separate classrooms). Viewed by the West Jersey Press as “important step in the permanent growth and prosperity of our city,” Hofford’s school on Market Street and its boarding school extension at 315 Cooper nevertheless proved to be short-lived. By 1874 he moved to other ministerial posts. The girls’ boarding school, acquired by new teachers and with a different name, continued two years longer nearby at 312 Cooper Street. The Collegiate School on Market Street, after a brief closure, reopened on Market Street under a new principal.
After the departure of the Collegiate School, the owners of 315 Cooper Street continue to offer it for rent or for sale: “A three-story brick house ten minutes’ walk from the ferry,” read an advertisement in the Camden Morning Post in 1879. “Contains all conveniences; heated throughout; stationary wash stands in bed rooms; two water closets; two kitchens; stationary wash tubs; underdrained; dry cellar.” For about five years, 1878 to 1883, 315 Cooper Street became a boarding house operated by Mary A. Lanning, who lived there with her husband and adult son, as many as seven boarders, and two servants. Recorded in the 1880 Census, the boarders included a lawyer, a bank teller and his wife, a sea captain and his wife, and a hardware dealer. The servants were Susan Boyer, a Black woman who was widowed, and likely her son John, age 12. Neither of the Boyers could read or write.
Family Home
The house at 315 Cooper Street became a family home once again in 1883, when a dispute among heirs of John W. Mickle led to a court-ordered sale of the property. For the next 26 years, 315 Cooper Street was owned and occupied by attorney Peter V. Voorhees, his wife Louisa Voorhees, their son James Dayton Voorhees, and usually three to four domestic servants. They previously lived several blocks away at 430 Linden Street, part of the 1870s development known as Linden Terrace.
The names of the new residents of 315 Cooper reflected the depth and breadth of their family histories. Peter V. Voorhees had a family lineage that traced to seventeenth-century Dutch settlement of Long Island, New York. Peter V., born in New Brunswick in 1852, graduated from Rutgers College in 1873 and then moved to Camden to study law with his uncle, Peter L. Voorhees. The younger Voorhees followed his uncle’s specialization in real estate law and became, among other roles, a representative of the Cooper family trust. In 1881, he married Louisa Clarke Dayton, whose family history extended to seventeenth-century English settlers of Boston. Later generations lived in Somerset County, New Jersey, and Louisa’s father, a lawyer, moved to Camden after graduating from Princeton College. Louisa’s uncle, William L. Dayton, served in the United States Senate and in 1856 was the young Republican Party’s candidate for vice president of the United States. Honoring Louisa’s family legacy, the Voorhees’s son was called by his middle name, Dayton.
Peter V. and Louisa Voorhees had been married about two years when they moved to 315 Cooper Street with one-year-old Dayton. A second child, a daughter named Elsie born in 1883, died just before her first birthday while the family vacationed at Lake Minnewaska, New York. A death notice in the Philadelphia Times stating that she died “suddenly” suggests an accident or other unexpected cause, but the details were not publicly disclosed. Thereafter, they remained a family of three as Peter prospered as a lawyer, Louisa engaged in charitable activities, and Dayton grew up at 315 Cooper Street and went on to college at Princeton.
The domestic workers in the Voorhees household included Celina (or Selina) Kammerer, who stood apart from other domestic help on Cooper Street through an unusually long term of service and her nationality. While most white domestics on Cooper Street were Irish immigrants or native-born, Kammerer was born in France. No evidence exists to explain how she came to be employed in the Voorhees household or why she stayed so long, but she was present throughout their time at 315 Cooper Street. Public records reveal only that Kammerer was born between 1850 or 1860, that her mother was French and her father either French or Prussian, and that she immigrated to the United States in 1866. Most other domestic servants who worked for the Voorhees family were Irish immigrant women, but by 1900 the family also employed a Black butler, Jesse Bailey. Born in Virginia in 1850, Bailey likely came to Camden as part of the emerging wave of Black migration out of the South to northern cities.
In addition to the large home on Cooper Street and domestic servants, the affluence of the Voorhees family enabled extended summer vacations to the Jersey Shore, Maine, the Adirondacks, and Florida. Like others of their social and economic standing, they had leisure time and resources for tourism to resorts by rail. During the 1890s, they also traveled by ocean liner to Europe and from the West Coast by sea to Japan.
At home, Peter V. Voorhees’s legal work included handling the Cooper family’s sale of their Cooper Street land between Front and Second Street for use as a public park—later known as Johnson Park. At the pinnacle of his legal career, between 1900 and 1905, he served as an appointed lay judge of the New Jersey Court of Errors and Appeals. Like other men of his station, Voorhees maintained a network of positions on local boards of directors, including the Camden Republican Club (at 312 Cooper Street, across from his house), the Camden City Dispensary (which provided medical care to the indigent), the West Jersey Title and Guarantee Company, and the First National Bank. He served as a vestryman of St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church on Market Street. (He was not, however, connected with the 1899 creation and naming of Voorhees Township, which took its name from then-governor Foster McGowan Voorhees.)
The Voorhees family remained at 315 Cooper Street until the 1906 death of Peter V. Voorhees from multiple ailments that followed a serious bout with pneumonia the previous year, and the 1909 death of Louisa Voorhees from unspecified diseases. This ended the era of single-family ownership at this address. Dayton Voorhees, who served in World War I and then became a professor of politics at Princeton University, did not return to the family home. By 1915 it was rented out and divided between two households, one headed by James Buckelew, the superintendent of the West Jersey and Seashore Railroad Company, and the other headed by Lewis Larsen, a salesman. By 1920, the tenants were real estate dealer William P. Hollinger with his wife, Frances; three young children; and two domestic servants, a married Black couple James and Susan Taylor.
A Domain of Men
During the 1920s, Cooper Street experienced transition from a residential to commercial thoroughfare, largely through the efforts of real estate interests who anticipated a business boom coming with the 1926 completion of the Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge). While many former residences on Cooper Street became apartments or office buildings, 315 Cooper Street gained a new purpose as a club house for Camden’s professional men.
The Camden Club came into existence through the efforts of a Camden undertaker, Fithian Simmons, who lived at 319 Cooper Street, next door to the vacated Voorhees home. The club filled two voids: on a personal level, Simmons poured his energy into the club following the death of his wife, Alverta, during the influenza epidemic in 1919. For Camden’s elite, the club offered a gathering place for men following the demise of the Camden Republican Club, which had been an anchor of men’s sociability on Cooper Street for decades. Supporters of the new Camden Club contributed $1,000 each to raise the funds to transform the Voorhees “mansion,” as the Morning Post described it, into a “luxurious clubhouse.” Membership required a $100 initiation fee and the same amount each year in annual dues.
With Simmons serving as president, the Camden Club sought to be the equivalent of the leading clubhouses for men in Philadelphia. The remodeled building offered a restaurant open day and night; parlors and reception rooms; rooms for billiards, card-playing, and other games; and four bedrooms on the third floor. By all outward appearances, the club thrived during the 1920s and celebrated its tenth anniversary with a dinner at 315 Cooper Street early in 1931 with “members and guests comprising leading business, professional and political notables,” the Morning Post reported. By that time, Simmons remained involved as president emeritus.
The Camden Club’s finances were not secure enough to survive the Great Depression, however. After purchasing the building for $14,000 in 1920, the club had taken out a mortgage for $100,000 to finance its ambitious remodel. By 1938, the club had fallen into default on the mortgage and owed thousands in back taxes to the City of Camden. With numerous prominent individuals and companies implicated as bond holders for the club, the building went up for sale to settle its debts.
Another fraternal organization in similar straits benefitted from the Camden Club’s demise. The Loyal Order of the Moose, Lodge 111, founded in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1888, had been active in Camden since 1909. The local lodge had opened a grand new headquarters on Market Street in 1929, but it fell into default on the mortgages and receivership by 1934. Having lost ownership of its hall to banks, the Moose Lodge opted in 1939 to buy the former Camden Club at 315 Cooper Street. For the next twenty-five years, the clubhouse became the hub of social and service activity for the men’s Moose lodge and the auxiliary Women of the Moose. Sports banquets, movie nights, dances, and other events were occasionally punctuated by police attention to liquor sales on Sundays and the presence of slot machines. Like other fraternal organizations of its time, the lodge restricted its membership to white people only, a limitation not overturned by Moose International until 1973.
Union Headquarters
By the 1960s, Cooper Street stood at the edge of an urban renewal zone. Between 1962 and 1964 Rutgers University created a new Camden campus through demolition of houses in the blocks between Cooper Street and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, between Third and Fifth Streets. Although Cooper Street was spared wholesale destruction because of its perceived commercial value, the longstanding houses at 315 and 319 Cooper Street fell to demolition. Both became the sites for new union headquarters buildings, with 315 the site of a new, modern office building built in 1966 for the Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union, Local 56. Next door at 319 Cooper Street stood another strikingly modern structure built in 1960 for the International Union of Electrical Workers, Local 103. Together, the buildings created ties between Cooper Street and two of Camden’s longstanding industries, food processing and sound recording.
The Amalgamated Food and Allied Workers Union Local 56 – Meat Packing Division purchased 315 Cooper Street as the previous longtime occupant, the Moose Lodge, moved to temporary new quarters farther east on Cooper Street at the Walt Whitman Hotel. Formed in 1940, by the 1960s Local 56 represented workers in fisheries, canneries, farms, grocery stores, and food processing plants throughout New Jersey and at the General Foods plant in Dover, Delaware. Its work included organizing migrant labor in South Jersey, which in 1967 prompted a visit to Cooper Street by a delegation of Vietnamese tenant farmers escorted by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Later known as the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 56 remained at 315 Cooper Street until 1982, when it opted to leave Camden for a building in Pennsauken that offered more space and easier, more ample parking.
Youth Services
By the time of the union’s departure, the economic and social circumstances of Camden had produced needs for greater social services for residents experiencing poverty, homelessness, or other effects of the sharp decline of industry in the late twentieth century. Responding to the needs of youth in these conditions, a nonprofit organization, New Ventures Management, purchased 315 Cooper Street and made it the headquarters for the Juvenile Resource Center (JRC). The center, led by former Camden school board member Stella Horton since its founding in 1978, provided juvenile offenders with alternatives to incarceration, including an alternative school, counseling, and employment programs.
The JRC continued its work on Cooper Street for decades, changing its name in 2003 to the Camden Youth Development Center (CYDC) after receiving a $1.2 million grant from the William Penn Foundation to join forces with the Camden City Youth Services Commission. Surrounded by that time by buildings purchased by Rutgers University, in 2012 the CYDC also gained an executive director, Felix James, with connections to Rutgers as a graduate of the university’s law school in Camden. Continuing operations in the 2020s, the CYDC stated its mission as “embracing and using the assets of young people to meet their needs and successfully address the complex work they must do to transform their communities and neighborhoods.” Its services encompassed leadership development, tutoring, employment preparation, college preparation, and “providing emotional, social, spiritual, physical, and cultural proficiencies.” Evolving from the original JRC focus on alternatives to incarceration, the CYDC in the 2020s stressed civic engagement as a pathway to success.
Camden and Philadelphia Newspapers (Newspapers.com and Genealogy Bank).
Camden City Directories (Ancestry.com).
Camden County Property Records.
New Jersey State Census, 1885-1915, and U.S. Census, 1850-1950 (Ancestry.com).
New Jersey Office of Cultural and Environmental Services, Historic Sites Inventory No. 0408205 (315 Cooper Street), 1985.
Prowell, George R. The History of Camden County, New Jersey. Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1886.