On Sunday I visited two cities, neither very far from my own, and right across a river from each other, but light years apart in every other respect.

In one of these cities I saw something very beautiful, but very sad. It was the city’s stylish, Art Deco city hall, built of white marble and crowned with a stunning clock tower. Below a frieze at the top of the façade was carved this motto:

“In a Dream I Saw A City Invincible”

As well it should. The city is Camden, New Jersey; the author of those words its most famous native son, Walt Whitman.

But poor Camden. For nearly two hundred years thought of only as the bastard sister of shining Philadelphia a mile across the Delaware River, its image has never been the best. In the early years of the twentieth century, it was a factory town—home to Campbell’s Soup and the Victor Talking Machine Company, before whose restored factory I fell to my knees and salaamed wildly. As the factories dimmed their lights in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the city’s reputation slid ever further down; people from Philadelphia’s most frightening neighborhoods feared Camden.

Camden is in the unenviable position of Ozymandias. Eighty years ago it was a city invincible, or at least enviable. For a small industrial city it had name recognition—who didn’t have some Victor records, and who didn’t settle down to Campbell’s chicken noodle soup on a cold day? Now it doesn’t even have its tough reputation of thirty years ago. A good third of the buildings in the downtown area are just…gone. Apparently, some city father of the recent past decided that its bombed-out reputation was too much, and the quick fix was to tear down everything that didn’t look pretty anymore. Never a good answer--the city now looks like a Monopoly board before anybody’s had a chance to even stick a house on Oriental. Gone are all of Market street’s businesses; Broadway has quite a few storefronts left but not much in them. There are two lonely and shuttered hotels.

Still, Camden may yet pull it out. The Victor plant is being converted to not-very-cheap condos. There’s a spiffy little minor-league ballpark on the site that once cranked out millions of cans of tomato soup. There’s a big, nice aquarium with a little fun park for kids. This last has a cute little midget train you can ride, and a nifty old caboose. And, the Big J—the USS New Jersey—is tied up there, and was my reason for visiting Camden in the first place. (This is, by the way, the largest battleship ever built for the US Navy, and easily one of the more impressive displays of naval power I’ve ever seen, including the carrier Nimitz, Germany’s Brandenburg and a blond German lieutenant I met once.)

It’s nice to see cities making a comeback, but it’s sad when they have to fall so far, and lose so much, before doing so.