By EILEEN STILWELL
Courier-Post Staff
CAMDEN -- For years, it was nothing more than an illegal city dump teeming with rusted car bodies, mattresses, tires and construction debris.
Today, four acres of Delaware riverfront land in East Camden, across from Petty's Island, is actually beginning to look like a park.
In the future, up to 34 acres will be cleaned up and converted into a nature trail with educational markers that would end with a scenic view of the waterfront. And like Green Acres ground, it will remain protected from future commercial development.
How the South Jersey Port Corporation, which acquired the land from the city, stopped the environmental crime is a good illustration of land bartering. It also explains how individuals, private or public, get permits from the state Department of Environmental Protection to build on protected wetlands. That process is called mitigation, which in environmental terms, means offsetting damage to one area by improving another.
SJPC spent $540,000 to clean up, dredge, landscape and restore the East Camden site, known as Baldwin Run, in the Cramer Hill section. SJPC agreed to clean up the site in exchange for approvals to build another berth at the Beckett Street terminal.
Until four years ago, Baldwin Run was owned and ignored by the city. Then city and county officials offered SJPC the unauthorized landfill in exchange for land adjacent to the New Jersey State Aquarium to build Wiggins Park marina.
"This land is a treasure to an expanding port because every time we build on land near the port we have a site that we can work on in exchange," said John Maier, deputy executive director of SJPC.
SJPC is a quasi-state agency that owns and operates Beckett Street and Broadway terminals in Camden and runs a tiny port in Salem City.
SJPC's fourth berth at the Beckett Street terminal brings Camden's capacity to dock ships up to seven. The new berth, the port's first major expansion in a decade, was built with an $11 million federal grant.
The filled-in area behind the berth probably will be a new location for Camden Iron & Metal Inc. Without it, the controversial scrap business, which has been on the waterfront for nearly 100 years and employs about 250 people, could have closed.
Historically, private industry has monopolized this waterfront rim, so residents have had little access. They still don't, but the expanse of ugliness is reduced, natural habitats for plants and wildlife are on the mend and there are plans, albeit long-range ones, for public paths.
The reverberations from a single property title change are many: Camden's Waterfront got scenic Wiggins Park, the South Jersey Port Corporation got a new berth, the DEP got some damaged wetlands off the critical list, workers kept their jobs and residents who have never been able to see the Delaware River will get box seats.
City Councilman Angel Fuentes, who represents the 4th Ward, which includes Cramer Hill, said the community is pleased with SJPC's work.
"We've seen a big turnaround in a year, but we know the completion of our vision is years away. They've created some good paths and shifted mounds of dirt so the water can be seen. Until they removed the debris, there were people in this neighborhood who didn't even know the river was out there. Now, for the first time in decades, we're looking at something that could really be beautiful," he said.
