If I were to ask you to describe a children’s garden in a troubled city in New Jersey, what would come to mind?
Perhaps a brightly-colored area where kids and their parents could escape some bad neighborhoods. Lots of swing sets and things for kids to climb on. Shrieks and screams of kids being kids, running around, having fun. Big trees, flowers.
But for one children’s garden in, of all places, the Garden State, those memories have very quickly faded away, leaving behind a vast void of sadness and despair.
Camden Children’s Garden – Photo: Chris Coleman
Camden Children’s Garden – Photo: Chris ColemanA Visit to Camden Reveals What’s Left
Several months ago, I took my daughter to the big aquarium in Camden. We hadn’t been there in a while and we had a wonderful time — it’s a really cool place where you can spend an entire day and learn all kinds of stuff and see thousands of fish.
Of course, locals will remember when that facility opened as the New Jersey State Aquarium in 1992 and it quickly became a big failure because it contained nothing but Jersey-native fish, which are pretty much all brown and grey. Today, that aquarium is fantastic.
Discovering the Abandoned Camden Children’s Garden
Anyway, as we walked outside to check out the penguins, a fenced-off area off to the side caught my eye. It contained several dilapidated structures along with lots of playground equipment. Turns out, that is — or was — the Camden Children’s Garden.
Colorful entrance for the former Camden Children’s Garden in Camden NJ – Photo: Google Maps
Colorful entrance for the former Camden Children’s Garden in Camden NJ – Photo: Google MapsClosed Since the Pandemic
Best I can tell, the garden opened a number of years ago and it was very popular, at least until it closed when the COVID pandemic hit. Once it shut down, it never reopened. To the best of my knowledge, nothing has happened there between when I visited it last and now, so it continues to sit abandoned.
As you’ll see in many of these pictures, like many things when the pandemic took hold, one day it was there and the next it was gone.
It’s hard to imagine that there isn’t some big company that could slap their name on this, put a little bit of money into it, rehab it, and reopen the Camden Children’s Garden and make it compliment the aquarium.
Heartbreaking Look at Abandoned Camden Children’s Garden
Gallery Credit: Chris Coleman
Cool bridge in rural Salem County; Built in 1905, closed since 1991
Gallery Credit: Chris Coleman