Dominican Nuns of the Perpetual Rosary Monastery

The monastery of the Dominican Nuns of the Perpetual Rosary opened in 1900. At the time, the sisters were worshipping in a pair of old houses along Haddon Avenue. It wasn't until the late 1920s that a large construction project was undertaken to create a proper worship space for the sisters. 

A large, beautiful double chapel was constructed between the houses. Dormitory space was built around an inner courtyard, a design which drew influence from European monasteries. A matching stone wall with heavy iron gates surrounded the complex. The large new building was open for worship by 1927.

At its peak as many as thirty nuns lived at the monastery, each taking turns performing a perpetual Rosary prayer. Life within the walls remained relatively unchanged until 1947, when construction began on the adjacent Lourdes Hospital.

The medical center dwarfed the old monastery, standing tall over the Parkside neighborhood of the city. The sleek new art deco hospital was run by the Catholics, making them great neighbors for the monastery.

After a century of perpetual worship but dwindling occupancy, the building was vacated in 2013. At this  point only a few sisters remained at the Camden location. Once the complex was shuttered they moved up to the Monastery of Mary the Queen in Elmira, NY.

The deceased sisters who were interred on the property were moved to Calvalry cemetery in neighboring Cherry Hill. A St. Michael statue created by DaPrato Studios was given to the St. Michael's school in Clayton. 

Lourdes Hospital purchased the empty monastery the following year. This was the first time I was ever made aware of the building. During a visit to a patient at the hospital, I overheard a discussion about how the sisters had left the building and nobody knew what was going to happen with it next. 

In 2017 a large parking lot was built around the monastery. The hospital still insisted they had "no plans" for the old place of worship. The structure had already been suffering for years of deferred maintenance before the nuns even left. I continued to watch the deterioration progress, just waiting for the right moment to make my move.

Lourdes continued using the monastery for storage and for parking security vehicles. Every time I visited Camden I'd drive by to see what was going on with the building. Occasionally I'd see the front gates open, which was my invitation to sneak around inside the complex. Still, I wasn't able to make it inside the well secured structure. 

Lourdes hospital was purchased by Virtua Health Network in 2019. The sale included the monastery, which was now firmly tied into the medical campus. At this point the building had been vacant for half a decade, which signaled to me that the hospital network had no intention of reusing the structure. 

The building languished for another five years before Virtua announced they were planning to demolish the monastery. I assumed I'd have a little bit of time with it until a friend of mine told me equipment was on site and the buildings days were numbered. I already had plans that weekend, so I was panicking. I wasn't sure if I would be able to get down to Camden before demolition started. 

I decided the only chance I had was to sit through the awful traffic after my full work day to get from Essex to Camden. The whole ride down I had butterflies in my stomach, wondering how badly the demolition prep had affected the building. 

I arrived with about an hour and a half left of daylight, meaning I had about 90 minutes to get inside and get my photos. A shift change at the hospital combined with a vigilant security gaurd in the parking lot left me with very few options for approach. I did see that there was one unlocked gate I could access if I timed it right. 

A few cars passed by, but nobody was paying me any mind as I walked into the lot. As I approached the gate my eyes were shooting back and forth trying to get eyes on the gaurd. I couldn't see them, but I was at the gate now. It was now or never in the most literal sense. Just as I was making my way past the gate, security came right around the corner right in front of me. I muttered an explative to myself and turned back towards the driveway, as security drove behind me to ensure I left. 

From across the street I watched until the gaurd went back to his spot in the parking lot. The open gate was now out of play; my options were now extremely limited. The only other way I could figure involved a very visible climb over the front gate. Even that was an imperfect approach, as I wasn't sure there would be a way inside from there. Just as I was working out my chances I noticed my moment was arriving fast. Nobody on the sidewalk, nobody driving in the road, nobody stopped at the traffic light. Before I even knew what I was doing I found myself flying over the top of the fence and heading towards the storm door I had been eyeing from the sidewalk.

I was overjoyed when the door opened right up, allowing me to hide and check to see if I had caused any disturbance. Everything looked good outside, nobody seemed to have noticed me. I had to check my hands for scrapes since the column I had pulled myself up on was topped with broken glass in the mortar; a common Philly area anti-climb measure. Thankfully the glass was so weathered it had actually been dulled over years, becoming little more than a slight discomfort.

The closed door into the building itself was a sobering reminder that I wasn't actually inside the building yet. The handle turned, and the door began to open. Unfortunately it was almost immediately blocked by something on the other side. I gave a few pushes along the handle side of the door to feel out where it was being blocked. The obstruction was around chest height; that means it's either an interior deadbolt or a hasp and padlock. The amount of give led me to believe it was the latter. 

I checked each of the windows on the porch; they were all locked and wood-blocked. I went back to the door which had some give as I mentioned. I pulled the door shut, then pushed again with a bit of force. I could feel the hasp beginning to give, so once more I pulled the door nearly shut, and put all my weight behind my shoulder for one last bump. Finally the screws gave out and the door swung open. 

The inside of the building was as remarkable as I had hoped. There were stained glass windows all throughout the complex. They had been removed from the chapels, but even without them those spaces were still magnificent. Out of all the large monastery buildings throughout New Jersey I've had the pleasure of documenting, this was one of the finest.

I spent about an hour wandering around the building before plotting my exit. I checked on security from one of the upper floors, and noticed from where they were sitting I should be able to walk out that open gate from earlier without them noticing me. And even if they did see me, I was on the way out anyway. My other option was to wait for the sun to go down, which would leave me walking alone back to the street where I left my car in the dark.  It wasn't a very difficult decision.

I waited a few weeks to see what would happen with the building. Occasionally demolition projects will stall or slow down significantly, but not this one. The historic monastery was quickly reduced to rubble. Surprisingly, despite multiple articles discussing the impending destruction, I didn't end up seeing any other photos of the complex. I'm extremely glad I managed to get inside and document the space. 

The space where the monastery once stood will go on to serve the hospital as a parking lot. Another ridiculous loss for the historic landscape of Camden. 

American Strip Steel

Passaic Avenue in Kearny looks much different than it did at the turn of the century. Factories and machine shops used to tower over both sides of the street. Those industries have since died out and made way for cookie-cutter retail and tacky, high density housing. One such factory that was recently demolished was the American Strip Steel Company. 

American Strip Steel was founded by Newark Entrepenuer LeRoy Schecter. Schecter had just returned home after fighting in World War II. After a brief stint working in the local steel mills he founded his own rolling mill just up river from the city in Kearny.

After a few decades, Schecter noticed that one of the pinch points in his operation was having to rely on outside trucking firms to move his goods around. The mill had a shoreline crane to load barges and was adjascent to a freight railway, but fright was losing out to truck transportation as more and more lines across the country closed and consolidated. This led Schecter to found Norbert Trucking in 1965. 

Kearny experienced the same heavy blows to domestic production that much of the country faced as the decades passed. The Aluminum Bat Factory to the north had been shuttered, as had the Clark Thread Mill to the south. Despite this American Strip was thriving. Things were going so well they began branching out to fill other niches.

In 1989 the company started manufacting metal studs under the name Ware Industries. Ware then purchased the Marino company four years later, rebranding themselves Marino-Ware. 

The Passaic Avenue Industrial corridor was beginning to become a nuicense to the town of Kearny. They declared the strech "an area in need of redevelopment". This allowed them to rezone the area for high density and grant special tax incentives so developers can make a ton of money rebuilding the properties. 

Most of the old industrial buildings were swiftly demolished. American Strip Steel, however, managed to hang on just a bit longer. It wasn't until the 2020's that American Strip had finally left Kearny. They moved to the large Marino-Ware compound in South Plainfield. 

At this point their old buildings stood out a bit like a sore thumb among the equally unappealing "peel and stick" style apartments. The oginal American Strip Steel Buildings were eventually demolished in the early 2020s. Workers moved slowly to salvage some of the overhead gantry cranes that were built into the structure, but by 2023 the buildings were entirely wiped away.

The site is currently being reworked to accomidate the new buildings that will rise where American Strip Steel once stood. Hopefully they pay some sort of homage to what once stood there, as the story is such a quintessentially American one. Only time will tell. 

Vineland Training School

As an avid explorer of old asylums, it's been a bit of a mission of mine since the mid 2000s to document as many institutions as I can. So many have been lost with little to no documentation, and as that happens the stories they hold begin to fade away. The story of the Vineland Training School is an important one, and one that I've wanted to tell for quite some time.

Source

The Vineland Training School was founded in 1887 in the Millville home of Steven Olin Garrison. Garrison, a Methodist minister, had two developmentally disabled siblings. His family had long been pushing to get the state to open an asylum to research and treat children who are born in such a way. Vineland philanthropist B.D. Maxham heard of his mission and donated the Scarborough mansion and 40 acres along Landis Ave. to Garrison the following year. 

Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive

The New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feeble Minded Children, later renamed the Training School at Vineland, was the very first instition for the developmentally disabled in the state. Those living at the school learned various vocations as well as farming, and lived in small cottages rather than the large, linear plan institutions like Trenton and Greystone state hospitals. The Training School at Vineland was one of the earliest "cottage plan" aslums in the country. It influenced different institutions all over the country including the seperately ran Vineland State School. That facility opened across the street from the training school one year later.

Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive

Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive

 

Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive

The campus continued to expand, with more cottages being built in 1892 onward. As the facilility grew, Steven Garrison began to fall ill. Recognizing the need for a contingency plan for the school, he began the search for his successor. The man he chose was Professor Edward Johnstone, who at the time was the Principal of Instruction at the Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth. Steven Garrison passed away at the age of 46 on April 17th, 1900. 

Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive

One of the first major decisions Edward Johnstone made was choosing a new director of research. Henry H. Goddard was chosen for the position in 1906. Goddard was a professor working at the Pennsylvania State Normal School. Despite the somewhat jarring and institutional name, a normal school is essentially a university for teachers. This position gave Goddard a large amount of influence and credibility. Now, at the Vineland School, he was in charge of the first research laboratory for intellectual disability in the united states. 

Goddard was a fervent eugenecist, believing that those with developmental disabilities should be segregated from the general population and advised to not reproduce. In 1908 he introduced the IQ test to America, having translated and reformatted the Binet Intellegence Scale to English for the first time. This was done after thorough testing on the population at the training school. Two years later he would coin the term "Moron", and introduce it into clinical use to describe those with an IQ of 59 to 70. He dubbed those with an IQ of 26 to 50 as "imbeciles" and those who landed between 0 and 25 "idiots". All of these groups, as he believed, should be weeded out of the gene pool for the betterment of society as whole. 

In 1913 a seperate farm colony of the training school was formed on a acre plot of land southwest of the main campus, but still within city limits. The campus was constucted using the labor of those who would go on to live on the property. The new campus was dubbed "The Menantico Colony". 

At the same time, Henry Goddard began an "intellegence testing" program at the isolation hospital on Ellis Island. The end result of the testing determined that up to 80% of the steerage-class immigrants coming to this country were "feeble minded". Surprisingly this xenophobic arrogance didn't completely discredit him, it actually seems to have led to him getting a better job.

Goddard left Vineland in 1918, one year after his Ellis Island findings were published. He went on to become the Director of the Ohio Bureau of Juvenile Research. His work was eventually largely discredited, but not before his influence made significant and long lasting changes to the landscape of psychology, and the lives of millions.

Stanley Porteus, an Australian immigrant, took over Goddard's position as Director of Research. As much as I love the fact that an immigrant took over a xenophobe's job, Porteus was quite problematic himself. He held stong beliefs about caucasion people being intellectually superior to all other races. 

Porteus served for six years before moving on himself, which brought psychologist Edgar Arnold Doll to Vineland. Doll is best known for developing the Vineland Social Maturity Scale in 1935. The scale measures social function, and is still widely used by psychologists. 

Despite the hopeful and noble purpose with which the Training School was founded, conditions and care at the facility began to decline. Federal funding towards research was being shifted away from private institutions, removing one of the pillars that had held up the school. The cottages on the campus were deteriorating, and the exterior fire escapes mandated by new building codes left the students vulnerable to unauthorized entry. 

This came to a head in 1979 when a deaf child was mutilated and murdered inside his cottage. Police completely ignored reports of a tall blonde stranger who had been seen around and even inside the cottage on several occasions. Three fellow students were blamed for the murder, two 15 year olds and an 18 year old boy. The families and several staff members objected to the charges, as they were all harmless and not physically capable of causing the injuries to the deceased boy. The boys also said they saw the previously described tall blond man inside the cottage when they came upon the body. These reports went nowhere, and as far as many people are concerned the murder was never solved. The boys who were blamed never ended up facing any formal punishment. Two of them even continued to live at the training school. 

The following year, two reporters from the local newspaper "The Record" went undercover at the instition to try and see how things really operated. Valerie James and Henry Golman exposed multiple instances of physical and sexual assault on students, as well as a prevalent cover-up culture. Multiple members of the administration ended up being arrested after the exposé, including the president of the school at the time, William Smith. James and Goldman ended up winning well deserved awards for their work. The act likely influenced Governor Richard Cody to do a similar undercover investigation at Marlboro state hospital a few years later. 

The future was uncertain for the school at this point. The state of New Jersey was about to step in and and shut the facility down when a private organization named Elwyn announced they were going to take over 

in 1981. Elwyn's main mission was to depopulate these institutions and reintegrate their students into society through group homes. One of their first major missions was to clean up the decrepit Vineland facility. They began moving students out of the aging cottages and tearing them down. By the early 1990s they began building new group homes on the campus itself, the first construction the property had seen in nearly 100 years. The remaining cottages were vacated and kept around for storage.

The now depopulated Vineland Campus was put up for sale in 2022. By this point all of the remaining cottages were boarded up and in severe disrepair. They were all demolished, in an effort to make the campus easier to market. The only historic buildings that managed to survive were the old Scarborough mansion and the "New School", which became an apartment building. As sad as it is to see the important campus bare, the facility had become outdated, and simply was not able to offer the students the level of care and comfort that they deserved. Even though the buildings are mostly gone, the story of the Vineland Training School will go on to serve as an important reminder that providing the best care means learning and evolving over time. Who knows what the next big breakthough will be? All I know is I hope I can be there to help tell the story. 

 Thanks for learning with me everybody.

Campbells Pond Pumping Station

 

Source

Situated alongside Campbells Pond in the South Mountain Reservation, this old pumping station has sat empty for decades. It was built around 1895 when the park was founded. 

Famed architect Frederick Law Olmstead desighed every aspect of the park, including the pumphouse. Olmstead is best known for his contributions to the buildings and landscape of Central Park in New York City. 

The pumping stations main function was to supply drinking water to the city of Orange. It had a capacity of 2.5 million gallons per day. The station ran for a number of decades before a fire put it out of operation.

When the county acquired the property and made it a reservation, they dammed up the pond. But they left the pumping station sitting just over the old train bridge that used to carry the trains bringing coal to the building.

Numerous vandals have broken into the building over the years, and there is very little left of its past. Pieces of the old chimney are breaking off and falling down to the ground below, which prompted the county to put up a fence around the structure. 

As of 2024 the county has actually taken some serious strides to preserve the shell of the building. They filled in the basement with all the trail races and the large well in the main room, to ensure nobody would get hurt inside the ruin. They also removed what was left of the wooden roof, which by that point had been burned and thoroughly rotted. I think keeping the shell of the building around is a fanatic compromise, considering it serves no other practical purpose. Make sure to stop by and check it out next time you're in the area!