Camden in the NY Times

I was checking the Times online when I saw that the New York Times Magazine this week focuses on Jon Corzine and the New Jersey gubernatorial race. As with all things concerning New Jersey politics, Camden comes up in the first few paragraphs.

The magazine feature on Corzine is quite long, so I'll post the link to it here and let you read it on your own time if you want to. But just so you know, it's a big deal the the Times even describes Camden. Look at the first paragraph (the emphasis is mine):

In early September, for instance, on the day that President
Obama delivered his heralded (and controversial) televised pep talk to
public-school students, Corzine traveled to Camden, one of the country’s poorest
cities, his government-issue black S.U.V. weaving through a postapocalyptic
landscape of overgrown fields and shuttered row houses. The neighborhood was
celebrating the opening of the sparkling new H. B. Wilson Elementary School, one
of 45 new schools that Corzine’s administration has constructed and opened,
despite the state’s acute economic troubles, and Corzine, who displays an
obvious passion for all things educational, had arrived to bask in the
achievement and to join a class of fourth graders in watching President Obama’s
speech. The students, dressed in their crisp yellow uniforms, seemed buoyant as
they filed in, eyeing a small mountain of brand-new backpacks donated by the
local bar association. Not much that’s new and shiny turns up in Camden, whose
broken city government has been taken over by the state and whose choicest piece
of waterfront property is blighted by a state prison.

This is how the world at large sees this city. What's more, it's only a visual description. In case people ever think I'm being dramatic or exaggerating about this place, remember that the Times descibed Camden as postapocalyptic. And they're not being dramatic.