Delaware River

No one seems to know exactly how many people are buried in Fishtown’s Palmer Cemetery. Created for the community by the merchant Anthony Palmer in the 1730s, the cemetery has been such a popular final destination for residents over the generations that the community’s historians have lost count of its eternal tenants, which could number as high as 50,000.

In 2004, much of the stable, working class community of Cramer Hill in Camden, New Jersey was slated to be bulldozed. The City Planning Board had authorized $1 billion redevelopment plan that would have demolished 1,200 homes under eminent domain law. Although parts of the Cramer Hill waterfront had fallen into disrepair, residents say that their charming neighborhood on the Delaware River had a vitality that the City failed to recognize. An isolated neighborhood adjacent to a marina, Cramer Hill's forested shores are a unique natural sanctuary.

A huge electric sign in the neighborhood once proclaimed "What Chester Makes Makes Chester." These words begin the story of the former glory of a great industrial and cultural center on the Delaware River, a few miles south of Philadelphia. The documentary features the reminiscences of elderly residents who fondly recall the streets lined with shops and theaters, the factories and shipping docks by the river, and a large religious community of neighborhood churches. A sense of security and prosperity pervaded in those times, before the post-industrial economic and social changes of the 1960s.