Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
Say you\u2019re delivering packages, pizzas, or people. Or you\u2019re a newspaper photographer out looking for pictures. If you\u2019ve been driving around a city for a few years, the streets might seem ordinary, but then something about an intersection, a store front or a sign gives you that feeling of D\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. <\/p>\n
Of all our senses, sound, taste and smell are usually considered the most powerful memory triggers. Like when Sam \u201cPlays it again\u201d in Casablanca<\/a> or Anton Ego tastes Remy\u2019s ratatouille<\/a>. Or when any of us open a brand new box of Crayola crayons.<\/p>\n But as a photographer it is the visual reminders that are powerful. Driving in the city I am always taken back to a graduation party I photographed down a particular street, or the sunset I framed. Or how I negotiated a hill in a snowstorm, or covered a shooting on that block.<\/p>\n Sometimes I feel like I have been leaving bread crumbs behind me as I drive everywhere, waiting to be remembered.<\/p>\n Stalled in backed-up traffic for the ongoing construction on Rt. 70 in Cherry Hill last week, I glanced over at a bus shelter. I recalled years ago seeing riders standing in the slim shadow of a utility pole to get just a tiny bit of some shade from the sun while waiting for their bus. <\/p>\n They waited next to a multimillion dollar retail development on the site of the former Garden State Racetrack. The mostly minimum wage workers who rode the bus to their jobs there didn\u2019t even have a bench to sit on \u2014 let alone relief from the elements while waiting to go home. Back then I photographed commuters sitting on overturned shopping carts and tried to interest an editorial writer to take up their cause. <\/p>\n Eventually, a bench was put there, and a few years later a shelter was installed. But as I sat in my car the other day, it still didn\u2019t look right. I turned into the shopping center and walked over.<\/p>\n Wayne Peters tells me he\u2019s been taking NJ Transit\u2019s 406 bus to and from Camden for about two years, and says this stop has \u201cgotta be the worst in the state.\u201d He says he always picks up trash when he\u2019s there, and adds more to the piles already in the shopping carts that serve as receptacles.<\/p>\n Fellow rider Bobby White added, \u201cYou\u2019d think something in Cherry Hill would be better. How hard would it be to put a trash can here?\u201d Before their bus arrives, Peters, trying to be positive about the shelter, reminds him \u201cThey fixed a broken window once.\u201d<\/p>\n Another thing about revisiting so many corners of our region is it becomes easy to think I\u2019ve seen it all. And then I hear about a place I didn\u2019t know anything about.<\/p>\n A semi-retired friend from Bucks County and her friend try to take weekly drives every Thursday they call \u201cHighways of History.\u201d Last week she texted me some photos saying \u201cguess where we are.\u201d <\/p>\n Now in all my years of being like a UPS, DoorDash, or Lyft driver I had never been to the place in her pictures. I could tell from her other stops that she was nearby, which made it even more mysterious. There was a carousel and other things for kids, like a smaller version of the giant covered wooden slide I\u2019d been to at Smith Memorial Playground & Playhouse<\/a> in Philadelphia\u2019s Fairmount Park.<\/p>\n Just like the well-known Philly playground that is considered a childhood rite of passage, a New Jersey version has been around for well over a century and when she told me it was only twenty minutes from my house I was completely gobsmacked. <\/p>\n Not only had I never even heard of the place as a journalist, but it never even entered my consciousness during those years when my wife and I were constantly googling \u201cthings to do with a toddler\u201d finding ways to keep our kids \u2014 and ourselves \u2014 entertained and out of the house.<\/p>\n She told the me her father took the ferry there from Penn Treaty Park in Fishtown and \u201cspent many a happy day along with hundreds of other poor kids in the 1930s for free soup and crackers and a carefree day.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s called Soupy Island<\/a>. It was founded in 1877 on an island in the Delaware River by the Sanitarium Association of Philadelphia, a group of doctors who wanted to help sick city kids with tuberculosis recover with fresh air, playtime, and that free soup. When the Delaware was dredged a few years later and the island was wiped out, the camp moved to the mainland, on the Jersey banks of the river.<\/p>\n My love of history was sparked and I could not believe the connections. My own father, growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, was sent away every summer to the \u201cPrev.\u201d He shared many great memories with me of learning how to swim and fish at a preventorium<\/a> on a lake. <\/p>\n As its name implies, it was designed to halt tuberculosis among children by getting them away from their crowded, mostly immigrant inner-city neighborhoods and out to the country.<\/p>\n I spent the weekend digging around and reading everything I could to learn all about Soupy Island, amazed to see The Inquirer had done a number of stories about it, even in the years I\u2019d lived here (kids were still coming over by ferry from Penn Treaty well into the 1980s.)<\/p>\n Seeing that it was closing up for the summer, I planned to reach out the caretaker on Monday to go make pictures. That\u2019s when I learned my colleague, reporter Sarah Nicell<\/a>, was visiting on their penultimate day of the season. She grew up in South Jersey, and she had never heard of it before either. <\/p>\n I made sure I got the photo assignment.<\/p>\n