Walt Whitman Arts Center, Camden (must see)

The Walt Whitman Arts Center occupies the former Cooper Branch Library, a Classical Revival building completed in 1918 as part of Johnson Park. Its history connects early transport activity with later civic, educational, and cultural uses. Its development was closely tied to Eldridge R. Johnson, founder of the Victor Talking Machine Company, whose philanthropy helped shape the park and library.

The building’s best-known exterior feature is D’Ascenzo Studios’ mosaic frieze, America Receiving the Gifts of Nations, made from thousands of pieces of opalescent glass. Its figures include Shakespeare, Longfellow, William Penn with Quakers, and references to Michelangelo and Raphael. The same studio created the “Nipper” stained-glass windows for the nearby Victor/RCA Victor building, linking the site to Camden’s recorded-sound history.

Johnson Park adds another point of interest through its bronze Peter Pan statue by Sir George Frampton, one of seven original casts from the same model as the well-known statue in Kensington Gardens, London. When it was dedicated in 1926, more than 3,000 local schoolchildren took part in a Peter Pan Pageant before a crowd of around 10,000. Eldridge Johnson’s fondness for animals also appeared in the park’s smaller bronzes by Albert Laessle, including goats, Pan, and Turtle and Duck.

After serving as a public library, the building became the Walt Whitman Cultural Arts Center in 1975, hosting theatre, music, readings, dance, and visual arts events. Rutgers acquired it in 1986, though the arts centre remained active for years. Around 2010, the former theatre space became lecture halls and classrooms after a legal dispute and settlement. Today, it serves as a Rutgers–Camden academic facility linked with the Digital Commons, while its mosaic remains both artistically valued and debated.