Monica Yant Kinney: The state mounts another cosmetic cover-up in Camden

Way back in 1999, New Jersey's then-Gov. Christie Whitman spent $45 million sanitizing the Admiral Wilson Boulevard for the Republican National Convention.

The boulevard had long been home to a motley mix of skanky strip joints and pay-by-the-hour motels, a smorgasbord of cheap women and wine for drivers heading to or from the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Whitman didn't dare let conventioneers see the real Camden. So she had state crews demolish debauchery and sod over sin. Taxpayers even funded faux-brick medians in a comic effort to make a hellacious highway seem civilized.

Unwitting visitors might have been snowed, but locals knew the hookers and junkies didn't repent; they just relocated.

Fast-forward a decade, and a new Christie administration has just spent a smaller, but still strange, sum to gloss over another harsh reality on the boulevard of broken dreams.

I speak of $50,000 fences to shoo the homeless.

Anyone who read about Camden's infamous "Tent City" knows the disease can't be cured by do-gooders promising to put people in hotels. After Tent City folded, seven homeless people took up residence under Route 676 on the boulevard.

High up a steep concrete incline, shielded from the elements except choking exhaust, they made "rooms" along a narrow walkway with mattresses, chairs, coolers. For entertainment, they had a 29-inch TV covered in plastic.

One morning, as we rounded the bend approaching the bridge, my daughter gasped at a bearded guy changing his clothes behind a tarp wall he'd hung. "Does he live there?" she asked, incredulously.

Others noticed, too. No one person or agency will take credit (or blame), but by fall, someone at the state Department of Transportation had the bright idea to erect fences to spruce up the view.

"Some guys from the state pulled up and told us, 'We're going to clean this place out,' " recalls Mike, an underpass dweller from South Philly who says he's an ex-con but offers only his first name. "They took our mattresses, pillows, and blankets and threw all our stuff away."

Tall chain-link pens then went up at a half-dozen spots on both sides of the road, even those without human occupants. When DOT drove off, Mike noticed it had inexplicably skipped the most high-profile underpass at Seventh Street - close to downtown Camden, feet from the expanding Rutgers University, inches from curious commuters.

Camden County spokeswoman Joyce Gabriel reminds me that the underpass camps are on state land, and not the responsibility of the county or the city. She says she doesn't know who requested the fences or why.

"It might have even been a Homeland Security issue. You can't even photograph bridges anymore."

Gabriel suggests talking to someone at the Volunteers of America, which operates a shelter in Camden. Surely the local experts were consulted before the DOT dropped $50,000 on a chain-link Band-Aid.

"There was a concern about the activity going on there," explains the VOA's Gina Williams Deas, who sits on the statewide Interagency Council to Prevent and Reduce Homelessness. "But we don't know who made the call to do it and why they did it the way they did it."

New Jersey DOT spokesman Joe Dee couldn't name any other place where the state erected anti-homeless fences, but he did say the state had no plans to blow any more dough rousting Mike and his pals from their new place under Seventh Street. Perhaps Christie will stop by to say hi Wednesday when he pops into Camden to break ground on the new Cooper Medical School.

Mike is neither embarrassed nor arrogant about his circumstances when we meet during Tuesday's rush hour.

"It is what it is. I do what I do."

But even he says the state could spend its money more wisely.

"$50,000?" he marvels before descending into the trash and weeds. "That would pay for 10 years of me living in an apartment."