Park advocates question clubhouse demolition

A quaint bit of Camden County history is...history.

The long-closed clubhouse overlooking Evans Pond and the Cooper River in Cherry Hill was torn down this month after the county and the township concluded it had been damaged beyond repair by winter weather -- and had become dangerous.

Calling the move unnecessary and shortsighted, Cherry Hill activists Kevin Cook and Bob Shinn also questioned the county's decision to block their effort to have the state designate much of Cooper River Park as a historic district.

"I'm concerned about the integrity of the park, the stairways, the stone walls, the Hopkins House," says Cook, whose efforts I wrote about in a column last April.  "Without the protections of a historic district, they're all living on borrowed time. The county's answer is demolition."

"I know that Kevin was upset, but we delayed demolition of the  building for almost a year at his request," county Freeholder Jeff Nash says. Absent community support, and money,  to renovate the fire-damaged  structrure,  he adds,  "there was no reason to save it."

Nash says the historic district application was technically flawed, and that a "sweeping" designation could impede implementation of a $23 million plan to revitalize Cooper River Park. "If there are historical buildings that need to be preserved," he adds, "I am very much in favor of that."

Says Shinn, "the value of the clubhouse, besides the setting, was that it was the first building the Camden County Park Commission built, in 1928, in the very first park the commission built. And now it's lost. It's gone."

--KEVIN RIORDAN