Thanks for the memories, but it's time for a new Camden High

Camden High School rose from the crest of Forest Hill in 1916, its prime location, Collegiate Gothic architecture, and majestic tower making an eloquent statement about the blue-collar city's aspirations.

That same city has gone on to lose countless landmarks, entire neighborhoods, and most of its downtown to various notions of progress.

But the mighty Castle on the Hill has endured.

Until now.

Beginning next spring, the century-old building and its labyrinth of later additions will be closed, razed, and replaced, with a $133 million new Camden High School scheduled to open on the same site in 2021.

"This is a tremendous and wonderful announcement," Mayor Dana Redd said at a limited-access, somewhat less-than-celebratory event Wednesday with Gov. Christie and other officials in Camden High's Clarence Turner gymnasium.

The facility honors the late basketball coach whose championship teams made "The High" renowned in South Jersey, statewide, and beyond during the 1970s and '80s.

"Of course I was saddened to think it's going to be torn down," said another Camden High legend, former principal Riletta Cream, who sat in the front row Wednesday.

"They've got to do it, in order to meet the needs of our children," Cream, 89, told me. "So I'm all for it."

Rightly credited with restoring order, structure, and pride to a school floundering in the wake of racial tension and white flight, Cream ran The High with a firm but loving hand from 1972 until 1987.

Those were the days when the click-click of her approaching high heels was enough to keep students in line.

"This is still the architecturally most magnificent high school I've ever seen," Cream said. "But it doesn't meet the needs of now. It's got to come down."

That the beloved educator who essentially saved the place now publicly calls for its replacement suggests how assiduously the city and the state-controlled school district are shepherding, if not stage-managing, the project's rather low-key rollout.

So much so that Camden High teacher and high-profile community activist Keith E. Benson, an opponent of the project, said he was asked to leave the gym before Wednesday's festivities got underway.

"There's no guarantee that Camden High will be brought back as a public school, and no real track record so that we should trust what [officials] say," Benson said Friday.

"Camden High should be renovated."

Civic leaders less fiercely opposed to, or generally supportive of, the plan - which the district is touting in a well-crafted video on YouTube - share Benson's concerns about the level of public participation so far.

"The community basically found out about the new school through the media," said Bridget Phifer, executive director of Parkside Business and Community in Partnership Inc., the community development organization for the Camden High neighborhood.

"Most of the residents are very supportive of a new, state-of-the-art facility," she added.

Parents and others also want to know what accommodations will be made for Camden High's 600-plus students during the transition.

"Where are the children going to go? There isn't a plan," said Moneke Ragsdale, founder and president of the Camden High Parent-Teacher Organization.

"Lots of people are caught up in nostalgia," said former Camden school board member Sean Brown, the director of a leadership program called Young Urban Leaders.

"We have to focus more on the current students."

Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard said the district must "be creative in finding solutions" to provide classroom and other facilities for Camden High students.

Academically and otherwise, "it will be business as usual" he said.

"We actually have excess capacity in existing buildings. We have some options."

Not an option, money-wise, he added: Retaining some or all of the facade, or the tower, of the 1916 landmark. Much less, renovating the entire complex.

"We will do everything we can to honor the legacy," Rouhanifard said.

"But we can't let memories hinder future generations."

It's true that the Camden High so fondly remembered by so many - a 2,400-student powerhouse with a nationally recognized basketball program - has not existed for decades.

But that $133 million, the largest amount the state has allocated for Camden High during a decade of struggle over the school's future, will make possible not only a new but a better Camden High.

One worthy of alumni and others who have loved and fought for this hallowed South Jersey institution for so long.

And worthy of the city's 21st-century aspirations, too.

kriordan@phillynews.com

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