It made the discs, the machines, and the dog. Then the dog came out of the tower.
This is the twelfth profile in The City That…, a series about American cities that invented an industry, led the world in it, and then watched the center move on. We tell their stories plainly and with affection — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are.
The Founding
The man who gave the world its recorded voice started out building machines that sewed the pages of books.
Eldridge Reeves Johnson came to Camden in 1886, nineteen years old, to work as a machinist. He owned the shop within a decade. He was good with springs and governors, and he would have finished as a well-regarded local mechanic if Emile Berliner had not come through his door in 1896 with a toy that did not work properly.
Berliner’s disc gramophone was a better idea than Edison’s cylinder and a worse machine. It needed a motor that held speed and cost almost nothing. Johnson built it, patented it in 1898, and never got free of it again.
On October 3, 1901, the Victor Talking Machine Company was incorporated in Camden, merging Johnson’s company with the Berliner patents. Berliner also brought a painting: Francis Barraud’s fox terrier peering into a phonograph horn, trademarked in 1900 and barely used since. Johnson put that dog on every machine, record, and catalog before the year was out.
Camden got the industry because Camden already had the machinist.
The Height
The first pressing plant opened in 1905. The Victrola came in 1906, and the Victrola was the thing that did it — the horn folded down inside a cabinet of good wood, the machinery hidden, the whole thing built to pass as furniture. A parlor could admit it.
By 1920 more than thirteen thousand people worked across thirty-eight buildings on the Camden waterfront, the largest talking-machine and record factory complex in the world.
Building 17 rose with a seventy-five-foot tower, and in 1915 the D’Ascenzo studios of Philadelphia set four round stained-glass windows into it, fourteen feet across, each one the dog and the horn. You could see him from Philadelphia. Camden had put its trademark in the sky.
Here the record complicates the legend. Camden is remembered as the place where Caruso was recorded, and it was not, or not at the start. Victor ran no studio in Camden between August 1901 and December 1907, and Caruso’s first American sides were cut at the Carnegie Hall Annex in New York in 1904. Early discographers found ledgers with no locations listed, guessed Camden, and printed the guess. I keep turning it over because the correction ought to shrink the claim and somehow does not. Camden pressed those discs by the million, built the machine they were played on, and owned the dog on the label. In 1918 Victor bought the Trinity Baptist Church on North Fifth Street and put two studios in it, leaving the pipe organ where it stood. Stokowski recorded there, and Toscanini, and Rachmaninoff. Camden did not so much capture the voice of the century as manufacture it.
Two other things were made on that waterfront.
- Henry Morse founded the New York Shipbuilding Corporation in 1899, meant it for Staten Island, could not get the land, and kept the name; by 1917 it was the largest shipyard in the world.
- Campbell’s had been canning in Camden since 1869.
Then, in June 1936, it all turned into an argument about sound.
The union had been chartered in March. Thousands walked out of the RCA plant, and for the first stretch the strike was fought entirely with loudspeakers. The pickets set one up at the gate and played Sousa marches. RCA put a loudspeaker on the roof and answered with its own records, played loud, all day, out over the street. The city that had taught America to listen spent that summer as two horns shouting at each other across a picket line. Camden’s five commissioners took no action on any of it but one: they ordered RCA’s loudspeaker silenced, because it carried five blocks and disturbed them at City Hall.
Then the strikebreakers came and the music stopped mattering. Pickets threw eggs filled with paint. Out of the factory windows came red pepper, hot metal, light bulbs loaded with ammonia. One afternoon three thousand people went for the employees leaving the gate, a third of them men from Philco and the shipyard who had walked over because it was Camden’s fight.
The union won. The biggest labor battle in the country that summer opened with two machines built to reproduce music.
The Turn
Radio got there before the Depression did. Free music out of the air took the phonograph business apart through the 1920s, and RCA bought what was left of Victor in 1929. The studios drifted to New York and the manufacturing dispersed west.
The rest came slowly and then all at once. Camden held 43,267 manufacturing jobs in 1950 and 10,200 by 1982. New York Ship closed in November 1967.
The population was 124,555 in 1950.
It is about seventy-one thousand now.
In 1968 RCA took the dog out of the tower. The windows came down and the sky over Camden was ordinary again.
The workers won in 1936 and the work left anyway. That is the order it happened in and there is no arrangement of it that comes out kind.
Some of what Camden made had it coming. Radio killed the Victrola before any strike did, and the country stopped needing a hundred acres of cabinetmakers in order to hear a song.
The Navy stopped ordering ships and owed Camden nothing. A city can be very good at a thing the world has finished with.
The rest of it was theft. Three mayors in twenty years were convicted. Angelo Errichetti took fifty thousand dollars from a federal agent dressed as an Arab sheik. Arnold Webster paid himself twenty thousand out of the school money. Milton Milan took the mob’s cash and laundered a drug dealer’s money through the city, and the boss of the Philadelphia mob sat in a federal courtroom in Camden and explained to a jury how. The factories left for the reasons factories leave. The men who were supposed to hold the place together sold off what was still standing.
What Was Lost
Thirty-three thousand jobs, the neighborhoods built around them, and the skill of a man who could press a record or hang a hull plate and had nowhere left to do it. The parish churches emptied. The rowhouses came down, or stood empty, which is worse. Camden became a shorthand in the national press for what a city could come to, and the people who stayed had to live inside the word.
The church on North Fifth Street, where the organ stood and the symphonies were cut, became a company store, then a recreation room, then a wrecking job. It is a parking lot. There is no marker.
What Remains
Building 17 is called The Victor now and holds apartments. The Nipper windows have been remade more than once; an original from 1915 is kept by the Camden County Historical Society. Campbell’s is still headquartered in the city, and the old shipyard ground is a working port again.
The city is safer than it has been in living memory: twelve homicides in 2025, five fewer than the year before, a first summer without a killing in fifty years, a fifty-five-year low in crime.
The renaissance was bought, though, and the receipt is public. Companies moving into Camden have won roughly $1.6 billion in state tax credits since 2013. A task force appointed by the governor found fraud and mismanagement across the program. A state analysis found the tax-break construction projects hired twenty-seven Camden residents. Twenty-seven, in a city of seventy thousand. The towers are real and so is that number.
Go down to the waterfront at dusk and the dog is still up there, fourteen feet of stained glass lit from behind, looking into a horn that has been silent for ninety years. Below him the cranes swing cargo across the ground where the building ways were. A few blocks inland is a parking lot where a church used to stand, and in that church a man once sat down at an organ and a machine took the sound and held on to it, and it is holding it still.
Camden built the thing that keeps a voice after the voice is gone. Every recorded sound this country has loved since runs back to a machine shop on the Camden waterfront and a mechanic who built machines for sewing books.
Camden’s whole history, the achievement and the hardship alike, deserves to be remembered.
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Why Camden? It did not merely host the recording industry; it manufactured it — the discs, the machines, and the trademark that told the world what a record was — and for a third of a century the largest record factory on earth stood on its waterfront.
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Charles C. Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he employs AI tools in a limited, supporting role for research, occasional image creation, and editing, while the prose and judgment remain entirely his own. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live and co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.
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