Many towns justly laid claim to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which opened a year ago this month in Cleveland.
Yet area historian Frederick Barnum III says “there’s only one spot in America” that deserves a Museum of Recorded Sound–Camden, N.J., the original home of the Victor Talking Machine Company and later the RCA Victor Corp.
Now, plans are afoot to develop just such a tourist attraction for the Camden riverfront area, a combination museum of sound technology/culture and a contemporary entertainment complex, to cost in the $15 million to $20 million range.
It would be in the last remaining RCA factory building No. 17, also known as the Nipper Tower, located near the waterfront at Market Street and Delaware Avenue. That’s the Camden landmark topped with a tower containing stained-glass replicas of “His Master’s Voice,” the famous British painting of a dog nicknamed Nipper gazing quizzically into the horn of an old-fashioned gramophone.
While the factory closed in the 1980s, and the empire split into a number of companies, Nipper has remained the symbol of RCA brand records and televisions.
“We think the museum concept is a very strong one, because it is truly rooted in Camden history,” said Tom Corcoran, president of the Cooper’s Ferry Development Corp., which developed the adjacent New Jersey State Aquarium and helped sell the Blockbuster-Sony Music Entertainment Center projects to the state and city.
“Our museum would have an authentic historic component, tracing the history of recorded sound technology and entertainment, along with reflections of what was going on culturally in those decades, showing how the music fit into society,” Corcoran said. “The facility also would have a strong Epcot-like element, projecting listeners into the 21st Century with 3-D video and personal sound environments.”
Hired to implement the project is MRA International, a developer of entertainment destinations based in Philadelphia that also is designing a sound and light show for Independence Hall.
The Camden museum project is part of a “second wave of cooperative waterfront development on both sides of the Delaware,” Corcoran said. It is intended to drive up area tourism from the current 3 million to 10 million to 15 million visitors a year. Right now, each side of the river attracts about 1.5 million visitors.
A physical expansion of the Camden aquarium “with an added high-tech interactive component” also is being plotted.
Come fall, Cooper’s Ferry will begin hustling for corporate support of the sound-museum project. The wish list includes the German-based Bertlesman group, which owns RCA Records; the French giant Thomson, which produces RCA TVs; the Japanese electronics and recording company JVC (Victor Co. of Japan), and the British company HMV (which initially commissioned the His Master’s Voice painting).
In his book “His Master’s Voice,” South Jersey author (and former RCA employee) Barnum recounts that Camden was the world’s foremost maker and exporter of phonograph machines and recorded popular music, from the turn of the century through the post World War II era, as home to Victor Talking Machine Co. and later its successor, Radio Corp. of America.
Opera singer Enrico Caruso, America’s first music superstar, made his U.S. recording debut there for Victor in 1904. John Philip Sousa, George M. Cohan, Al Jolson and Victor Herbert were other early studio toilers. In 1917, Leopold Stokowski brought the Philadelphia Orchestra across the river for their first session on the eighth floor of Victor building No. 2–one of 22 company structures in this enormous, 1.6 million square-foot complex.
During the 1920s, Camden was reputedly the only place in the nation where black artists such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Fats Waller felt comfortable recording.
In the 1930s and ’40s, the Camden facility became the world’s leading producer of radios, and in the post-World War II era it became manufacturing king of televison sets and professional broadcast equipment. All this will be reflected in the museum, planned to occupy the first floor or two (and 85,000 to 170,000 square feet) of the six-story Nipper building, and possibly stretching across Delaware Street to a newly constructed building. That building will house a “combination theater-recording studio and any exhibits that require an open-spanning space,” Corcoran said.
