The more troubled your neighborhood becomes, the farther people will drive in order to dump trash by your house.

For Gladys Blair's neighborhood in South Camden, they drove all the way from Pennsylvania. A pickup truck hauling pieces of lumber, plaster and roofing dropped a pile of junk at a vacant lot near South 6th and Woodland streets, a couple of blocks from Blair's home. Neighbors reported the truck's tags to the police, and the driver was supposed to retrieve this stuff. But that was two years ago, and it's still there, now overgrown with grass – tires, some kind of wheeled apparatuses and two sealed barrels.

“I don't know what's in those barrels,” Blair said. But they're full. And they're starting to rust.

Blair's neighborhood, the Terraces, has been going downhill since the nearby New York Shipbuilding Co. went out of business in 1967. Fewer than half of the 112 original lots on these three blocks have houses on them anymore. And of the 45 or so houses left, many are abandoned or condemned.

The neighborhood is hemmed in by industries, truck routes and Interstate 676. But one thing reminds us that the Terraces area is nevertheless part of nature: It abhors a vacuum. Open a space, and people fill it with garbage.

A few years ago, then-Mayor Milton Milan knocked down some condemned homes on nearby South Broadway. It was good news, at the time. At last! Something was being done about the blight! Hooray for urban renewal!

Then people from other towns started hauling their trash bags out there and dumping them in the vacant lots.

“I guess people missed trash day at home,” Blair said.

Bags, bottles and the burned-out shell of a car. A couch, a mattress, a couple of TVs and a vacuum cleaner. Wood scraps, paint buckets, potato chip bags, plastic casings, cups, pots and sheets of glass.

“I was raised on a farm, and this gives pigs a bad name,” Blair said. “They don't do their personals all over the pen. They have a corner and they keep the rest of it nice.”

And after the inanimate garbage comes the living refuse. Pets, for example. People drive by and ditch their cats and dogs, some of them sick. Then Camden gets blamed for having so many stray animals, Blair complained, when local residents just feed these strays occasionally. “You don't want to see them out starving,” she said.

Then, on top of the abandoned cars and the barrels and the cats and the mysterious wheeled apparatuses come the abandoned people, who fill the abandoned houses.

Crack dealers and especially prostitutes. They come by bus or walk over from the other side of I-676 or up the railroad tracks. Sometimes cars with Pennsylvania tags drop them off and pick them up later.

“People don't want them. They're like throwaway people,” Blair said. “They should have someplace to go, maybe a rooming house or something.”

Their customers come out there as well. And now someone has spray-painted all over Blair's neighborhood that a prostitute who works the area has AIDS.

It used to be nice around here. Forty years ago, when New York Ship was still in business, the company used to sweep the streets, said the Rev. Al Stewart, who runs the nearby Camden Rescue Mission on South Broadway. You can still see a little of what it used to be like on Fairview Street, where some of the homes are still kept up.

“My home, I've put a lot in it,” Blair said. Her house on Fairview is tidily but lushly decorated with plants and photos. She has put in paneling and redone the bathroom. Her kitchen is dense with cooking implements, but highly organized, with all the food carefully stored in plastic containers.

“It's in the ghetto, but it's nice,” she said.

It's just that people keep sending her their garbage.

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This column was a sidebar to a larger story about the Terraces. If you're interested:

Here's the main bar of the story.

Here's the other sidebar – a history of the neighborhood.

Here's the first column I wrote on this topic.