When the St. Lawrence Cement Co. tried starting a factory in Camden, N.J., that would spray the air with up to 60 tons of partly adhesive limestone dust every year, one small group of neighbors was actually rooting for it.

You'll find these folks in an area known as the Terraces - a few houses set among dirt lots and old railroad tracks just off I-676, along five blocks from Lester to Morgan streets. To the east, the interstate cuts them off implacably from the nearest parks and schools in Morgan Village. To the west stand warehouse buildings, in front of which large trucks roll by all day, shaking pictures in people's houses as they pass. To the north and to the south, there is pretty much nothing.

Residents say they'd hoped that, if the cement factory succeeded, the state finally would buy up the area and move everybody somewhere else.

The neighborhood smells of rotted licorice from an old candy factory, and diesel fumes and dust and worse. Of the 112 lots there, 62 are either boarded up or abandoned, and Fairview Street is the only road left with any significant signs of life. Gladys Blair, a homeowner on Fairview, pointed out an abandoned office building at the corner where emergency personnel recently trained for urban warfare. Residents didn't know this was going to happen until their homes rattled with explosions from the mock battle.

"Only in this neighborhood would they do that," Blair laughed.

The area should be zoned solely for industry. These people shouldn't have to live here. And frankly, the rest of us owe them a way out.

For, if you live in Camden County, you have an intimate connection with the residents of the Terraces: One of the recurring smells nearby is from the county's sewage treatment plant. People here and throughout the surrounding neighborhood of Waterfront South have been taking your ... well, they've been taking it for years. And your garbage, too, at the Camden County trash incinerator next to the interstate. Up the road, a co-generation power plant is allowed to spew even more dust than the cement factory. Two federal Superfund sites also lay somewhere between here and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, as do more than a dozen other seriously polluted properties: scrap iron dealers, drywall supply companies, cars stacked up on a hill waiting to be dropped into a giant shredder.

So, what has improved now that the cement plant has been closed down and tied up in litigation?

"I wake up choking and gagging every morning," says Bonnie Sanders, who lives in a different part of Waterfront South and has a different take on St. Lawrence Cement. She was part of the lawsuit that stopped its operation. But she still is losing her neighborhood. A study in 1997 found that 61 percent of South Camden residents had coughing problems or trouble catching their breath, compared with 36 and 39 percent in North Camden.

"When my family came here, the air was fresh. You could have a cookout," Sanders said. "Now you can barely open your window."

The state, county and South Jersey Port Corp. - everybody who's destroyed this neighborhood - ought to buy up all of Waterfront South: everything west of I-676 between Ferry Avenue and Newton Creek. The 1,700 people there could be relocated cheaply, whereas the sewage treatment plant isn't ever going get up and go to another town (though it certainly smells like it's going to get up and walk somewhere). And things won't get better under state rule. The cement plant went up on land owned by the state and run by the Port Corp. That's the state's attitude.

But many people such as Sanders want to stay. So let's focus on these five particularly stranded blocks of Waterfront South that unequivocally want out. An appraisal led by St. Lawrence estimates that all five blocks of Terraces property could be bought up for $2.161 million. Add maybe another million to ensure that everybody gets properly relocated.

Otherwise, we are forcing people to live in our filth, their only comfort being that, through the miracle of litigation, St. Lawrence Cement now has to suffer right along with them, for everyone else's previous sins.

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I returned to this issue a year-and-a-half later:

Here's the main bar of that follow-up story.

A history of the neighborhood.

When you're down, people dump their garbage by your house.