Haddon Avenue begins just northeast of Camden's City Hall, runs through the Cooper Medical Center complex, under the North-South Freeway, and through the once thriving business corridor of the city's Parkside neighborhood. Some stretches of the avenue are more desolate than others. Closer to the overpass, vacant buildings dominate. An old graveyard, many of the tombstones toppled over, looks forlorn and abandoned. 

But further down the block things start to liven up. The newly opened Made in Camden clothing boutique is on this stretch, along with numerous barbershops and eateries. But the queen of the block can be found at 1254 Haddon Avenue: Corinne's Place is a 25-year-old soul food restaurant and caterer that serves some of the best collards and pork ribs in the region. 

Corinne Bradley-Powers is a lifelong resident of Camden. She grew up in a neighborhood called Foggy Bottom in South Camden. Her mom grew up in New Jersey, too. 

"People would ask me what part of the South are you from and I would say, 'South Camden,'" she recalls. "Then they say, 'What about your mom?' Then they ask me about my grandmother -- they gotta find somebody. She was born in Georgia. But I've never been there." 

Bradley-Powers went to school at Rutgers University and got a degree in social work. In the late 1980s, she decided to buy a building with enough space to live in and to pursue her love of cooking on a larger scale. Parkside was then known as one of the more stable neighborhoods in Camden, though there were already a lot of vacant storefronts back then. Bradley-Powers continued working as a counselor for troubled young people, but on the weekends she began fixing up the building and taking catering gigs.  

"This was a city property," explains Bradley-Powers, sitting in the dining room of her restaurant (she owns the original building and the two flanking it on the row as well). "When you buy a city property, it's like buying a pig in a blanket -- you don't know what you got. When I opened the door, there was no electric, no gas, no nothing. It was just a shell. But it was my shell. And I had a vision for it."

Thanks to those catering jobs, she was able to fund the piecemeal assemblage of Corinne's Place: A chair here, a toilet there. A few years after buying the building she married her husband Jerry, who works as a contractor, and he helped her get the space operational. Corinne's Place opened in 1989. 

It took a while to get the word of mouth going -- "We had to go to the barbershops and different places to take orders," she recalls -- but eventually the neighborhood gossip made its way to local media. A TV station did a segment on her, as did WDAS, and the Courier-Post produced a video segment on Corinne’s Place last year. Most memorable for Bradley-Powers was a visit from Philadelphia Inquirer critic Craig LeBan ("He's like the Bible of food.") who gave Corinne's Place a rave review entitled "Island of Mouthwatering Bounty A Bright Spot on Camden’s Scene." 

Corrine's Place is an immensely welcoming establishment. The dining room is warmly lit, with clusters of red and gold balloons hanging from the ceiling, and walls lined with paintings of Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Buffalo soldiers and a young African-American man dressed in Union blues. The main room, where customers can order take out from the counter, is awhirl with relatives and restaurant employees. 

Bradley-Powers still gets most of her business from catering to the region's many schools, hospitals and corporations. The end of the year is especially busy, with Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's parties. She still gets a lot of customers who eat in the restaurant, though many aren't residents of the city. Some of those diners try to convince her they've got just the place for her in their town, but she politely demurs. She is frustrated by the city's tough reputation and all the good that never gets talked about. 

"Often times when I'm interviewed they say, 'Why Camden?' And I say, 'Why not?'" 

Many of the city's struggles can be traced back to a lack of good jobs -- or any jobs -- that residents can access. Bradley-Powers does her best to address the problem in her own way. She trains and employs kids from Camden, especially during the Sunday rush when everyone is getting out of church. She proudly ticks off the career paths that some of her old protégés have taken: doctors, teachers, lawyers, social workers. Bradley-Powers works hard to establish a family atmosphere in the restaurant, insisting the kids call Jerry "Pops" and herself "Noona." 

"I've seen children come through here with problems you and I wouldn't even believe, but they beat the odds," she insists.

Corrine's has also employed people released from prison who had difficulty finding work elsewhere. "Sometimes if I see a kid in the street begging or whatever, I tell them I've got a job for them, so they come and they bag and we pay them. If they need some place to stay, I was hooked up with the courts and all that -- being a social worker -- so I knew places where people could take care of them. I connected the dots to help them out." 

For years Powers was trying to open a culinary school in an adjoining city-owned building, but local regulations made the process exceedingly difficult and, in the end, she was unable to achieve that goal. This year, she received a grant from the Parkside Business and Community in Partnership, a neighborhood group, allowing her to renew the façade of Corinne's place.

On a recent weekday afternoon, as her staff blows up balloons to make the restaurant more festive, she explains that the recession made things even harder in Camden.

"I'm in business for 25 years, but I'm struggling truth be told," she muses. "You see anybody in here now?" 

There are no customers in the dining room. 

"It's a big building," she continues. "Nobody's here. But I'm hanging in there. I can't fret and say, 'Oh Camden didn't do this.' I gotta do what I can do as long as I can do something. I'm happy."