The Hotel Plaza was built at Fifth and Cooper Street in 1927, and was originally called the Plaza Club Hotel. In 1947 it underwent a complete remodeling. Hotel owner S.N. Petchers of New York explained that the high cost of modernization was “justified in my belief that Camden will continue one of the leading industrial cities in the country and entitled to the kind of top flight hotel service we provide.”
S.N. Petchers undertook another modernization in the summer of 1950.
The hotel featured banquet and meeting rooms, a bar known at different times as the Plaza Hotel Bar and the Lantern Lounge, The Cornerstone dining room, and a coffee shop.
The Hotel Plaza closed in 1985. For almost 30 years it stood empty, with various redevelopment schemes proposed every now and then The old hotel was finally demolished in February of 2014. Like the nearby Parkade Building, which had been taken down a couple of years earlier, the Plaza’s razing was far more a symptom of Camden’s reality than an event marking a new day of progress.
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