March 25, 1996

Citing declining attendance, the Campbell Museum, which opened in 1970 at the Campbell Soup plant in Camden, has closed its doors, officials said last week. The museum used to attract more than 60,000 visitors a year, but that number has dwindled to 20,000, a spokeswoman said. The museum has donated its international collection of tureens, some of which were made for European royalty, to the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, near Wilmington, Del. A permanent display, containing about half of the 300 tureens in the collection, is to open in the spring of 1977. TERRY PRISTIN

After a 3-year-old boy was killed in a drive-by shooting in December, 100 black men fanned out through a black neighborhood here. They knocked on doors until leads resulted in three arrests several days later. After rival gangs firebombed four houses in the same northeast Denver neighborhood in January, more than 1,000 men turned out for a five-hour protest rally, the All Black Men Conference. The firebombings stopped.

Students at four schools in New Jersey helped raise money to buy air-pollution rights at an auction scheduled for today at the Chicago Board of Trade, according to a nonprofit environmental group.

About 140,000 children in New Jersey are being raised by their grandparents and the number is growing, a spokeswoman for an elderly group says. Because of their age, their disabilities, or perhaps just their lack of knowledge, many of these substitute parents need help but do not know where to get it. Last week, the State Senate passed a bill that would establish pilot programs in five counties to help grandparents get assistance with financial, legal, educational and child-care problems. Atlantic, Essex, Monmouth, Middlesex, and Mercer counties would each receive $5,000 through the Department of Human Services to set up a program. "Because of AIDS, drug abuse, increases in the number of arrests and even abandonment, more grandparents are being asked to raise their grandchildren," said Patricia Freeman, a spokeswoman for the United Seniors Alliance.

With the exception of a patch of struggling grass, little is blossoming at Hunters Point Community Park in Long Island City, Queens. The playground, with its sandbox and one tiny slide, is usually empty; old people seldom sit on the oddly-shaped stainless steel benches. This park, one of the newest in the city, is a virtual wonderland of concrete, so distinguished and lavish in its use that it won a merit award last November from the Concrete Industry Board, narrowly losing the top honor to the Federal Detention Center in Brooklyn. Other merit awards went to the Department of Environmental Protection's Water Tunnel, No. 3, Stage 2, Shafts 21B and 22B in Brooklyn; two water pollution control plants and the environmental agency's Supplemental Cake Storage Facilities on Wards Island.