On a recent trip to Philadelphia (
see photos), I made a brief stop in downtown Wilmington, DE. Like everyone who lives in a major northeast city, I've passed through numerous times between DC and Philly/NYC, either on Amtrak or the highway, but never stopped to look around.
But there's a city there! And it looks interesting! 500,000 in the county, 70,000 in the city limits. It's part of the Philadelphia urbanized and metropolitan areas.
So this time I poked around, very briefly.
I started at the train station, walked up downtown's main spine of Market Street, and ended at Rodney Square.
Orient yourself:
Via Google
Let's start with the Amtrak station. This is the main way I've perceived Wilmington until now:
Looks like a nice station. I hoped to check out the historic waiting room, but it was locked up.
The newer waiting room is below the tracks. Definitely a more convenient and functional location, but not as pretty.
Hey I've never seen it from the outside before!
OK let's head up Market Street. I was there on a Sunday and it was pretty deserted, but it looks like it's healthy enough during the work week.
The office towers cluster near Rodney Square, on the opposite end of downtown from the train station. You can tell the difference in storefronts frome one end to the other, with more people and more lunch places on the Rodney Square end, with less customer-focused art spaces and such down at the train station end.
We're starting at the train station end and working our way up.
Love this corner.
Great-looking buildings.
You pass the Second Empire-style opera house and then you're in the more officey part.
And then you reach Rodney Square, the center of the office zone.
The statue and steps are cool. I'm a fan.
The sqaure itself sucks though. The middle is just empty grass. If you want a green park, put in some paths and shade trees. If you want an open square, hard-scape it and put a statue in the middle. Either way, benches. We as a country are bad at this.
OK. Usually my modus operandi is to show you a lot of transit stuff whenever I do a photo thread. I saw a few buses but didn't manage to get a good photo. So here's SSPer
xzmattzx, talking about Wilmington transit in my
Philadelaphia transit photo thread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by xzmattzx
Transit in Delaware is more about interesting stories and speculation than actual transit. It's just buses here, although our Amtrak station is always 11th-busiest in the nation, occasionally in the top 10 (I think). But the buses can be interesting. We have trolley buses in the other sense: buses made to look like trolleys, after the city considered adding light rail again 10-15 years ago. There are also long-range buses that go from Wilmington/Newark to Rehoboth Beach, for shoppers and beach-goers. And, the Wilmington/Newark metro used to have a great private bus network, mainly because of MBNA, which was rolling in so much money in the 1990s that they would offer to pick up employees in small private buses for free.
Even the buses have interesting stories and discussion. Just today, my friend posted on Facebook about the argument about moving the bus hub from Rodney Square to a designated place a few blocks away. The people and users all want it to stay at Rodney Square. The companies around the square want it moved away from the park at a designated transit hub. The alterior motive, it appears, is that the companies want the homeless people who try to live at the bus hub to migrate a couple blocks away.
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Here's one of the shelters for the main downtown bus hub. Besides the train station this is the only real transity photo I got.
For good measure here are a couple of photos I found on Flickr.
A bus:
Via GhostStationPA86 on Flickr
SEPTA, Philadelphia's transit agency, runs some trains to Wilmington, and beyond to Newark, DE.
Via Dart First State on Flickr
I guess that's about it. Here's Wilmington from an airplane window.
