Wilmington, Delaware.

[Cirrus]

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.

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.

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.

[tdawg]

Great tour! My husband is from Wilmington and we go there frequently to visit his parents. It's actually quite a beautiful city with a ton of great parks and greenways. Also several grand mansions thanks to the DuPont family. Supposedly they have a very high murder rate which I don't understand.

[Echoes]

What a great looking place.

[xzmattzx]

Nice pictures! It's surreal to see pictures of my hometown metro from someone else.

You actually give Wilmington a little more credit it deserves in some places. Market Street is dead unless it's working hours. Even Friday and Saturday nights are dead. The bars are in the west side neighborhoods. But there's a couple nice bars on Market Street, and the city is trying very hard to bring it back to life.

Rodney Square would be bad either for shade trees or a statue because it functions as the city's event space. It's the site of the city Christmas tree, political events, parades, and festivals like the popular Jazz Festival. The openness allows for stages, free-flowing crowds, etc. Statues or trees in the middle would disrupt that. Most people don't use it as a true park anyway; they go to Brandywine Park, which begins just a few blocks away. Rodney Square, incidentally, remains almost completely unchanged from when it was created during the City Beautiful Movement.

By the way, everyone will recognize that statue from the Delaware state quarter!

[ColDayMan]

Great little tour.

[Murphy de la Sucre]

That's awesome as Wilmington, Delaware is relatively rare on this forum.

[kool maudit]

The eastern seaboard is a treasure trove.

[mrnyc]

a beautiful high street and it has so much potential. i dont understand the violence issues there either.

[mousquet]

I once visited this state. I didn't notice any particular inequity (I hardly watch anyone's bank account anyway, I don't give a feuk), but they say this would be the one tax haven state in the US, which is definitely wrong.

For example, that's where Amazon would move much of their money from Luxembourg, so they don't pay any tax in Europe.
Moreover, Amazon is turning into the monopoly of online shopping, by crushing any of their potential rival on purpose, which is very unsafe. Monopoly is the most dangerous thing to the economy.
Oh, and Jeff Bezos may be the wealthiest person on Earth by stock market assets, he nonetheless would be a complete asshole by his management. If you're an engineer, like a computer scientist specialized in big data analysis or something, Amazon is surely the one place to be at the moment. But if you lack education, care and skills, they would exhaust you to death, which is unfair when everyone's brain is pretty much the same.
It's really not such a hard thing to code algorithms that researchers found before anyone uses them when you focus... I don't see why those would get privileges while others are ill-treated. It's not only unfair, but also completely stupid as it causes harm to macro economy.

It's either dangerously naive or outrageously cynical to state that the public authorities would be useless, and that they wouldn't be worth taxes.
People stating such silly things are called Libertarians. They agree on the tax haven concept, which should piss everybody off. Those people are as dishonest as the creepy communists.
I don't like them at all.

I know many rich people in the US are philanthropists, giving loads of money to charity and all on their personal accounts, to thank society for their success. That's a traditional custom in the US, and it's fine. Great tradition. We're aware of it.
But I suspect the successful will never be as wise or generous as they should be, so I still would advocate the democratic public authorities to enforce wisdom and discipline in this whole system to some extent.

[xzmattzx]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

a beautiful high street and it has so much potential. i dont understand the violence issues there either.

The violence stems from Wilmington being the heroin capital of the United States, unfortunately. You get the associated gang violence from it. And then it compounds because most killings are "revenge killings", either evening up a killing from beforehand, or killing someone because they slighted you, or innocent bystanders in the crossfire with drive-bys and whatnot.

[Cirrus]

Originally Posted by xzmattzx

Rodney Square would be bad either for shade trees or a statue because it functions as the city's event space. It's the site of the city Christmas tree, political events, parades, and festivals like the popular Jazz Festival. The openness allows for stages, free-flowing crowds, etc. Statues or trees in the middle would disrupt that. Most people don't use it as a true park anyway; they go to Brandywine Park, which begins just a few blocks away. Rodney Square, incidentally, remains almost completely unchanged from when it was created during the City Beautiful Movement.

I figured as much, as that's usually the reason US cities do this to their best squares. But it's a lame & counterproductive excuse. Consider European central squares, hardscaped and with statues, but they still have their Christmas trees and pop-up markets and public celebrations and flash mobs and pop-up theaters. Or forget Europe and consider only the better examples from US cities, plenty of which manage to have outdoor movies in nice hardscaped squares with big statues.

I'll even give you that the central statue may not work in all cases. We can do without. But there's no universe where a patch of grass is the best option for a place like this even sans statue. Hardscape it, put in movable seats & tables, a splash pad, whatever. It's not hard, most other countries and plenty of US cities manage to figure it out. Wilmington and many other US cities don't because we're so afraid of homeless people using our public spaces that we think the only outcome is for nobody to use them at all unless there's a special event. And that's crap. That's how you empty out a city.

Not trying to pick on Wilmington in particular. In fact I think this Wilmington square is not nearly as bad as many others, even if it has failings. But that whole mindset of how to manage a public space is just wrong.

[EastSideHBG]

Cool pics! Wilmington reminds me of my hometown, Harrisburg, PA, in a lot of ways.

[Jawnadelphia]

Nice little tour.

Next time head down to Trolley Square and Brandywine Park and Rockford Park-the water tower!. And the Riverfront is booming right next to the Train Station.

The Wilmington crime is the same crime reasons in cities like Baltimore, Camden, Chester, Philly -- poverty, drugs, gangs, breakdown of family structure, poor schools, ...etc. etc., you all know this story already, watch 'The Wire' if unfamiliar. And it's always in the same 2-3 hotspots -- ghetto's of the city.

Shameless plug, much more of Wilmington, and the First State can be found here, my photo album:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/125694...57645043550487

[Xing]

Beauts!

[Nomad9]

Thanks for the tour. I’m a relatively new Wilmingtonian and I think the city is a hidden jewel with huge potential. The city has great housing/building stock and density throughout. And there are a few great little walkable neighborhoods. Unfortunately, it gets overlooked because of its “The Wire”-like crime issues and the fact that it sits in the shadow of several great American cities—as others stated, it’s in the Philly MSA and it’s within 2 hours of DC, Baltimore, and NYC.

What the tour doesn’t get to (this time!) are the new developments in/near downtown. Just off Market Street there is a large apartment complex under construction, and the Riverfront district is full of new apartments and offices (its bland, but nice enough + walkable and accessible). If the downtown area population continues to grow with young professional types, new restaurants, a brewery, etc., Market won’t be dead on weekends for long.

Also, I’m all for moving the transit stop from Rodney Square. The city needs to have effective public transportation but the harsh reality is that the homeless and panhandlers are always hanging around. Residents and visitors shouldn’t feel uncomfortable or unsafe in the city’s central public space.

Finally, next time you’re there, check out the Hotel DuPont, Trolley Square, and the Brandywine Valley! The Brandywine is beautiful and a really under appreciated asset for the city. Also, the aerial picture shows one interesting aspect: you can drive 10 mins west from downtown and find yourself in semi-rural chateau country with rolling hills and beautiful estates.

[xzmattzx]

Originally Posted by Nomad9

Thanks for the tour. I’m a relatively new Wilmingtonian and I think the city is a hidden jewel with huge potential. The city has great housing/building stock and density throughout. And there are a few great little walkable neighborhoods. Unfortunately, it gets overlooked because of its “The Wire”-like crime issues and the fact that it sits in the shadow of several great American cities—as others stated, it’s in the Philly MSA and it’s within 2 hours of DC, Baltimore, and NYC.

What the tour doesn’t get to (this time!) are the new developments in/near downtown. Just off Market Street there is a large apartment complex under construction, and the Riverfront district is full of new apartments and offices (its bland, but nice enough + walkable and accessible). If the downtown area population continues to grow with young professional types, new restaurants, a brewery, etc., Market won’t be dead on weekends for long.

Also, I’m all for moving the transit stop from Rodney Square. The city needs to have effective public transportation but the harsh reality is that the homeless and panhandlers are always hanging around. Residents and visitors shouldn’t feel uncomfortable or unsafe in the city’s central public space.

Finally, next time you’re there, check out the Hotel DuPont, Trolley Square, and the Brandywine Valley! The Brandywine is beautiful and a really under appreciated asset for the city. Also, the aerial picture shows one interesting aspect: you can drive 10 mins west from downtown and find yourself in semi-rural chateau country with rolling hills and beautiful estates.

When did you move here?

[Nomad9]

Originally Posted by xzmattzx

When did you move here?

August last year, though I lived here last summer too. Moved here for work without any other connections to the region.

[xzmattzx]

Originally Posted by Nomad9

August last year, though I lived here last summer too. Moved here for work without any other connections to the region.

Where did you move from?

[Cirrus]

Back to normal.

[marcus]

Thanks for the tour! Wilmington looks great! I know from streetview that it has some really pretty residential neighborhoods too. I'd love to explore Wilmington one day...in fact, I might just do that