Blooming on Broom Street

A nice oasis on Broom Street between Gilpin and Shallcross is this streetside garden in front of the Ingleside's new assisted-living facility.

Welcome to the neighborhood!

 

Bluebell Time at Gibralter

Hidden away behind high stone walls on the northwest corner of Pennsylvania and Greenhill Avenues is one of Wilmington's loveliest gardens. It's near the end of the line, trolleywise speaking, and it's open to the public without charge. (Contributions welcome!)

My wife and I spent a couple of leisurely hours there the other day and found the spring display in full bloom. We had the place almost entirely to ourselves. Two female couples -- one young and one a bit older -- were our only company. The young ones stopped to chat about gardens in general and Mt. Cuba in particular, and the older ones let me photogaph them together by the pool, which is large enough to swim in but probably served mainly as a reflecting pool. Gibralter was one of the homes of Wilmington's duPont-connected Sharp family, and, like not a few mansions of its kind, has become something of a white elephant in recent years. Its gardens, however, have been magnificently restored and are well worth a visit.

All Aboard!

My new business cards arrived in the mail today, so I suppose I should get down to business. This old streetcar isn't going anywhere without me.

Please bear with me. As bloggers go, I am a relative neophyte. I've played with blogs for a couple of years now, but never seriously. Certainly never on a day-by-day basis.

I think can handle the words and pictures, though. A lifetime of writing and editing -- nearly a quarter of a century of it in the daily newspaper business -- gives me a measure of confidence on that score.

The mechanics of it give me pause, however. I am a relic of another time in what we once called the press. The broad term today is "the media", and the press -- the dear old, ink-stained, transom=peering press whose freedom is enshrined in the first amendment tacked on our Constitution, is now "the print media."

We used to bat our stories out on mechanical typewriters, paste the flimsy pages of newsprint together, and deliver them into the hands of copy-desk butchers, former reporters contemptuous of the whippersnappers who were trying so awkwardly to fill their old jobs.

From what was known in those days as the "universal desk", our words were transported physically -- through a network of vacuum tubes, can you believe it! -- upstairs to the composing room, where clever tradesmen of the International Typographical Union actually cast our words in lead, thus to find their way, by dint of wondrous 19th Century technology into the paper that -- with luck -- some 12-year-old boy would deliver to the faithful subscriber's door.

It was wonderful, romantic stuff, but it's gone forever. This is the era of the electronic media, an age when we are all inundated 24 hours a day, seven days a week by a steamy digital stew of words, pictures and sounds. The media are converging, it is said. There is a time and place for words and pictures on the printed page, at least for the time being. Meanwhile, the future in upon us. We are all going digital.

Whew! Heavy stuff... All I wanted to say in this brief introduction is that I have a lot to learn about these new concepts and techniques of publishing. I am am not as out of date as the old hot-lead production process. I am composing this on a laptop computer. On the other side of the room is my desktop unit, a fairly muscular custom unit that I routinely push beyond its limits. On my hip is my Blackberry 7250, a pocket mailbox that doubles as a cell phone. On my ear occasionally -- much to the amusement of some of my contemporaries -- is a Bluetooth transceiver that helps me with my multitasking.

Very few of my old have followed me this far down the digital path. I salute those who have. And I look forward to making new friends as we ride this old trolley car. I remember when there were plenty of trolleys but no Trolley Square.

It's been only a year since my wife Maggie and I moved back into the city, and in that sense we are new to the neighborhood. But we were here, it's safe to say, before maybe 95 per cent of the city's present residents. We were here in the city and we were here in what is now known as Trolley Square. We have stories to share. We want you to share yours, too.

Ride on! Read on! Write on!

The Eeffoc Effect

Ventured into the new Eeffoc's Cafe on the southeast corner of Delaware Ave. and Clayton St. for the first time the other day. It's clean, bright and stocked with just about everything you need for that caffeine fix. A pleasant surprise, actually, since the location (up a flight of stairs from the street to the lower level of an apartment building) is offbeat, to say the least. (And what about parking???)

There's a pleasant staff to make a wanderer feel welcome, a brunch-lunch menu of muffins, sandwiches, etc., the usual array of barrrista specials (not for me, a black-coffee type), seating for 10 or 12, and a large-screen TV for entertainment, if that's what you're looking for. For bean-grinders like me, the good news is that there's a decent selection of gourmet coffees, ground and whole-bean. The name? Spell it backwards! (And if it sounds familiar, that's because there's already an Eeffoc's in the Riverfront Market.)

Spring in the air?

A sure sign of better things to come....

Workers from the nearby Delaware Center for Horticulture were busy cleaning up along Gilpin Avenue beneath the Chessie overpass the other day.

They had already trimmed away the most of the weeds that made the site one of Trolley Square's most glaring eyesores. Now they were busy spreading mulch, presumably readying the ground for planting.

Were they volunteers? No, one of them explained. The Center has paid workers as well as volunteers. Was Chessie paying the Center to have this work done? Unlikely, and the workers didn't know.

All this is probably Chessie's responsibility, as owner of the adjoining property (the railroad right-of-way). But kudos to whoever is paying for this clean-up, whether it's Chessie or our good neighbors at the DCH!

At Last --- Some White Stuff

First snow of the year -- of the entire season -- overnight. Not much, but enough to bring out the snow plow to clear our buiding's parking lot. Surprise: The guy who drives to plow also clears the snow off the windows and cars parked out in the open! (In our building, at least one space is assigned to each unit; some of them are under cover, and some (including ours) are out in the open air.)

Getting Started

Hello, and welcome to a new blog about Wilmington, Delaware in general and the Trolley Square neighborhood in particular.

My wife and I recently moved back to the city after several years in suburbia and exburbia. Our kids are grown and gone, and with them went our need for a big house and the headaches and backaches that go with it.

We live now in a snug condominium unit only a few blocks from the big brick house on Broom Street where our kids spent their early years. Someone else tends the grounds, shovels the snow, and frets about trash pick-ups. We kick back and do more interesting stuff, like pursuing our real-estate careers and playing with the idea of a web log on our new-old neighborhood. If the spirit moves us, we pack up and head somewhere else for a few days or weeks.

A little farther away than Broom Street, but still within walking distance, is the first home we ever owned -- a semi-detached, severely vertical townhouse in Wawaset Park. We lived there for nearly 10 years before moving to Broom Street, in the Cool Spring (note the singular!) neighborhood.

Later still we rented a big place on Delaware Avenue whhile we built the requisite chateau on a couple of acres in Greenville. It really was a French Provincial, a Walter Durham design at that, but not on the gargantuan scale of today's McMansions.

Then came Mike Castle's townhouse on Ivy Road in Rockford Village, and then a clapboard farmhouse on someone's estate in Mt. Cuba, and then another townhouse, out of town in the Pike Creek suburb of Mendenhall Village...

And now we are back in town, around the corner from Howard Pyle's home, across the street from Frank Schoonover's studio, within a hoot and a holler of the Horitcultural Center, the Art Museum and the Zoo.

We love being back in the city! We love this corner of Old Wilmington that is now called Trolley Square! There is so much going on. So much to look at. So much to listen to.

So much to write about!