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!