A park on the edge of the city

Before there were brick row houses and curved streets and neighbors waving from porches, there was just open land — a stretch of recreational grounds at the western edge of Wilmington, beyond Union Street, where the city gave way to grass and sky.

They called it Union Park, and starting around 1882 it was the kind of place where a young city went to have a good time. The Front & Union Park hosted the Wilmington Quicksteps, a baseball club with a name that deserved better luck than it got. There were bicycle races, circuses, traveling shows — the whole rotating carnival of late-nineteenth-century American entertainment, pitched on open ground at the edge of town.

Nobody looking at that park in 1910 would have guessed what was coming. But then again, nobody looking at the world in 1910 would have guessed much of what came next.

America enters the war

On April 6, 1917, the United States entered the First World War. Almost overnight, cities with shipyards became cities with a problem. Wilmington was one of them. The federal government created the Emergency Fleet Corporation — a wartime agency with the urgent mission of building merchant ships as fast as humanly possible — and Wilmington's shipyards were overtaken, pushed to maximum production.

Workers flooded in. Thousands of them, from across the region and beyond, arriving in a city that had no place to put them. The housing shortage was immediate and severe. Rooming houses overflowed. Families doubled up. The situation was untenable, and the federal government knew it: you cannot build ships around the clock if the people building them have nowhere to sleep.

So the government made a decision that would have seemed extraordinary in peacetime and was merely urgent in war: it would build an entire neighborhood from scratch.

John Nolen's vision

The man hired to design that neighborhood was John Nolen, one of the most prominent town planners in America. Nolen was not interested in barracks. He was a leader of the English Garden Suburb movement — a reformist approach to housing design, inspired by British planners who believed that workers deserved not just shelter but beauty. Greenery. Human scale. Streets that felt like they belonged to the people who lived on them.

Working with the Philadelphia architectural firm Ballinger & Perrot, Nolen drew up plans for 506 houses — row houses, semi-detached homes, and corner units — arranged along curved streets that slowed traffic and created a feeling of enclosure and intimacy. A broad tree-lined median on Bancroft Parkway gave the neighborhood a green spine. Houses were clustered with varied setbacks, materials, and rooflines, so that no two blocks looked quite the same.

This was not mere worker housing. It was, even on paper, a community — conceived with the kind of care that most American cities reserved for the wealthy, applied here to the homes of shipyard laborers and their families.

Ground is broken

On June 24, 1918, ground was broken. Two hundred workers showed up on the first day. Within weeks, that number swelled to nearly four thousand.

Twelve million bricks were ordered. Wilmington had two brick manufacturers, and both of them worked around the clock for forty days straight to fill that single order. Construction was done the old way — with horses and wagons, hauling materials across muddy ground in the summer heat. There were no bulldozers. There was no time to wait for them.

The pace was staggering. This was wartime urgency applied to domestic construction — the same national will that was building ships and moving armies, turned toward the problem of laying foundations and hanging doors. An entire neighborhood, hundreds of houses, built in under a year. It is the kind of thing that sounds impossible until you remember that people were at war, and impossible was not an option anyone could afford.

The neighborhood takes shape

The Armistice came on November 11, 1918, and with it the end of the war and the slow winding down of the shipyards. But the houses were still going up, and by July 1919, three hundred of the planned five hundred and six homes were occupied. Families moved in. Children appeared on the sidewalks. The curved streets filled with the ordinary sounds of people making lives.

All the homes were rented from the U.S. Shipping Board, the federal agency that owned the entire development. Residents paid their rent to the government, which was fine for a while — but people who plant gardens and paint trim and learn the names of their neighbors' children tend to want something more permanent than a lease.

The residents wanted to buy their homes. The government, predictably, wanted to sell the whole development to a single investor and be done with it. The people living in Union Park Gardens pushed back. A community spirit was already forming, even as the question of who actually owned these houses remained very much unresolved.

The great auction

The government tried twice to sell off Union Park Gardens and failed both times. The first attempt, a sealed-bid sale, attracted no acceptable offers. The second, a deal with a Philadelphia syndicate, collapsed before the ink was dry.

Then, in February 1922, they tried something different: a two-day public auction, open to anyone. Over five thousand people showed up — a remarkable turnout for a real estate sale in a small city. The bidding was brisk. Two hundred and eighty-six homes sold, for prices ranging from two thousand to forty-five hundred dollars. Senator T. Coleman du Pont, whose family name was already woven deep into Delaware's fabric, played a role in making sure the homes went to individual buyers rather than speculators.

By August 1922, every deed was recorded. Union Park Gardens — conceived by the federal government, designed by one of America's finest planners, and built in wartime haste by thousands of workers — finally belonged to the people who lived in it. It was a pivotal moment, the one where a housing project became a neighborhood in the fullest sense of the word.

The neighborhood today

More than a century has passed since those first bricks were laid, and Union Park Gardens is still here — remarkably, stubbornly, beautifully intact. Most wartime housing developments built during the First World War were temporary by design and demolished within a generation. Union Park Gardens was built to last, and it did.

The brick row houses remain. The tree-lined parkway remains. The curved streets that Nolen designed to slow traffic and encourage neighbors to see each other — they remain too, and they still work. Second and third generation families still call this neighborhood home, living in houses their grandparents bought at auction a century ago. The neighborhood association holds quarterly meetings and organizes cleanup days. People know each other here.

Walk through Union Park Gardens on a spring evening and you will see what Nolen saw when he put pencil to paper in 1918: a place built at human scale, for human life. Children on bikes. Older residents on porches. The neighborhood cats — real, numerous, and beloved — making their rounds with the quiet confidence of creatures who know they are home.

It is a rare thing in America, a neighborhood that has held its shape and its spirit for more than a hundred years. Union Park Gardens is that rare thing. It always has been.