The Christina Riverfront: From Industrial Ruin to Revival

The mile of riverfront you are moving through along the Christina River has been many things in the course of Wilmington's history. It was, in the colonial era, the site of the first Swedish settlement in North America. In the nineteenth century, it was the most productive iron shipbuilding corridor in North America. In the twentieth century, as the yards closed and the factories went dark, it became a contaminated industrial waste zone, a band of brownfields and empty warehouses that separated the city from its own river.

By the nineteen nineties, the waterfront had become a symbol of everything that had gone wrong in post-industrial Wilmington, a city that had lost population steadily since the nineteen fifties and watched its tax base shrink with every factory closure. In nineteen ninety-five, the Delaware General Assembly created the Riverfront Development Corporation and charged it with turning the contaminated riverfront into something livable.

What came out of that effort was not perfect, and critics noted that the revitalization prioritized entertainment and market-rate housing over the neighborhoods that most needed investment. But the physical transformation was real. Tanneries, salvage yards, and petroleum operations were cleared. Soil was remediated. A riverwalk was built. Restaurants, a minor league baseball park, a movie theater, and eventually high-end apartments arrived on the western bank. The replica of the Kalmar Nyckel, the ship that carried the original Swedish settlers to this very bend of river in sixteen thirty-eight, now sails from a dock a few hundred yards upstream.

The eastern bank remains largely undeveloped, a reminder that urban renewal is not finished in a decade. But on a summer evening, with the water reflecting the lights of the new buildings and the masts of the tall ship visible above the treeline, it is possible to see simultaneously what this river has been, and to wonder what it will become next.