Community I

As a child growing up in the then small town of Delaware, Ohio, I would often stand on the downtown sidewalks and stare up at the buildings, wondering what used to be in the clearly vacant upper floors. As an adult, I was lucky enough to be able to write about my hometown’s commercial architecture for the local newspaper. Writing those articles, which ran for almost two years, gave me the opportunity to get into, under, through, and on top of many of Delaware’s downtown buildings and satisfy that long-held fascination with the buildings.

Delaware is gifted in that it has a fairly intact downtown commercial district. Much of the existing building stock is original to the nineteenth century and, except for changes to the storefronts of the buildings, reasonably intact. The predominant style is Italianate, an architectural style that was most popular in this country in the decades preceding and following the Civil War.

In looking around downtown Delaware, we are reminded constantly of our past. The buildings that line our downtown streets are familiar to us, so familiar that we often walk past them without seeing them. We notice them instead by their absence, as with the gap on West Winter Street where Bun’s stood before the fire. Our downtown buildings are so familiar that they appear in our dreams and shape our expectations of what a “real” downtown looks like. When we travel to other communities, we feel most at home, without even recognizing it, in those whose downtown buildings and facades resemble our own. We know our Delaware streetscape well even if we don’t always acknowledge it.

What I find equally fascinating is the role of a downtown in a community. Winston Churchill said “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” In doing so, mere space becomes place and through a sense of place, a community comes together and thrives.

Our City Manager recently said that “there is a heart to this community and the downtown is that heart.” That was as true a century ago as it is today. We still look to our downtown as the core of this community. We no longer have the Pumpkin Show; now the Delaware Arts Festival fills our streets in mid-May. The downtown fountains are gone, but we have wonderful tile mosaics popping up on the sides and backs of buildings. The summer band concerts on the courthouse lawn ended when the summer band program did; the local symphony performs a free Fourth of July concert that attracts thousands from all over the region. The downtown Farmers Market turns our downtown into our family kitchen twice a week from May until October. Although we have changed in so many ways in one hundred years, our downtown and its role in our community has remained largely intact. The downtown is our heritage from past generations and also our legacy to future ones. Our community is richer because of it. Like having a local symphony, a local college, and a local Farmers Market, we are richer because of our streetscape.

Visitors to Delaware often exclaim over our downtown streetscape. It is charming; it is visually appealing. In Delaware, the past is our present. We have retained our old buildings, not as museum pieces, but as our identity. Unlike other communities that didn’t realize the important of place to a community, Delaware did. One only has to travel to a community that razed its downtown in the middle of the twentieth century to realize what a treasure we have in our midst.

If you own real pearls, I was told you are supposed to put them on hours before whatever event you plan to wear them to. Apparently pearls pick up the warmth and oils from your skin and are more lustrous as a result.

Our downtown is not unlike a string of pearls. We have worn it daily, sometimes casually, sometimes carelessly, for over a hundred years. Like those pearls, our downtown has taken on the warmth and the glow of that daily use. May we continue to wear it proudly.