God Save The Village Green - New Castle, DE

I hope our friend Caitlin – an alum of the University of Delaware – is not too righteously offended by this, but neither of us had lofty hopes for the state of Delaware. We went into it knowing three things about it:

1.)   It was the first colony to become a state.

2.)   It is very tiny.

3.)   Joe Biden is from there.

The only big thing about Delaware known in most of popular culture is this scene from Wayne’s World:

Somebody tell their board of tourism this, but our moderately low expectations were exceeded ten times over. Aside from a quick jaunt through Wilmington, which was just another Mid-Atlantic shithole, we were delighted to find several towns that time forgot. The first we visited was New Castle, just six miles south of Wilmington. New Castle looks like it hasn’t changed since the late 18th Century, complete with an English-style village green. At the north end of the village green is an Episcopalian church from the 1700’s. In describing it to a friend, I said it was like the town is a giant Kinks song, a quaint village with a deep reverence toward its past.

One of the main drags in New Castle.

In the present day, cities have their own ethnic enclaves, where the spirit of “back home” manifests itself in the architecture, the signage, and the types of stores in the neighborhood. Currently, there are a large number of immigrants from Africa, South Asia, and South America coming into the United States, all of them bringing their cultural heritage and artifacts as the latest ingredients in our cultural stew. Before that, it was my great-grandfather coming by way of Sicily and Alexa’s great-grandparents coming from Warsaw, Poland. At the same time, there was a massive wave of Chinese immigrants. Before that, it was the Irish (including the ancestors of my maternal grandfather). In a weird way, New Castle is the British take on the ethnic neighborhood, like Wee Britain from Arrested Development, only real.

The Episcopalian church on the green.

There have been some criticisms about Williamsburg, Virginia, for replicating (rather than restoring) all of the old homes from colonial times; New Castle, by contrast, is the real deal. The gorgeous homes here have been treated with the utmost care, with friendly locals out tending to their gardens and saying hello to passersby. There were also more people on bicycles than there were automobiles. As a low-key and comparatively small town, it seems to attract dedicated followers rather than gaggles of waddling visor-wearers fresh off of a tour bus.

New Castle marked a great start for our trip through Delaware, which included stops in Dover (the only state capital that looks like a college campus), Rehoboth Beach (the only East Coast beach town we visited that had not been overtaken by neon-lit consumerism), and Lewes, which itself was another town that time forgot, albeit with a pronounced maritime flavor.

We also saw this.