This Is Sad

http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20130801/NEWS/130801009

It seems that the city I was born and raised in has truly sunk to unthinkable lows.  Not only did Parenting magazine place us 8th on their list of most dangerous cities, a traveler guide has included the city on its list of unfriendliest cities to visit.

It’s really sad to see how the city has gone from being practically invisible to totally notorious. The city’s slogan, “A great place to be somebody” hasn’t really ever been true; it wasn’t a bad place… it was just one of those cities that didn’t have the kind of juice that, say, Philadelphia has.  Shit, the only reason why some people even knew about the city was because of the DuPont Company and even then we’d get confused with the city in North Carolina more often than not.

I don’t think there’s any lingering doubts about where Wilmington is and what its claim to fame is – “A great place to be somebody who might get jacked” seems to be the new and disappointing motto.  The city government tried to up the city’s rep and, for a while, it worked; a lot of banks were moving their corporate offices to Wilmington, sparking a boom in new office towers, the possibility of jobs with said banks, as well as taxes and other monies to fill the city’s small coffers.

The city’s still trying to get things done, developing a riverfront district with outlet stores, restaurants and even a Kahunaville – that was a major draw for the city until they either decided to leave the city or was shut down because of all the violence that would take place there.  It saddens me to see that the glory days of the city of my birth have come and gone and that the crime that had, at one time, totally bypassed us has now taken root and doing a great job of making what used to be an okay place to live and turning it into a place that, today, I wouldn’t go to unless I really had to, like, visiting my mother; where she lives is smack dab in the middle of one of the most crime-ridden sections of the city.

The current mayor is someone I actually know, both from high school and his duty as a police officer; his predecessors did the best they could to keep the crime down and pump up the city’s image and, well, it’s kinda obvious that they didn’t do as good as they had envisioned and I doubt that the current mayor is going to be as effective as he thought when he ran for office.

Wilmington’s the largest city in a state that some people still think is a suburb of Philadelphia; whenever I traveled, I had endure jokes about my home state including the fact that some people didn’t even know where Delaware was or that it was a state.  Our small size – only Rhode Island is smaller in area – probably helped keep a lot of the bad shit away… but no longer.

It’s just sad to see the place going to shit…