We're now in Wilmington, recently chosen as North Carolina's favorite city in an online survey. The blog's slick new look was designed by our slick young nephew Mike Morrow, a recent UVa grad who's now working in Washington, D.C. We have fond memories of Mike as a nine-year-old kid doing standup comedy on the porch of a vacation rental at Sunset Beach some years ago. Now he's an ambitious, multi-talented young man with a bright future. He's out to make his mark on the world as an entrepreneur. We think he'll soon reach that goal.
I don't know how scientific the survey was that designated Wilmington the state's favorite city, but it's always been high on my list of cities where I'd like to live. For starters, it's a seaport, and seaports seem to me to always be more interesting than most inland cities.
As a seaport, Wilmington has had the world coming and going since 1739--walking its streets and hoisting mugs in its saloons, pursuing hopes and coping with disappointments, chasing the future and running from the past, raising families and burying the dead. During those 278 years, the cultures, cuisines, languages and habits of the world have been deposited here, and while all those influences may not be apparent to the naked eye, they're all part of the city's character, all part of its social archaeology, its ambience.
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| Wilmington's downtown waterfront on the Cape Fear River. (Photo from Seagate Boating website) |
There are some beautiful neighborhoods--so very Southern--with graceful, lovely old homes on streets lined with oaks dripping Spanish moss. Some of the houses, of course, were built with slave labor. Wilmington has had a few moments of infamy during its long history. And it's not without some modern problems. While the city has the allure of being a seaport and a gateway to the world, it also has a problem common to seaports--drug trafficking.
So it's not a gated community where the bad is shut out. It has beauty and blemishes, charm and ugliness.
We're in a good neighborhood with good neighbors, not far from downtown. And the downtown is lively--in fact I haven't lived in a town with a downtown like this since the old days in Chapel Hill back in the '80s. Front Street is lined with restaurants, art galleries, coffee shops, bookstores. There are restaurants that specialize in the old-style Southern cooking I grew up with, and others offering trendy haute cuisine. The grocery stores run the gamut from Food Lion to the more exotic (and expensive) Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. There are two colleges providing plenty of young, tattooed, pierced and dreadlocked hipsters for the street scene.
There are museums, including the Cape Fear Museum, which features an exhibit about the early days of Wilmington's most famous native son, basketball superstar Michael Jordan. There's also a remnant of the movie industry that was thriving here until the newly conservative state legislature revoked their tax breaks and sent most of the producers and technicians scurrying off to Atlanta, which welcomed them with open arms. Our friends in Raleigh never really explained why they were eager to hand out tax breaks for just about everybody except the movie studios.
I'm getting settled into my Marvin Spencer-designed office, converted from a garage. I'm sharing it with two cats. We get on each other's nerves sometimes and I think they still expect to be going back to Plymouth any day now. But for the most part we've learned to co-exist.
New city, new life, new (sort of) blog. I promise at least a few updates every month. So we're back in business. Stop by again soon.
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