Barksdale Maynard is a lecturer at the University of Delaware and the author of eight books, including the recent “Artists of Wyeth Country: Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and Andrew Wyeth,” available at your local bookstore or online.
One by one, Delaware’s historic buildings are disappearing. This was a dire theme of Preservation Delaware’s annual conference Oct. 20-21.
I have seen this happening firsthand, having spent several years writing “Buildings of Delaware,” the first guidebook to the architecture of the First State. Even before the book was published in 2008, more than a half-dozen of the 500 buildings I had described were demolished.
Since then, the trend has accelerated.
I was especially shocked by the fate of the Thomas England House at Smyrna. This handsome Greek Revival building had a temple front like a miniature Parthenon.
Like many of Delaware’s best buildings, the Thomas England House (also called Woodlawn) combined aesthetic excellence, intriguing architectural details and an interesting historical back story. Its white portico had been a Smyrna landmark since 1853.
Although on the National Register of Historic Places, the Thomas England House was bulldozed in 2017 for a commercial development that never happened. All that remains are a few bricks in a weedy field.
The most important Greek Revival building in southern Delaware has also been destroyed. Lawrence at Seaford was in good shape when demolished. Neighbors are said to have wept at the sight.
Once these buildings are gone, there’s no bringing them back. Each one represented a specific moment in American life and culture, an age long gone.
The list goes on:
Failure to renew a termite policy led to the disintegration and collapse of the Jehu Reed House at Little Heaven, a superb example of Colonial brickwork with a whimsical Victorian addition.
Cannon Hall at Woodland (1820) was almost totally destroyed in a fire. The same happened to Bancroft Mills along the Brandywine, of which virtually nothing remains, not even the 1911 yellow-brick smokestack that could’ve been partially kept as an intriguing relic.
In Dover, citizens rallied in an attempt to save Scull Mansion, an Italianate house built by leading citizen Manlove Hayes during the Civil War. They pointed to the beauty of its Italianate architecture, the importance of Hayes and the fact that Dover has lost so much Victorian architecture already, including its 1870s post office and the Hotel Richardson. But last May, approval was granted for the razing of Scull Mansion to make way for a parking lot.
It’s not just our earliest buildings that are endangered. Delaware has good examples of architectural modernism from the decades after World War II, but few people like this style, and much of it is getting altered or torn down.
For example, Delaware has a nationally important example of the work of the architect I.M. Pei, famous for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The I.M. Pei Building, a skyscraper in downtown Wilmington, shows all the hallmarks of 1960s Brutalist style, with delicate greenish windows making a deliberate contrast with hefty, bare concrete walls of tremendous weight.
Unfortunately, all the windows have been replaced with ordinary looking ones, and prettifying details got added at the entrance. Small changes, but arguably they blur the artistry of I.M. Pei and his attention to the sharply contrasting qualities of concrete and glass.
Other modernist buildings have been completely destroyed. The Rodney Complex at the University of Delaware was another prime example of Brutalism, where sidewalks squeezed through narrow passageways between chunky brick dorms. It was a clever emulation of the medieval hill towns of Italy.
But few of us appreciate this kind of uncompromising modernism, and few complained when the Rodney Complex was demolished.
Of course, some modernism was atrocious. I wish the wrecking ball would come for the ugliest building in Delaware, the 1970s Floyd I. Hudson State Service Center in Newark, a beastly lump of artless concrete. While they’re at it, perhaps they could also tear down the Newark Post Office, which is almost as bad as its neighbor.
At the Preservation Delaware conference, I was asked, “Why do Delawareans not love their historic buildings?”
Some of us do. But lack of public education about architecture seems to be a key problem.
Suppose you owned a classic Mustang car. Would you restore it using a Cadillac grille? Would you include headlights and a hood ornament from a Pontiac?
Not in a thousand years would you commit such aesthetic crimes. You would feel in your gut that they were wrong.
And yet the owners of Delaware’s historic buildings often spoil them with grotesque alterations that violate the rules of architectural styles and abuse the artistry of the original structure.
As the author of “Buildings of Delaware,” I have often wondered, why do we care more about our mass-produced cars than about those handcrafted and irreplaceable buildings whose unique look defines Delaware’s historic landscape?
Unless we start taking an interest, we will lose the best of our architectural heritage.
