Nbuildings of distinction
ATHANS puts it a little more colorfully.
He recalls the reaction after the two men
acquired the junkyard between Third and
Fourth streets in 1999 and announced their
plans to develop it.
“I actually used to have people drive by
and point and laugh,” Nathans says. “It’s
funny because some of those people were
locals whose families had been here hundreds of years. It was a
neighborhood that was kind of abandoned. It wasn’t an area that
was ripe for development. They thought we were crazy.”
Abandoned is one way of saying it. Tilghman Herring, who ren-ovated
the abandoned Nabisco factory and moved the Wilmington
branch of Hood-Herring architecture onto the street in 2002, has
a different word.
“Seedy,” he says. “When we moved in there weren’t any street-lights.
As soon as it got dark, the prostitutes started walking the
street.”
Reclamation began through a combination of renovating existing
buildings and urban infill, developing vacant or underused parcels
with an eye toward the future without forgetting the past.
“I had looked at historical photos of North Fourth,” Nathans
says. “The street 100 years ago was a very thriving, commercial
district. There were a lot of old nice brick buildings. We tried to
match that old architecture.”
It started with the junkyard that took up most of the block
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