Rodney Square Historic District

The DuPont Building was constructed in 1907 as a twelve-story office building in the Italian Renaissance Style and was Wilmington’s tallest building. In addition to providing office space for 500 DuPont Company employees, the building also provided space for 2,000 other tenants, including Wilmington Trust employees. The space was nearly doubled in 1910, and in 1913 expansion provided space for the Hotel DuPont, with 150 rooms and the DuPont Playhouse, with 1,256 seats. In 1937 two stories were added. The most opulent interior spaces are within the hotel, featuring Italian marble, Caen stone, mosaics, terrazzo, oska paneling, bronze railings and intricate plaster details. One of the most notable rooms is the Gold Ballroom, which was designed to evoke 18th century France and has a 29-foot ceiling. The ornate public spaces were designed to be world class, proclaiming the importance of the DuPont Company and the City of Wilmington. The hotel lobby, restaurants and retail spaces are open to the public.

Also known as the City-County Building, this was the first civic building to be built as part of the DuPont vision for Rodney Square. Originally intended to be an addition to the old court house, Raskob convinced residents and city and county officials to jointly fund a building to house their offices behind a single, unified façade on the east side of the square. A juried competition was initiated and was chaired by Warren P. Laird, who would later chair the Rodney Square competition. The Classical Revival style building is clad in granite and distinguished by a colonnaded façade with Corinthian capitals and pedimented entrance pavilions. Major interior renovations in the latter half of the 20th century left only the prominent marble staircases intact. Rear additions were made in 1960 and 1980, and a major renovation in 2012 fitted the building for law offices.

In 1915, DuPont purchased land on the south side of the square for a library, stipulating that the building would conform to the character of the new City-County building (which was under construction) and be an ornament to the city. The Dupont-influenced building committee reviewed the designs of the architects, and DuPont provided the engineering services. Edward Lippincott was considered the foremost library architect in the country, and he and Alfred Morton Githens had worked on libraries for Andrew Carnegie.

The building was designed in the Beaux Arts style and is distinguished by a polychrome, terracotta frieze, limestone owls on the second story window sills, and an ornate central entry. The design repeated references to Greco-Roman architecture – motifs from Pompeii, the frieze from the Parthenon at the Acropolis, the Library at Alexandria, the frieze from the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina in Rome – in keeping with revivalist tenants of the “City Beautiful Movement.” The interior featured a centered, double-height, sky-lit atrium and polychrome, plaster columns. In 1925 the design received the American Institute of Architects Exhibition Medal for first place in the Public Building Group principally for its implementation of uninterrupted interior space. Renovation in 1969 added a mezzanine level for stack space and made other changes that dramatically changed the award-winning interior. Renovations completed in 2014 reversed some of those changes, repaired historic features, and added a carefully integrated access ramp and community space.

In 1931, the city received $1.6 million from federal emergency relief funds for a new federal building. Construction began in 1935 on the north side of Rodney Square and would complete the final piece of the Rodney Square vision. The symmetrical, three-story, limestone and rusticated granite building was in keeping with the other two public buildings on the square, and again drew from the Beaux Arts style. The lobby was adorned with notable murals by Works Progress Administration artists Herman H. Zimmerman, entitled “Chemistry and Industry” and “Chemistry and Agriculture.” A third mural, “Landing of the Swedes” by Albert Pels, which once adorned the primary courtroom and then the post office, was moved to the new post office on Delaware Avenue in 2006. In 1983, a towering 14-story addition was constructed at the rear to accommodate the offices of Wilmington Trust. The ground floor restaurant and the first floor lobby of this office building are open to the public.

Beginning in 1935, this 14-story building was constructed for the DuPont Engineering Department on the block located to the west of the DuPont Building. The Moderne style of the building matched that of the 1930 addition to the DuPont Building, and the two buildings were once connected by a tunnel and a bridge.

The reinforced concrete structure was faced with brick and limestone, and at the time of construction was said to be the largest building in the country ever to be air conditioned. Major renovations completed in 2002 removed much of the original interior fabric but added residential space, retail space and a public theatre.

The lobby, restaurants and movie theatre are open to the public.