In the Lingo rezoning controversy, preserving the heritage of Historic Lewes deserves more attention. Although I am a member of the Delaware Heritage Commission, I write here as a Lewes homeowner and resident who wants the character and charm of the Lewes I love to survive.
As I was raised in 480-year-old Quito, the capital of Ecuador, which became Patrimony of Humanity due to its historic preservation, the historic value of Lewes matters to me. Last Tuesday, my husband and I were delighted to be part of the commission’s book (on Delaware’s governors) release party at Woodburn, the restored official governor’s residence in Dover.
Most of the living governors attended, including Gov. Ruth Ann Minner, now walking with the help of her son and a walker. But the former governor looked up, with a smile and twinkle in her eye when the talk turned to the controversial development at the gateway to Lewes.
“A state park,” Minner said, “that’s what we were going to build up there, a state park, a beautiful gateway.” (The state did make the formal offer to buy the land from Townsend, but Townsend refused, saying they wanted to develop it with Lingo, which set up today’s controversy.)
Former Lewes Mayor George Smith’s name was invoked as the originator of the 2003 proposal for a Lewes Gateway State Park, but clearly Minner was relishing the remembrance of the old days, of the way it was then. State Sen. Gary Simpson was at the party too, in front of the ornate fireplace in the gloriously preserved building.
Back in Minner’s time, Gary represented Lewes, and he too remembered, “How we were trying to get it done right.” Now, what happened to “getting it done right” - elected representatives that provided bold leadership for tough problems? Smith, Simpson and Minner offered a clear-eyed vision of sensible growth linked to heritage preservation, so the whole community would benefit for generations to come.
To be fair, maybe the current elected leaders were waiting for the hard data to come in. But now it has. The ERM traffic report and BPW water report delivered the verdict last week: unless we want to bulldoze Historic Lewes to widen the roads to accommodate Route 1 traffic, instead of our lifesaving Scenic Byway mandating just the opposite (requiring roads and by inference, associated land use that respects the carrying capacity of our historic roads and neighborhoods), and unless we want to settle for our drinking water filtered not by the purification of living soil, but “filtered” through dirty asphalt parking lots that would cover our wellheads, the Lingo Folly is just not feasible.
Who are the elected officials who will now stand up and call for the visionary solution that Minner, Smith and Simpson had in 2003? Since the hard data shows that the Lingo site is already too congested for a shopping center, and the highest and best use of that land is the open space that the BPW report and the Sussex Comprehensive Plan both recommend over wellheads, then let’s “get it done right.”
Let’s get back to the 2003 Minner plan to buy roughly the first 500-feet deep of frontage along Kings Highway (the area over the wellheads including the Mitchell farmland and the Clay Road farmland) for the public safety priority of drinking water protection, that comes with a boatload of welcome co-benefits: a verdant, beautiful extension of the Scenic Byway in the form of a linear park as the gateway to Historic Lewes and its new National Park Heritage site, as well as a green field and jogging trails for the high school and surrounding communities.
It also deals with the little matter of keeping the roads viable for vital access to the DRBA ferry, ambulances to Beebe or Cadbury, to our beaches, state park and Old Town Lewes - to preserve our heritage, and our future.
Charito Calvachi-Mateyko
Lewes
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