Word: wilmington
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...soon after she joined Wilmington's Design Review Board, Chamberlain discovered that the town's "good-ole-buddy network" of businessmen and politicians isn't always grateful for fresh perspectives. Teaming up with a preservationist group led by two other outsiders--John Baskin, 56, a ruminative writer from South Carolina, and former Bostonian Hawley, whose Orange Frazer Press specializes in books about Ohio--Chamberlain became involved in a crusade to create a downtown shopping-and-entertainment zone. Mayor Eveland and the city council liked the idea, but never came up with a way to finance it. The activists also tried...
...enthralled about ripping down old buildings," says Eveland, "but some have outlived their useful lives. What comes to mind when you think of Wilmington is the downtown--so maintaining it is terribly important." Eveland is negotiating with a developer who wants to build a downtown retail complex, but most of the commercial action has moved to Hamburger Alley, where prime acreage is controlled by a city councilman named Robert Raizk. Downtown's economy has been so precarious that local bankers wouldn't risk the money to turn a warehouse into Main Street's first upscale restaurant; a businessman in town...
...challenges. She put her bed and breakfast up for sale and enrolled in a landscape-architecture course at Ohio State. After she gets her degree, she and Rick plan to move the family to Nantucket, Mass., where preservationists tend to win their battles. "I tell people that Wilmington's getting just a little too big for me," says Leslie, her perfect smile firmly in place...
Because Marcy Hawley is not only a preservationist but a parent as well, with a 16-year-old son at Wilmington High, the thin, cerebral publisher, who is married to the town's Presbyterian minister, has become a reluctant crusader for school reform. Serving on the local school system's Multicultural Advisory Board, she and other newcomers have been pushing for racial-sensitivity training and a minority-hiring program because the system, despite growing numbers of black, Hispanic, Japanese and Native American students, has just one nonwhite teacher...
...culture clash extends to academic issues because professionals moving to town want a college-prep curriculum that the system has been slow to provide. Wilmington's system ranks in the bottom quarter of Ohio school districts, according to a Cleveland Plain Dealer study, and sends less than half its graduates to college. Rick and Leslie Chamberlain moved to town thinking the schools would be adequate; they no longer think so. Their oldest child, Jeremy, was an apathetic student who fell in with underachievers at the high school. But because Jeremy wasn't a troublemaker, says Rick, the guidance counselors never...