Wilmington

Wilmington is Delaware's largest city, about 71,000 people where the Christina and Brandywine rivers meet on the Delaware, and the corporate capital of America: more than half the Fortune 500 are incorporated here, which fills downtown with bank towers and weekday suits. The visitor's Wilmington is the other side of that coin: a revived riverfront of museums and restaurants, the state's art museum, a grand opera house, and Brandywine Park's green valley running through the middle of the city. Its safety statistics are the hardest in this batch alongside Trenton's, so plan like a city person, but the core districts reward the stop.

The Christina Riverfront is the front door: a mile-plus Riverwalk past the Delaware Children's Museum, the Russell Peterson Wildlife Refuge boardwalks and a row of restaurants and event lawns. Uphill, the Delaware Art Museum holds the country's great collection of Pre-Raphaelite art and the Wyeth family's work. The Grand Opera House, an 1871 iron-fronted hall on Market Street, hosts the Delaware Symphony and First State Ballet. Brandywine Park, designed with the Olmsted firm's input, runs along the river through the city's north side with the Brandywine Zoo inside it, and Rockwood Park's 1851 Gothic Revival mansion sits in the suburbs. Just outside the city, Hagley Museum preserves the DuPont family's original gunpowder works, and Nemours Estate shows the fortune's gilded result. The Delaware History Museum and Old Town Hall on Market Street fill in the colonial-to-industrial story between the two rivers, and the Kalmar Nyckel, Delaware's tall ship, sails from its riverfront shipyard in season. Fort Christina Park, at the river's edge east of downtown, marks the 1638 Swedish landing that started the city, the first permanent European settlement in the Delaware Valley.

Market Street and the Riverfront carry the dining scene: chef-driven rooms downtown, Italian institutions in Little Italy along Union Street, and Trolley Square's bars and cafes in the Forty Acres neighborhood, the city's nightlife corner. The Clifford Brown Jazz Festival each June, named for the trumpet great born here, is the East Coast's largest free outdoor jazz festival, and St. Anthony's Italian Festival fills Little Italy the same month. The Big August Quarterly, running since 1814, is one of America's oldest African American religious festivals. Coffee and lunch run on Market Street's weekday rhythm, while the DECO food hall inside the DuPont Building gives downtown a modern sampler built for the office crowd. The Queen, the restored theater up Market Street, books the national indie and legacy acts that the Grand's classical calendar leaves out.

Hotels concentrate downtown on Market Street and along the Riverfront, with the I-95 and Concord Pike corridors adding the chains. Wilmington Station, renamed for Joe Biden, is one of Amtrak's busiest small-city stops, with SEPTA commuter trains to Philadelphia and Greyhound and DART buses in the same building. DART First State runs the local buses, and Wilmington Airport's Avelo flights offer a small set of leisure routes, with Philadelphia's airport about 30 miles north. Downtown, the Riverfront and Trolley Square are the walkable districts; the du Pont sights just outside need a car.

Spring and fall are the prime seasons, with June's festival double-header the peak. One to two days covers the museums and riverfront; add Hagley and Nemours and it becomes a full Brandywine Valley stay, pairing with Longwood Gardens and the Chadds Ford country just over the Pennsylvania line.

On a route, Wilmington is the Delaware Valley's I-95 and Northeast Corridor stop between Philadelphia and Baltimore: the banking city with a jazz festival, an art museum and a riverwalk.