Student Research and Accomplishments

Students:  Kara Green  |  Lisa Helschien

Kara Green

Kara A. Briggs Green, (UAPP 2007) is a native Delawarean and fourth generation resident of the Forty Acres neighborhood in Wilmington.

Kara is not an anomaly in the neighborhood, but one of many ‘generational’ Forty Acres residents. She has been active in the neighborhood’s civic association for many years. It was involvement in the civic association that brought about the question regarding her neighborhood’s community identity.

By the 1990s Forty Acres, with the availability of affordable housing, had become a popular neighborhood for first time home owners and renters. Due to it’s close proximity to the neighborhood, new residents and business owners alike began to associate Forty Acres with the shopping center of Trolley Square. As new restaurants, bars, and shops opened around the shopping center, it became easier for people to relate to these surrounding businesses as being located in the ‘Trolley Square area’ or simply ‘Trolley Square.’ The landscape identity change was of no concern to Forty Acres residents until the business owners on the western side of the railroad tracks, in Forty Acres, began to advertise their business locations as “Trolley Square.” Media attention, such as commercial and real estate advertisements, assisted in granting the shopping center neighborhood status and succeeded in predisposing new generations of Delawareans to recognize the neighborhood landscape of Forty Acres as ‘Trolley Square’. Original residents tired of hearing their historic Forty Acres neighborhood being called ‘Trolley Square’. It was the exploration of why this was happening that brought about Kara’s thesis: “Forty Acres: Marketing Versus Historic Character, A Conflict Over Community Identity.”

The purpose of the thesis was to understand why retaining their historic name was so important to this urban, Wilmington, Delaware neighborhood and what that says about the nature of Forty Acres as a community. To understand why the name was important enough to the community for it to organize to preserve it, one needs to understand the nature of Forty Acres as a community. To achieve this goal, one must explore the community’s desire for acknowledgement as Forty Acres rather than Trolley Square; grasp how the ‘Trolley Square’ name came to impose itself on this area and to recognize the history and community of this neighborhood. To the people of ‘Forty Acres’, it is important to retain the original neighborhood name over that of ‘Trolley Square’ because it represents the community, culture and history of the neighborhood. The name ‘Trolley Square’ was given to the shopping center as an ode to the trolleys that once occupied the trolley barn of city block site. However, through efforts from commercial merchants and real estate agents, the Trolley Square name eventually threatened to overtake the Forty Acres neighborhood. Forty Acres residents and neighbors banded together to preserve not only their neighborhood name, but the physical neighborhood itself: the streetscapes, building facades, and physical borders as a separate entity from that of Trolley Square.

A year after completing the thesis and receiving her MA degree, Kara wrote a book on the Forty Acres neighborhood. The book, due out later this year, is published by Arcadia Press. The book is partially based on her thesis and is a pictorial history of the Forty Acres neighborhood and its people.