The Week After Big Quarterly Is When Wilmington's Riverfront Gets Good

Right now, on the last Sunday of August, gospel groups are working through their sets at Tubman-Garrett Riverfront Park. Vendors line Rosa Parks Drive with food and cultural goods, and a children's area is drawing the usual crowd of families. Nearby, two lifelike figures stand over that same stretch of the Christina River, mostly unnoticed today by anyone not already looking for them. This is Big Quarterly, the closing day of Wilmington's August Quarterly, and by Monday morning the grass will be mowed flat, the vendor tents gone, and the statues back to being scenery nobody stops to read.

That gap between festival Sunday and empty Monday is where the Riverfront actually gets interesting if you live anywhere near it. The park's summer calendar is genuinely packed. The Riverfront Blues Festival, the Bob Marley tribute known locally as the People's Festival, the Delaware Taco Festival, the Delaware Marathon, a Hispanic Festival, and the week of August Quarterly all cycle through the same lawn between June and Labor Day. But that calendar is front-loaded. Once Big Quarterly wraps tonight, the only other organized event still scheduled at the Riverfront before the weather turns is the Delaware River Fest on September 26. Everything else along that corridor, the trail, the restaurants, the boardwalk through the wildlife refuge, just gets more usable the second the crowds and the parking scramble stop being a weekly occurrence.

The Names on the Statue

Most people who show up for a blues festival or a taco festival never look closely at why the park is called Tubman-Garrett. Thomas Garrett lived in Wilmington's Quaker Hill neighborhood and served as the city's stationmaster for the Underground Railroad, sheltering people fleeing slavery before they continued north. Harriet Tubman worked alongside him. The park's centerpiece, a sculpture called "Unwavering Courage in the Pursuit of Freedom" by artist Mario Chiodo, sits at the eastern end of the Wilmington Riverwalk as a kind of quiet footnote most joggers pass without slowing down.

That history is not incidental to this particular week. The August Quarterly tradition this year marked 212 years of African American freedom, and its events traced a real route through the city before landing back at the park named for the two people who made that history possible in Delaware. The week opened with a wreath-laying ceremony honoring Rev. Peter Spencer at Peter Spencer Plaza on North French Street, moved through a Liberation Fest at the Delaware Historical Society on North Market Street, and closed tonight at Tubman-Garrett with the gospel groups, food vendors, and children's activities that make up Big Quarterly itself. The park did not just happen to host the closing event. It is the same site the whole week has been building toward, named for the same two people the tradition honors.

The Trail Underneath All of It

Once the tents come down, what is left at that end of the park is the trailhead for the Jack A. Markell Trail, and this is the part of the Riverfront most residents underuse without realizing it. The trail proper runs 5.5 miles, connecting the DuPont Environmental Education Center to New Castle Battery Park on a route built from an abandoned freight rail corridor. If you start further north on the Wilmington Riverwalk and ride the whole connected system down to Battery Park, the total distance closer to 7.9 miles, depending on which end you count the Riverwalk approach from. The project took most of a decade and roughly $26 million to build, finishing in September 2018, which means the version of the Riverfront most current residents know is still, in trail terms, less than a decade old.

The first mile and a half runs along the Riverwalk itself, past the Delaware Children's Museum and the Chase Center, lined with condos, hotels, and restaurants, and lit at night if you are the kind of person who runs after work rather than before it. From there the trail shifts onto an elevated boardwalk through the Russell W. Peterson Urban Wildlife Refuge, with marsh views on both sides and noticeably less foot traffic once summer festival season winds down. Bikes can be rented at the DuPont Environmental Education Center, and seasonally at Riverwalk Mini Golf, if you want to cover more ground than a walk allows.

September is, honestly, the better month to do any of this. The boardwalk section has no shade, so the drop from August humidity to early fall temperatures matters more there than almost anywhere else in the city. The Riverwalk section, which gets crowded with festival traffic all summer, empties out enough that you can actually see the river instead of the backs of other people's heads.

What's Open Along the Way

The restaurants that line the Riverfront do not close down after summer, and a few are worth planning a walk around specifically.

Blackwall Barn & Lodge is the one worth flagging if you have not been yet. It opened at the start of this year as the newest tenant at Avenue North, and it is different enough in tone from the rest of the Riverfront's dining scene, cozier, more of a lodge feel than a waterfront patio, that it is worth the short walk over even if you already have a regular spot down by the water.

One More Date Before It Goes Quiet

If Big Quarterly closes out the summer festival run, the Delaware River Fest on September 26, running from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., is the one organized event left on the Riverfront calendar before things settle into the quieter fall stretch. After that, the corridor mostly belongs to whoever wants to walk it, bike it, or eat dinner by the water without competing with festival traffic for a parking spot.

That is really the point worth sitting with. Residents who assume the Riverfront goes dead once Labor Day passes are timing it wrong. The two or three weeks after Big Quarterly, before the boardwalk gets cold and before the holiday crowds start, are arguably the best stretch on the whole calendar. The park is named for two people who risked everything for freedom of movement. It seems worth actually using the movement it offers now, while it is easy to.

If you already call this stretch of New Castle County home and the conversation ever turns to buying, selling, or simply figuring out what your place near the Riverfront is worth, that is a conversation for another day. For now, go ride the trail while it is like this. When you are ready to talk real estate, Myking Johnson is a phone call away, and the free home valuation offer stands whenever you need it.