By looking back at Wilmington’s roots and its maritime past, the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation hopes to make its shipyard the centerpiece of a bright future for the city’s Seventh Street Peninsula.
Cathy Parsells of the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation discusses its new education, maintenance and administration building.
Cathy Parsells of the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation discusses its new education, maintenance and administration building.
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The foundation holds a ceremonial groundbreaking Tuesday afternoon for its new, three-story education, maintenance and administration building – the first phase of a $4.5 million dollar project. The second phase calls for construction of a new dock on the banks of the Christina River to provide a sturdier berthing space for Delaware’s iconic tall ship.
Coupled with the groundbreaking will be the dedication of the Delaware Heritage Mural, painted on the wall of an aging warehouse across the street from the shipyard by participants in the Creative Vision Factory program, a state-supported arts initiative to support substance abusers and the mentally ill on their road to recovery. The mural, some 20 feet high and more than 200 feet long, traces the history of the peninsula from the arrival of the first Swedish settlers aboard the original Kalmar Nyckel in 1638 through construction of the replica ship in 1997.
With this project, “we’re making a significant change to the Seventh Street Peninsula,” says Cathy Parsells, executive director of the Kalmar Nyckel Foundation. “We now have a critical mass. We’re becoming more of a destination.”
The peninsula, although home to Fort Christina Park, the site of the Swedes’ landing, and Old Swedes Church, the nation’s oldest church still standing as originally built, had fallen on hard times in the 1950s, following the closing of the Jackson & Sharp Co. plant, where railroad cars and ships were built from 1875 through the end of World War II. The area began experiencing a revival in the 1990s, when construction of the Kalmar Nyckel replica began. More recently, the Challenge Program, which trains at-risk youth for careers in the construction industry, built a new training center adjacent to the shipyard on land leased from the foundation.
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The 18,000-square-foot building will enable the foundation to run its education programs year round and provide a more hospitable environment for the volunteers who maintain the ship. It replaces “temporary structures built in the mid- to late 1990s that were not expected to last as long as they did,” Parsells says.
“They’re environmentally and economically inefficient,” says Sam Heed, the foundation’s director of education. “They’ve got more holes in them than the cheeseheads worn by Green Bay Packers’ fans.”
Most of the first floor will house the ship’s maintenance shop. The lobby will serve as a welcome area and gateway to the education center on the second floor and to a 2,000-square-foot office area on the third floor.
The construction project includes state-funded brownfield remediation work, to be performed by BrightFields Inc., an environmental services firm that also relocated to the peninsula in 2005. Contaminants on site are primarily oils and low levels of lead, iron and manganese, much of it from the former shipyard and railcar factory, according to Mark Lannan, a BrightFields principal.
He anticipates few problems with the cleanup. “Other sites around the city and on the riverfront have been more challenging,” he says.
The remediation work includes bringing in new soil and regrading to elevate the construction site above the floodplain, Parsells says.
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Construction will start almost immediately, with the maintenance area expected to be finished next summer and the upper floors by next fall, she says. Bancroft Construction is managing the project, with architects Bernardon Haber Holloway responsible for the design. Of the $4.5 million budget, about $3.75 million has been raised, roughly $3.2 million from individual and corporate donors and the rest from the state for brownfields remediation. A public solicitation campaign to raise the remaining funds will begin Tuesday.
The maintenance area will be divided so there will be separate space dedicated to particular types of work — carpentry, sanding, painting, and so on, so tasks can be completed more efficiently and in their proper sequence, Parsells says. It will also have a large sail loft for storing the ship’s sails when they are not in use.
The new education area, Heed says, will permit year-round activities on a variety of topics, including the history of the Kalmar Nyckel, the first permanent European settlement in Delaware, Dutch and Swedish colonization, the roles of the Lenape and Minquas tribes in the region, the history of Wilmington’s riverfront and the city’s shipbuilding heritage. It will include a model of the ship and a variety of exhibits and hands-on activities.
“We like to highlight Wilmington’s history as a shipbuilding center,” Heed says. Shipyards lined the Christina, from the foot of the peninsula to west of Market Street, and were a major employer in the city from the Civil War era through the end of World War II, he notes.
Currently, there is no indoor space dedicated to educational programming, so by school groups and others have been limited to seven to eight weeks during spring and fall when the Kalmar Nyckel is docked at the shipyard and the weather is suitable for outdoor instruction.
The newly painted mural, with its visual portrayal of the area’s history, will become an integral part of the expanded educational programming, he says.
About 3,100 students visit the shipyard each year for activities and programs, and the foundation reaches another 8,000 students annually through its outreach efforts, Heed says. In addition, the foundation has worked with the state Department of Education to develop three curriculum units —fourth grade history, and fifth grade economics and geography — that reach 8,500 to 9,000 public school students each year.
The Kalmar Nyckel Foundation, with an annual budget of about $750,000, has only five fulltime employees. “We’re small and lean,” Parsells says, making a team of about 300 volunteers that contributes about 40,000 hours of labor annually essential to the operation’s success.
“Our volunteers absolutely make the organization run. They do the maintenance, they sail the ship, and they educate the kids. We couldn’t get off the dock without them,” Parsells says.
Now those volunteers will have a better place to do their work.
“We’re excited,” Parsells says. “This project will be of great value to the community.”
