DuPont Building

• 1. Introduction

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  The DuPont Building in Wilmington, Delaware, occupies an entire city block bounded by 10th, 11th, Orange, and Market streets. It gazes out over Rodney Square, and for more than a century it has been one of the most consequential addresses in Delaware. It started as a corporate headquarters in 1908, grew in stages, and eventually folded a hotel, a theater, and a bank branch under one roof. What makes this building unusual is not any single feature but how it accumulated purpose over decades, layer by layer, until it became a kind of city within a city. The story of those layers begins with the chemical company that built it and ends with a developer who promised to hold it all together.

• 2. Built in Phases

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  Construction of the original structure fronting Rodney Square was completed in 1908, giving DuPont a visible home at the heart of Wilmington's civic center. Five years later, in 1913, the building expanded outward along 10th and 11th streets, creating a U-shaped footprint that wrapped around an interior court. That same expansion brought the DuPont Playhouse into existence and converted part of the original 1908 section into the Hotel du Pont. The final phase came a decade after that, in 1923, when an addition along Orange Street closed the open side of the U and added two more floors to the structure. When that work finished, the building stood 13 floors tall at a height of 124 feet.

• 3. Hotel du Pont

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  Hotel du Pont carries a designation that places it among a select category of American lodgings: it is a member of Historic Hotels of America, the official program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. That membership signals that the hotel has maintained a standard of historical integrity that the Trust considers worthy of recognition. The hotel's political history adds another dimension. Joe Biden chose Hotel du Pont as the site where he announced his candidacy for the 1972 United States Senate election in Delaware. A hotel room in a corporate headquarters building became, for a moment, the starting point of a political career that would extend far beyond Wilmington.

• 4. A Company's Departure

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  DuPont used the building as its corporate headquarters for well over a century, but in December 2014 the company announced it would relocate and consolidate its operations at its nearby Chestnut Run Plaza site. The move took effect in early 2015. At the same time, DuPont was spinning off a new company called The Chemours Company, and Chemours moved into the DuPont Building to take up the office space its parent had vacated. Activist shareholders had been pressing DuPont to make changes, and the lease of the Playhouse followed that pressure. In January 2015, DuPont leased the building's theater to the Grand Opera House, which renamed the venue The Playhouse on Rodney Square.

• 5. New Ownership

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  In January 2018, the entire structure and the hotel business were sold to Buccini/Pollin, a developer based in Wilmington. The new owners did not dismantle the building's mixed-use character. They leased the office space back to Chemours, continued the arrangement with The Grand Opera House for The Playhouse on Rodney Square, and committed to keeping Hotel du Pont open. A branch of M&T Bank also operates within the building. The block-spanning structure that DuPont built over three construction phases now belongs to a Wilmington developer, but the tenants that gave the building its public identity have remained in place.