Market Street looking north from 9th Street, Wilmington, Delaware, circa 1940

About this postcard

A view north along Market Street from Ninth Street in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, with tall commercial blocks lining both sides, pedestrians on the sidewalks, parked and moving automobiles, and a yellow trolley or bus receding toward the horizon under a sunset sky. Market Street was Wilmington's principal retail and business thoroughfare, and the scene shows the dense early-20th-century commercial architecture that defined the downtown core before mid-century redevelopment. The automobiles and the linen-textured printing point to a date in the late 1930s or 1940s.