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Since 1980, Airborne has grown from 300 employees to 7,000, many of them commuting from as far away as northern Kentucky to sort packages in three vast warehouses that look like sets from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, with intersecting webs of conveyors and catwalks bathed in a yellow fluorescent glow. "If we had known how big Airborne was going to get," says Wilmington Mayor Nick Eveland, "we might not have been so welcoming." As Airborne grew, so did Rombach Avenue, the commercial strip that links the overnight-mail complex to downtown. Rombach became "Hamburger Alley," a neon riot of fast-food outlets and discount retailers like Wal-Mart. Eveland, who has held the part-time mayoral post since 1984, now says he wishes Wilmington had imposed design standards on Hamburger Alley to limit the blight, but at the time he feared doing so would slow the town's progress. By 1995, as the Alley spread west into Wilmington--driving some Main Street shops out of business, drawing others to the strip--it devoured a vacant area known as the Point, where Kent Pickard and his wife had for years run a farm stand called Garden Delight. Pickard's white vegetable booths now collect dust behind his old brick house, because the Point is inhabited by a Donatos Pizza, a Damon's rib house and a Bob Evans Family Restaurant.
THE INNKEEPER
Leslie Chamberlain came to Wilmington from St. Louis, Mo., to escape suburban sprawl and find a pretty little place where she could live a neo-Victorian fantasy as the proprietor of a gracious bed and breakfast. Nobody in Wilmington thought the ebullient, almond-eyed woman had a chance of making a B and B work; the town had never had one before, so people assumed it couldn't be done. But in 1990 Leslie and her husband Rick, a physician with good business sense, bought an ornate 1869 brick Victorian house on South Street. After six months of painting, wallpapering and antiques shopping, Leslie was greeting guests--and hatching a plan to turn her neighborhood into a historic district.
For the first decade of her marriage, she had been the insecure, dutiful doctor's wife while Rick pursued a career as a medical director of hospital emergency rooms in Cincinnati and later St. Louis. They lived in a series of crowded subdivisions where Leslie raised three kids. In 1989 she read a magazine article about a couple that ran a bed and breakfast. "I told Rick, 'This is what I want to do.' And in 10 years of marriage, he'd never heard me say that."
Her B and B was successful from the start--7,000 guests have stayed there so far--and Leslie blossomed into a confident, effective businesswoman. But while she landscaped her property and planted her gardens, she began wishing that others would do the same. So she launched a successful campaign to have her neighborhood declared a national historic district, a six-month drive that introduced Leslie to her neighbors. Soon they were planting flowers and sprucing up their homes just as she had hoped. "That's what newcomers can do for a town," she says. "Make old-timers see the place with fresh eyes."