Renderings promise the same handful of things every time: a family biking past a fountain, a couple carrying takeout bags, sunlight that never seems to hit anyone's eyes wrong. For years, that's what the 79 acres at Concord Pike and Powder Mill Road offered anyone driving past. Now the apartment listings are live in the 19803 zip code, the leasing office is booking tours, and a 400-seat restaurant has already been open since December 2025. The corner of Fairfax that sat behind a corporate fence since 1949 has started functioning like a neighborhood instead of looking like one on a poster.
If you already live in North Wilmington, somewhere off Silverside Road or up near Foulk, this matters less as news and more as a change to your own errands and your own drive times. Here's what's actually true about the site right now, separated from what's still just a plan.
Closed Since Truman
According to Delaware Business Times, DuPont bought the land in 1949. AstraZeneca eventually inherited it as a pharmaceutical campus once envisioned at 1.8 million square feet, and for most of the people who grew up nearby, the site was simply the AstraZeneca campus: recognizable from the road, inaccessible from the sidewalk. Delle Donne & Associates bought the 79 acres for $50 million in 2017 and started planning what they now call Avenue North, a live-work-play redevelopment with a construction budget developer Ernie Delle Donne has put in the range of $1 billion.
Delle Donne has been direct about what made the site unusual. Explaining the closed-off decades to Delaware Business Times, he said the property "hasn't been open to Delawareans" since DuPont's purchase. That's the frame worth holding onto here. This isn't a new subdivision going up on farmland. It's a fenced-off corporate campus, in the middle of an established neighborhood, opening its interior to the public for the first time in most residents' lives.
What You Can Actually Walk Into Right Now
The retail building at Avenue North is structurally complete, according to a February 2026 project summary, which means the gap between announced and open has started closing fast. Here's where things stand:
| What's there | Detail | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Brew HaHa! | Coffee and cafe chain | Already open, ahead of the rest of retail |
| Blackwall Barn & Lodge | 12,000-square-foot restaurant with a 400-seat dining room and private event space, the first Delaware location for Titan Hospitality | Opened in December 2025 |
| Fitness center | 12,000-square-foot gym included in the residential building's plans | Included in current construction, not yet confirmed open |
| Loca Beauty Salon, Fred Astaire Dance Studios | Signed retail tenants named in Delle Donne & Associates' leasing updates | Signed, filling in as space is finished |
Blackwall Barn & Lodge is worth a second look on its own terms. Titan Hospitality, the Maryland-based group behind it, runs Blackwall Barn locations in Gambrills and Columbia, and this is their first move into Delaware. The Avenue North location isn't a satellite outpost tucked into leftover square footage. At 12,000 square feet with a 400-seat main dining room and a private room built for up to 150, it's sized more like a banquet hall than a neighborhood restaurant.
The Apartments Got Ahead Of Schedule
The residential piece of Avenue North moved faster than a lot of the retail. The plan called for roughly 350 apartments in a nine-story building, each unit larger than the average luxury apartment in the state, built out of steel and concrete with a dedicated parking spot in an underground garage. Delle Donne has floated the possibility of adding another 250 units in a later phase.
By this spring, that plan had stopped being a plan. Listings for Avenue North apartments were live and updating on rental sites as of May 2026, meaning prospective tenants could already schedule a tour of a building that didn't exist a few years ago.
In Delaware Business Times, Delle Donne described the residential component in terms of what it sits next to:
"How many times do you get the opportunity to build apartments next to multi-million-dollar homes?"
That's not marketing language so much as an accurate description of the geography. Avenue North's apartments sit close to Woodbrook and near the DuPont Country Club, both established, higher-value pockets of Fairfax. The dedicated underground parking matters here too. A 350-unit building without assigned parking would have pushed overflow onto the surrounding streets. With parking built into the structure, that pressure mostly stays contained to the site itself.
Who Already Fills The Sidewalks At Lunch
The tower's office floors filled up quickly. In the spring of 2025, only two of the twelve floors remained on the market, with tenants including Delle Donne & Associates' own offices, land use firm Tarabicos Grosso, and law firm Morris James, which signed a 15-year lease for six floors totaling 43,000 square feet and relocated staff from downtown Wilmington over the course of that year. Existing campus tenants AstraZeneca, ChristianaCare, and Solenis add to that daytime population.
Delle Donne has estimated around 14,000 employees working in the surrounding quadrant, counting nearby anchors like JPMorgan Chase, Nemours, and the Experimental Station, with average salaries he put around $103,000. Whether or not that figure holds precisely, the practical effect shows up in foot traffic: a lunch crowd that didn't exist on this stretch of Concord Pike a few years ago now moves through Brew HaHa! and Blackwall Barn & Lodge on weekdays, well before any evening dinner rush arrives.
What Changes If Your Zip Code Is Already 19803
For anyone who already lives in Fairfax or the surrounding parts of North Wilmington, a few concrete things are different now compared to even a year ago.
- A gym, a salon, and a dance studio are moving into what used to be a fenced corporate lot, all within walking distance for the streets closest to Powder Mill Road.
- Weekday lunch traffic near Concord Pike and Powder Mill Road has already picked up now that Morris James and the tower's other office tenants have settled in.
- The first wave of new neighbors are renters, not necessarily buyers, since the apartment building leased up well ahead of the rest of the site's build-out.
- Parking for the new residential building is underground and assigned per unit, which limits how much of that growth spills onto nearby residential streets.
None of this changes what North Wilmington has always been. It changes what's inside walking distance of it, on land that had belonged to one company at a time since 1949.
If you're trying to figure out what a fast-changing corner of Fairfax means for your own street, your commute, or the value of a property you already own here, Harrison Properties Ltd knows this stretch of Concord Pike block by block and can walk you through it without a leasing brochure doing the talking.
