Hilltop Haven Part 2: Some residents see hopeful future, others are wary

Hilltop, named for its place among the steep hills of Wilmington’s West Side, has long drawn recent arrivals to America. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY JOSE IGNACIO CASTANEDA PEREZ
This is Part 2 of a series about Wilmington’s West Side. To read Part 1, click here.
Wilmington’s Hilltop neighborhood is changing — again.
Some say the changes are for the better. Others, for the worse. All have hope for the future.
On a recent afternoon, Joyce Woodlen, owner of Joy’s Hair Boutique, peered out of her beauty salon window. Through rose-colored glasses, she warily gazed at a handful of young men gathered outside a corner store across the street.
Her salon door is always locked. Clients must first knock.
Two blocks away, Rebeca Gómez similarly looked outside from her small business, the Dominican Café. Over mounds of caramelized pork, she saw a vibrant neighborhood, one where she often sees Latinos enjoying a nighttime stroll . That would have been a rare sight in years past.
The café’s doors are always open. Neighbors are welcome.
The Hilltop neighborhood, a majority Black and Latino community, has been afflicted with problems related to guns and drugs for decades. While residents still raise concerns, many see a new hope for the future .
The bustling neighborhood is home to a multicultural medley of people and longstanding businesses. Many residents can often be found enjoying the day from the shade of their porches, as Spanish music spills out of swinging bodega doors.
While historically a hub for Puerto Rican immigrants, Hilltop has recently become a beacon for newcomers from Central and South America. Some folks see the community changing for the better.
“It feels safer,” Gómez said. “Now, you walk outside, and you see Latinos walking at night with no problem.”
History of the Hilltop
In the 1950s, the first few Puerto Rican families moved into the largely Irish-American Hilltop community — brought there by its proximity to tanneries and other industry.
When Maria Matos moved to the area in 1964, she could count the number of fellow Puerto Rican residents on her fingers.
But, the neighborhood was on the precipice of major change.
Construction soon began on Interstate 95, fracturing the city and separating the Hilltop neighborhood from the core of Wilmington. The construction prompted many Irish and Polish residents to move to the suburbs.
It also displaced Black and Latino families, many of whom moved west into Hilltop.
By the time the new highway opened in 1968, a total of 926 families had been displaced and 652 dwellings had been demolished, according to University of Delaware researchers.
The highway corridor also made it easier to bring drugs into the community from New York City and Philadelphia, advocates say.
“One of the most devastating causes of I-95 to our community was the drugs that were able to infiltrate into our community,” said Matos, who today president and CEO of the Latin American Community Center in Hilltop.
I-95 also isolated Hilltop from Wilmington’s majority-Black Eastside neighborhood and deepened the racial divide between Latino and Black residents, Matos said.
Tensions flared in 1981 when a Latino teenager was shot and killed by a sniper following a fight between Black and Latino teens in the neighborhood. Two Black teens were arrested as the multicultural neighborhood reeled.
The incident followed years of instability and unrest, which included Matos’ own arrest in 1975, after she had intervened in the “routine arrests” of two Puerto Rican men, who allegedly refused to leave a storefront when police asked.
The men were allegedly “double-teamed” by police, with officers beating them with fists and nightsticks, Matos said in a 1975 News Journal article chronicling the riot.
Matos, her sister and father — a minister of a local church — were all arrested for disorderly conduct and hindering a police officer.
Those arrests incited at least three days of fiery riots in Hilltop. The three tear gas-filled days were complete with rock throwing and firebombing, with buildings set ablaze.
Matos and her family were released hours after their arrests. Officers then enlisted Matos’ father to ride through the neighborhood with them, seeking to quell the rioting crowd.
Ultimately, the two Puerto Rican men were cleared, and the FBI later looked into allegations of police brutality. No wrongdoing was found on the part of the officers.
Hopeful Hilltop future in sight
Joyce Woodlen nimbly teased a hair bun atop her client’s head as she looked on through her pink aviators on a recent afternoon. New store ownership had allowed people to gather in front of the nearby bodega, which Woodlen believed contributed to crime in the neighborhood.
Woodlen, a Hilltop business owner of over 40 years, said the neighborhood was nice and mostly violence-free when she first arrived.
“The neighborhood changed for the worse, like the whole world changed for the worse,” Woodlen said.
Woodlen’s locale, on West Second and North Franklin streets, sat in between a pair of shootings that occurred in May and June, leaving two people wounded in each incident. The boutique sat in the midst of 11 shootings, two fatal, in 2023, according to Delaware Online/The News Journal’s shooting database.
The number of shootings in the neighborhood and in Wilmington overall, however, are down compared to this same time last year, per News Journal data.
Numerous residents and business owners similarly raised concerns about gun violence afflicting the community today.
“Everything was good before,” said Ana Cotto, an elderly Hilltop resident who migrated from Puerto Rico. “There’s no problem with us, but there’s a lot of banditry.”
In past years, many of the neighborhood’s longtime Puerto Rican residents moved out of the city and into surrounding communities, such as Newark and Middletown, as they attained higher education and better paying jobs.
Mexican immigrants eventually became the majority of the Latino demographic in Hilltop. More recently, the community has attracted a cohort of immigrants from Central and South America.
Gómez, the owner of Dominican Café, says the new arrivals have made the neighborhood feel safer than years past. Six years ago, Latinos were afraid to walk around at night. Today, that has changed, she said.
Despite her concerns, Woodlen is hopeful the neighborhood will change for the better. No matter what happens, she’s not going anywhere.
“I really think that this neighborhood is going to be turned around,” she said. “I’ll be here until I die.”
