22. Drover´s Park

The oldest neighborhood in Newcastle, the most economically diverse, the most culturally integrated. Drover’s Park is what most people think of when they think of Newcastle. The eldest of the homes still bear the signature style of the region, and only a mile away, affordable apartments offer the urban Newcastle experience without crippling leases. Drover’s Park falls short of idyllic only because the neighbors don’t trust each other. The wealthy resent the poor compromising their property values, and the less financially independent resent the upper classes trying to gentrify them out of the neighborhood. The blacks resent the Hispanics, who clash with the Asians, who can’t relate to the Jews. Drover’s Park is everything a city has to offer in a two-mile-diameter microcosm. It’s residential comfort, commercial availability, a homeowner’s bad dream and businessman’s albatross. It’s great when it’s not terrible, but it’s always both.

Background

Drover’s Park is the original settled land where Newcastle was founded and the city’s first house stood. Thus, Drover’s Park doesn’t have any singular identity; it’s been a cultural and ethnic melting pot ever since people moved here and put down roots. Every few years, it cycles a bit toward one particular demographic, but then the rest of the neighborhood’s residents and businesspeople make their concerted efforts to swing the pendulum back toward the center. At numerous times over the past 100 years, Drover’s Park has threatened to become an exclusive neighborhood, a black ghetto, a working-class enclave and an in-town sprawl of strip malls and big-box stores. Nobody wants to lose his own individual claim to Drover’s Park, though, so it works through council meetings to keep huge changes from taking place. Nowhere else in the city do neighborhood residents work so ceaselessly to maintain a status quo.

Alternative Name(s)

Elysium

Type

District

Location under

New Castle