46, 47 & 48. Nobility Hill, Blackgate and Roosevelt Park

This is the upper crust of the upper crust. Usually, these high-end neighborhoods look down upon everyone else, but here the class struggle has turned in upon itself. Of the Nobility Hill neighborhoods, the one plainly known as Nobility Hill insists that it alone holds claim to that title. Roosevelt Park is a fine neighborhood, but it’s not Nobility Hill, they maintain, instead being part of the greensward that makes up the titular park. Nobility Hill proper reserves much of its ire for the nouveau-riche, McMansion development of Blackgate, lower on the slope of the hill and indicative (to them) that money can’t buy class or taste. Blackgate is indeed a community of large but prefabricated houses, built on lots too small for the size of those houses, so the effect is one of expansive homes that practically sit atop one another. The developers love it, as it means they can charge practically anything they ask and people will buy them for the privileged zip code and appearance of affluence. In fact, as the wealthy turn exclusivity into a veritable war of status, it’s the perception of the middle and lower classes, which lump all three neighborhoods into the greater “Nobility Hill” entity, which engenders the disagreement.

Background

The “true” Nobility Hill has been the premiere neighborhood in Newcastle for the 100-plus years the city has stood, and was briefly its own community during the pre-Newcastle days of Morganville. Roosevelt Park was the “next wave” of wealthy homesteads, though the conflict between those two neighborhoods never came to the point that the bad blood between Nobility Hill and Blackgate has. Indeed, Blackgate is less than six years old, built upon the now-gentrified land of the lower slope of the hill that once housed a middle-class development that Nobility Hill installed gates to exclude.

Alternative Name(s)

Nobility Hill

Type

District

Location under

New Castle