Almanac

Festive Occasions

There’s a festival for almost every interest and taste in New Castle County.

Newark, for example, hosts an annual film festival and the Taste of Newark. The city of New Castle celebrates independence on Separation Day.

Wilmington is the site of the Bob Marley Festival, Brandywine Arts Festival, Cityfest, DuPont Clifford Brown Jazz Festival, Greek Festival, People’s Tribute to Food & Brew Festival, Polish Festival, Point to Point steeplechase celebration and St. Anthony’s Italian Festival.

Held each June, St. Anthony’s – featuring Italian culture, traditions, music and food – is billed as the largest festival of its kind on the East Coast. The 2008 celebration will be June 8-15.

Fore Evermore

Hit ’em long and straight at the nearly 20 public and private golf courses that grace New Castle County.

They include such noteworthy venues as Delcastle Golf Club, DuPont Country Club, Deerfield Golf & Tennis Club and White Clay Creek Country Club at Delaware Park.

White Clay Creek boasts a golf academy in addition to a 7,007-yard championship layout that was designed with environmental sensitivity in mind.

Now That’s a Screen

TheaterXtreme makes movie-watching comfortable, especially because the experience takes place inside your home.

The Newark-based company – founded in September 2003 and now with sales topping $5 million annually – designs and installs customized home theaters that feature 10-foot-wide screens and surround sound.

The systems sell for $3,000 to $9,000. Top seller One View combines on-screen access to movies, music, photos, video games and Internet access – all with the touch of a button.

More than 1,000 TheaterXtreme systems have been sold just in and around Delaware, with about half of those purchasers choosing the One View setup.

The Place To Be

AstraZeneca, DuPont, Hercules, W.L. Gore & Associates and a bevy of financial institutions – including Bank of America, Barclays, Chase Bank USA and Wilmington Trust – have headquarters or significant operations in New Castle County. So do numerous smaller companies.

What makes the area so attractive to business?

Businesses appreciate the proximity and easy access to New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., by road or rail. Many also take advantage of the Port of Wilmington, which handles 400 shipping vessels each year.

Favorable tax policy is another key reason. The corporate tax rate in Delaware is just 8.7 percent on net income, and there is no sales tax or equipment tax.

Overall, the cost of doing business here is 88 percent of the national average.

Saturn Skys and G2Xs

Busy. That’s how to describe the General Motors Corp. assembly plant near Newport.

The plant manufactures about 13,000 Saturn Sky convertible roadsters during a model year, along with around 18,000 Pontiac Solstices. The Boxwood Road facility also produces an Opel version for the European market, and it is now manufacturing a limited number of the two-seaters – about 150 of the 2008 models – to be sold in South Korea as the GX2 under the GM-Daewoo brand.

The Boxwood Road plant has about 1,400 assembly-line employees.

Across the Pond

Home-grown Wilmington Trust has offices on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean – in Dublin, Frankfurt, London and now Luxembourg.

The 105-year-old financial company assists national and multinational companies in maximizing their income, minimizing their taxes and managing complex financial transactions. In other words, it helps corporate clients maintain legal residency in places that have favorable tax and legal structures.

It’s a Steel

Pittsburgh, yes, but Claymont?

Yes, Claymont, DE, is home to Claymont Steel Holdings, which produces more than 500,000 tons of finished steel products each year.

The plant just northeast of Wilmington provides customized steel plates to companies in industries that make bridges, rail cars, ships, heavy equipment, mining equipment and storage tanks.

The plates are produced in small orders and in no standard dimensions for customers in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Claymont Steel Holdings bills itself as “the country’s leading custom steel plate producer.”

Fortunes in Innovation

New Castle County was the birthplace of such well-known products as Corian, Gore-Tex, Lycra and Tyvek, and it remains an incubator of innovation.

In particular, the county has emerged in recent years as a focal point of the nation’s biotechnology industry. Leading scientists and other researchers are working to develop the next breakthroughs, so stay tuned: Their inventions may be coming to a medical facility or pharmacy near you.