Sunset Park was sold as Wilmington's first truly modern subdivision. The developers' brochures promised all the city conveniences - streetcar service, electric lights, gas, sewers, sidewalks, and tree-lined macadam boulevards. The street layout, residents have always said, was modeled on Ansley Park and Westland Estates, the new garden suburbs of Atlanta then setting the pattern for the South. Northern Boulevard and Central Boulevard ran the length of the development. Views opened west over Greenfield Lake and, further out, the Cape Fear River - a flat dark sheet at sunset that gave the neighborhood its name. The Queen Anne houses came first, scattered along the boulevards in the early 1910s - two stories, hipped or gabled roofs, wraparound porches, the occasional corner tower.

Read the houses of Sunset Park west to east and you read the 20th century. The earliest, from the 1910s, are Queen Anne, with their bay windows and decorative brickwork. Behind them came Craftsman bungalows and the modest cottages of the 1920s. Tudor Revival arrived in the late twenties and thirties - steep roofs, stuccoed half-timbering, the look of an English village improbably transplanted to coastal North Carolina. Colonial Revival appeared next, then, after the war, Cape Cods on the cross streets, then ranches in the fifties and into the sixties. Each decade added a layer without erasing the one before. The neighborhood is, in effect, an open-air textbook of American domestic architecture - which is part of why it earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.

The neighborhood's original plan extended west all the way to the Cape Fear River. That land was never built out. Between 1940 and 1943, as the United States entered World War II, the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company expanded onto exactly the lots that Fidelity Trust had once sold as river-view homesites. The yard built 243 Liberty ships and victory ships between 1941 and 1946, employing more than twenty thousand workers at its peak. Sunset Park lost its riverfront. The houses built during those years - hundreds of them, packed tight on the eastern interior streets - went up to shelter shipyard workers and their families. The neighborhood's character changed permanently. The grand boulevards remained, but the western edge would always now end at chain-link and concrete rather than the river the poem had promised.

Sunset Park has always sat slightly south of where the action is, which has made it a useful neighborhood for filmmakers wanting Wilmington to look like a generic American town. David Lynch shot scenes for Blue Velvet there in 1986 - including the home of Detective John Williams, played by George Dickerson. Season nine of Matlock, the Andy Griffith vehicle, also used a Sunset Park house as Ben Matlock's home. The cameos fit. The neighborhood today still reads as ordinary in the best sense of the word - tree shade, sidewalks, kids on bikes, porches with rocking chairs. The 1912 poem is still framed in some of the older houses, in the pen-and-ink view that ran beside it - granolithic sidewalks intact, lake still placid, river view long since traded for the war.