Bank Campuses

While riding in the shuttle van after dropping my car for service, the driver took the first passenger to work at the JP Morgan Chase data processing campus.  I had never been there before though I pass it regularly.  A long driveway keeps it hidden from the road.  It reminded me of a college campus, several brick buildings with landscaping, an inviting silver colored sculpture at the entrace where the other fellow in the car departed, a hill with other buildings beyond our drop point, and a parking garage that blended architecturally with the other structures.  A very inviting place from the outside.  The passenger did not wear a tie, and other strollers looked like they did not work at bank headquarters but I do not really know if the working conditions inside are closer to those of a hi-tech haven or a modern sweat shop.  The exterior left me impressed.

It's been about 30 years since banks have come to Delaware in big way, initially because there was no state usury limit, but staying even when competitive interest rates have come down.  Some of these are more easily visible from the street, invariably landscaped, clean, with tasteful sculpture.  The kind of places you would trust with your money, or at least appreciate that the sometimes extortionist credit card interest rates supported architecture and art. 

Our legislators had insight.  The state's dominant chemical industry had a finite life, requiring some diversity of the workforce, an educated and talented one.  They did not piddle their efforts on lurid abortion bills or batter each other over Confederate statues, not then and not now.  They did not neglect the now, those roads or schools that everyone needs, but the elected officials of our state had and have a much loftier committment to what elevates its inhabitants than those Yayhoos of Old Dixie that depend on intimidating their opposition as their primary metric.  Chemistry would not survive forever and we dealt with that reality effectively.  Other places languish in the past, whether a church dominance in public affairs, subservient minority populations, a Civil War long since decided, or pre-automation manufacturing.  The world belongs to the visionaries and the amiables, as the JP Morgan Campus and our Legislative Hall which enabled it, so forcefully attests.