Why Should Delaware Care?
Michael Purzycki served as mayor of Wilmington, the state’s largest city and its economic engine, for eight years, including through COVID. Prior to his public service, Purzycki led the economic revitalization of the city’s Riverfront.
Michael “Mike” Purzycki, the former two-term mayor of Wilmington who oversaw a downtown revitalization after first spearheading the redevelopment of the city’s Riverfront district, has died. He was 80.
Purzycki died following a “hard-fought battle with cancer,” according to Wilmington Mayor John Carney’s office. The exact date of his passing wasn’t immediately clear and an official obituary is forthcoming.
After serving for eight years, Purzycki decided not to seek a third term in the 2024 election, citing his age and a desire to spend time with his family. That cleared the way for then-term-limited Gov. Carney to make an unprecedented run for city office.
Calling him a “giant” and the closest thing to the big brother he never had, Carney said in a statement, “He was so many things, and, above all else, Mike had the heart of a public servant. I can’t think of anyone who has had a greater impact on this city.”
Purzycki’s legacy may best be encapsulated with the work he achieved before being elected mayor in 2016, having led the Riverfront Development Corp. to turn a dilapidated section of warehouses along the Christina River into a significant commercial sector.
He is survived by his wife, Bette Richitelli, three children and two grandchildren.
An unexpected turn in life
Growing up in Newark, N.J., Purzycki made his way to Delaware through his first love in life: football.
He earned a scholarship to the University of Delaware and found success as a wide receiver, breaking all the university’s position records for the era. That performance on the field earned him a free agent contract with the NFL’s New York Giants, but the joy would be short-lived.
He injured his knee in training camp, got cut by the team and was never able to play professionally again.
In a 2020 interview with the Delaware Business Times, Purzycki recounted how he fought to receive compensation following his injury at a time when players’ rights were often ignored.
“When I got cut, I came home, and I told my father I thought I should get paid because I got injured,” Purzycki told DBT. “I didn’t get cut because I wasn’t good enough. He told me I was crazy.”
Not satisfied with that, Purzycki called the team offices and asked for storied owner Wellington Mara, and surprisingly, he connected with him. He later met with Mara in New York City and pleaded his case. A few weeks later, checks started arriving.
“I had tears when I drove out of camp … but I’m pretty resilient,” Purzycki said. “I’ve never been one to collapse.”
After the end of his football career, Purzycki would eventually end up in the real estate business, brokering sales and investing and developing properties as well, ranging from residential to commercial to golf courses and marinas.
A call to public service
Purzycki would earn a law degree in his early 30s before serving as legal counsel to the Delaware Senate in the early 1980s. In 1982, he was elected to the New Castle County Council, serving nine years before stepping down.
In 1996, then-Gov. Tom Carper tapped him to become the first executive director of the Riverfront Development Corp., a state-chartered nonprofit tasked with selling a redevelopment of former shipyards and warehouses along the Christina River.
From the start, Purzycki envisioned the area as an economic engine for the city, directing the construction of the Chase Center on the Riverfront where the former Dravo Shipyard once stood. Just two years later, the convention center opened for a world-class exhibit on the last Tsar of Russia.
“[Then-Gov. Carper] looked around, and he said, ‘I have no idea how you did this, and I don’t think I want to know, but I’m glad you did,’” Purzycki recalled in a 2021 interview.
About 560,000 people came through the exhibit at the then-First USA Riverfront Arts Center in a five-month run.
“It was remarkable,” Purzycki added. “It just kind of gave us a sense of what the possibilities were.”
From there, shops, restaurants, hotels, apartments, a movie theater, beer garden and corporate offices for Barclays Bank and AAA Mid-Atlantic have joined the Riverfront, fulfilling the vision that Purzycki laid out.
Megan McGlinchey, the current executive director of the Riverfront Development Corp. and a protégé of Purzycki, said the Riverfront transformation was remarkable not just for the physical change it brought, “but the psychological shift it created for Wilmington.”
“For decades, many people viewed the city through the lens of decline. The Riverfront gave Wilmington a visible success story. It helped attract residents back into the city and created momentum that extended beyond the Christina River into Market Street, adjacent neighborhoods, and now Riverfront East,” she told Spotlight Delaware, referring to the next expansion on the eastern bank of the Christina River.
A run for city office
When Purzycki pursued the mayor’s office in 2016, he entered a crowded field that already had six candidates, including incumbent Dennis Williams.
The city was still recovering from growing violence on its streets and a battered image brought upon by a Newsweek cover story that deemed the city “Murdertown USA.”
Purzycki, who by then had led the Riverfront revitalization for 20 years, said his city was “troubled by the sharp rise in crime, the lack of confidence in city leadership and the loss of optimism in Wilmington’s future.”
He narrowly won the primary race by 234 votes over Eugene Young, a rising young Black community activist who would later join Carney’s gubernatorial Cabinet. For years, critics argued Purzycki had come out on top by convincing a wave of Republicans to switch parties and back him in the Democratic primary – the city is so heavily Democratic that it acts as a de facto general election.
“He was a good man, and while we politically went up against each other in 2016, I had the pleasure of working with him on a variety of projects since, especially during my term as head of Delaware State Housing,” Young told Spotlight Delaware on Tuesday. “So we got to work together on a variety of projects impacting and helping the people of the city, and my heart goes to his family.”
A tenure marked by growth
Purzycki served two terms from 2017 to 2025, including the entire span of the COVID pandemic.
He helped to bring economic revitalization to the Market Street corridor, working in particular with the Buccini Pollin Group – the city’s largest for-profit developer – to build new apartments, restaurants and attractions in the stretch. The total investment by the firm founded by local brothers Chris and Rob Buccini has eclipsed $2 billion – a figure that was once unthinkable in the city.
On Tuesday, Rob Buccini told Spotlight Delaware that he and his brother first met Purzycki in the early 2000s, when they developed the Christina Landing apartments. They found him “intimidating but also inspiring.”
“Mike understood the complexity and the risk that we undertook on these projects, which I always appreciated,” he said.
Looking back, Buccini said that Purzycki’s success at the Riverfront made their work possible in the rest of the city. They often picked up investment bankers at the train station and took them there first, before heading to Market Street or other areas they wanted to build in.
“We had to show them the test case of what was possible. I don’t know that we’d be anywhere close to where we are now without it,” he said.
The Purzycki-BPG partnership also helped bring new businesses like Bardea, which has received vaunted James Beard Award nominations, to the city, drawing significant attention to the changing nature of the corridor.
They also built the Chase Fieldhouse – and subsequently attracted the Philadelphia 76ers’ Blue Coats G-League team – and a major HBCU Week exhibition to the city during his tenure.
City Council President Earnest “Trippi” Congo, who often battled with Purzycki in the latter half of his tenure, said that while they had their differences, Purzycki was “able to do some things as mayor and as the leader of the Riverfront Development Corporation that not too many people could have managed.”
In particular, Congo highlighted Purzycki’s championing of the annual HBCU Week and College Fair.
“I think that there is no denying that HBCU week would not be what it is today without his influence. He used his influence to help thousands of Black students receive millions of dollars in scholarships,” Congo said. “His legacy will live on forever.”
All of that growth helped to stabilize the city, which had seen a falling population in the years prior, and has since reached 73,000 residents, a level not seen since 2009.
In 2022, he laid out a $50 million plan, paid for by COVID-era American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, to invest in neighborhoods across the city. He worked with nonprofit developers to build new homes or rehab existing ones on the East Side. Purzycki also worked with REACH Riverside to build new public housing and resources in the community.
After COVID, however, Purzycki was faced with a changing economic climate in the city, as employers began leaving downtown high-rises for remote work opportunities. New development just north of the city limits also drove more tenants from the city’s downtown district.
Some of those buildings have now been converted into apartments, which will change the nature of the city’s future downtown core.
Hanifa Shabazz, who served as city council president for Purzycki’s first four years, called the late mayor a “visionary” and an “innovative developer.”
She said that many will remember him by his work on the Riverfront and what he brought to the city, but Shabazz remembers him as a friend and an excellent singer.
She recounted some 10 years ago, when she and Purzycki would sing duets at the First State Gridiron Dinner & Show, where they would imitate songs by Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett, changing the lyrics to express what mattered most to them as leaders in the city.
“Just to be engaged with him … we were able to see what could possibly be for Wilmington and use our resources to get it done,” she said.
Violence declines, but criticism remained
One of Purzycki’s first major tasks as mayor was to try to ease the level of gun violence in the city, and he tapped Robert Tracy, a veteran of the New York and Chicago police forces, to take the helm of the Wilmington Police Department.
Through the use of data-driven policing strategies and violence intervention efforts, shootings and murders fell sharply in the city, but they rebounded during the COVID era. As of the last year of his mayorship, Wilmington saw 81 shootings and 14 deaths – the city’s lowest totals in two decades.
Haneef Salaam, a longtime criminal justice and civil rights advocate in Wilmington, also pointed to Purzycki’s work before becoming mayor, when he chaired the Wilmington HOPE Commission in the mid-2000s. Purzycki was supportive of reentry initiatives in the city, including to help fund a reentry conference hosted by the HOPE Commission and the Delaware Center for Justice, securing space at the Chase Center and helping cover food costs, Salaam said.
“He was always willing to give financially and be a part of the conversation when it came to reentry, before reentry was even a big deal in Delaware,” he added, noting that Purzycki donated to two other reentry nonprofits that he operated.
Salaam said he appreciated Purzycki’s vision, which he feels is responsible for the fine dining downtown that Wilmington has today, but he wished the former mayor had done more to include residents in his efforts.
“I didn’t mind his vision. I just thought that he was excluding the current residents from being a part of the vision,” he said.
Despite the drop in bloodshed, the WPD also saw a 5% spike in complaints against officers during Tracy’s four-year tenure from 2017 to 2021. The lack of diversity in the top ranks of the police force – in a city that is majority Black and Latino – also led to a resolution of “no confidence” against Tracy by the city council. He left the next year to take over the St. Louis Police Department.
In the last months of his mayorship, Purzycki likewise came to a loggerheads with council over a proposal to nix the residency requirement for city employees. Ultimately, a vote of no confidence in the mayor was rejected by council members, but a comment likening the debate of the primarily Black council to “mob rule” by the white mayor elicited claims of racism.
Even after he left office, his push to rehabilitate the historic Gibraltar estate – which neighbors his own home – drew controversy, particularly after Spotlight Delaware revealed that the city had spent millions to stabilize the property with little public scrutiny.
Bud Freel, a longtime friend who has been assisting Purzycki on that project, said the news of his passing was “like a gut punch.”
“He loved this city, and he loved the people that made up the city of Wilmington,” Freel told Spotlight Delaware. “He was just a hardworking, decent guy who just tried to do his best, and I just think everybody in Wilmington owes a debt of gratitude to Mike for what he’s done over the years.”
