Downtown, one layer at a time.

Stop 1 of 13

1. 1

   The Unitarian Church

   152 Pearl Street, at the top of Church Street

   Map ↗Listen · 2 min

   The white spire at the end of Church Street is what everything down here aims at. Two heavy brick buildings frame it: the Masonic Temple, finished in 1898, and the Richardson Building, 1895. The state's own historic district file says the church provides a focal point for the area, and that directions in Burlington are frequently given in relation to it. The meeting house went up in 1816, on five acres of overgrown pasture the congregation had bought two years earlier for $1,000, and cost $22,185.34. The architect was Peter Banner of Boston. The tower rises about 170 feet, though the spire is a 1958 replica; lightning took the original in 1954. The first bell in it came from Paul Revere's foundry in October 1816.

   3 min to stop 2Face south and start walking down Church Street Marketplace.

2. 2

   Church Street Marketplace

   Church Street, between Bank and Cherry

   Map ↗Listen · 2 min

   Brick under your feet, no cars, benches down the middle. Until 1980 this was a street, with traffic and curbs and parked cars. The idea of closing it goes back to 1958, and it got its champion in 1962, when a Burlington architecture student named Bill Truex went to Copenhagen and saw the Stroget. Burlington tested the idea first: a one-day street fair in 1971 drew about 15,000 people, and a week-long fair the next year an estimated 50,000. On July 7, 1980, the two blocks between College and Cherry closed to traffic for good, and the Marketplace opened on September 15, 1981, on a $6 million design by Carr, Lynch Associates. The block in front of City Hall was not finished until 2005.

   3 min to stop 3Continue south to the bottom of Church Street, where City Hall faces the park.

3. 3

   City Hall Park

   City Hall Park, at the fountain, facing City Hall at 149 Church Street

   Map ↗Listen · 2 min

   This lawn is older than almost everything around it. In June 1798 the proprietors of Burlington held their last series of meetings at Gideon King Junior's house on King Street. William Coit presented a final plan for the city, the grid downtown streets still run on, and at those same meetings the proprietors voted to set aside the ground you are standing on. For its first hundred years or so this was Court House Square. City Hall came much later. Burlington's 1850s city hall was badly built and falling apart, so the replacement went to McKim, Mead and White of New York, with William M. Kendall as architect. It opened to the public on May 12, 1928, and cost $475,000, coming in $25,000 under budget.

   3 min to stop 4Head west one block on College Street to the library.

4. 4

   Fletcher Free Library

   235 College Street

   Map ↗Listen · 2 min

   Columns, stone steps, a Beaux-Arts front on College Street. Burlington has had a free library for more than 150 years. On July 14, 1873, Mrs. Mary L. Fletcher and her daughter, Miss Mary M. Fletcher, gave the city $20,000 to found it, half for books and half to start an endowment. The library outgrew the old city hall by 1901, the same year Andrew Carnegie gave $50,000 for a new building. Burlington architect Walter R. B. Willcox won the competition, and the building opened on August 17, 1904, the first of the four Carnegie libraries in Vermont. There was a filled-in ravine under this site; in 1973 the northwest corner of the foundation settled, the books had to leave, and demolition was on the table.

   9 min to stop 5Backtrack toward Church Street and head north on Cherry Street toward Battery Park. The route goes slightly uphill, then down toward the bluff.

5. 5

   Little Italy

   Foot of Cherry Street, Battery Park Extension

   Map ↗Listen · 2 min

   Look up Cherry Street, because that is where the neighborhood was. Roughly six blocks, running east from Battery and Pearl to Pine Street, south to College, and back west to Battery. The households were Italian American, and also French Canadian, Syrian, and other backgrounds; the interpretive signage puts it carefully, that many of the people, but not all the people, were the sons and daughters of Italian immigrants. On May 17, 1966, a bulldozer crushed a tenement on Cherry Street. Over the following two years more than 160 buildings came down, housing 157 families, 67 individuals and 41 businesses. Twenty-seven acres cleared, called the Champlain Street Urban Renewal Project. The last person out was Victoria Dutra, of 12 Cherry Street, whose home was demolished in 1968.

   2 min to stop 6Continue north into Battery Park.

6. 6

   Battery Park

   Battery Park, at the west rim above the bluff, North Avenue at Battery Street

   Map ↗Listen · 2 min

   You are on the edge of a bluff, the lake in front of you, the Adirondacks across it. During the War of 1812 the United States military put cannon up here to protect the harbor and stationed roughly 4,000 soldiers on and around this ground. The park takes its name from the artillery. Within about fifteen years, the ground just north of here was heavy industry. In 1827 Doctor John Peck and Professor James Dean established the Champlain Glass Company on the former battery campsite, described as the first extensive manufacturing concern in the town: about two acres, about 100 people, making window glass. Frederick Smith ran it from 1834 until 1850, when fuel costs closed it. An 1839 survey labels the neighborhood north of the battery Glassville.

   7 min to stop 7Walk south along Battery Street, back the way you came, taking in the historic houses.

7. 7

   Battery Street

   Battery Street at College Street, west sidewalk

   Map ↗Listen · 2 min

   The ground falls away toward the rail line and the lake, and that drop used to be the edge of the water. This street was called Water Street. The shoreline is now hundreds of feet further out, and everything between you and the water is made land, filled in across the 1800s for wharves, lumber yards and railroad track. A block south, the state's historic survey marks out the Battery Street Historic District, describing it as Burlington's earliest settlement, developed from 1790 onward and now on the National Register. Gideon King Junior controlled lake traffic from here between 1790 and 1812, and his house still stands at 35 King Street. At the foot of King Street was Burlington's only shipyard, where the Winans brothers built the steamboat Vermont.

   9 min to stop 8Continue south and then down the hill toward the waterfront — via Pine Street or the Battery Street stairs/path — to Union Station.

8. 8

   Union Station

   1 Main Street, at the foot of Main Street

   Map ↗Listen · 2 min

   Look up at the clock set into the stone above the entrance. Around it, carved scrolls and swags of fruit and flowers; on top of the whole composition, an hourglass with wings. Burlington Union Station opened in January 1916, and it was the city's second union station. Union means more than one railroad sharing one building. The city donated land and 15,000 dollars, and the Central Vermont and the Rutland, who jointly owned it, put up the remaining 150,000. The architect was Alfred Fellheimer, who had been involved with the design of Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. The Central Vermont ended passenger service in 1938, and the Rutland ran passenger trains here until a strike ended them in 1953. On July 29, 2022, Amtrak began direct service to Burlington.

   5 min to stop 9Walk north along the waterfront bike path toward the old power plant.

9. 9

   The FRAME

   The FRAME, 475 Lake Street, on the waterfront path

   Map ↗Listen · 2 min

   A red steel skeleton with the sky showing through it. That is not decay, that is the design. This was the Moran plant, Burlington's own municipal generating station: ground broken in 1952, online two years later, fully finished in 1955, a thirty megawatt coal fired power plant on the waterfront. In 1977 it made its first experimental conversion from coal to wood chips. It was decommissioned in 1986, and then it sat for more than three decades. On March 4, 2008, voters approved a 21 million dollar renovation plan that was never built. In August 2020 crews peeled back the brick, kept the steel superstructure, and painted it red. The ribbon was cut on November 15, 2022, on about six and a half million dollars of work.

   8 min to stop 10Walk back south along the waterfront path, past Union Station, toward ECHO.

10. 10

    ECHO

    1 College Street, at the foot of College Street

    Map ↗Listen · 2 min

    ECHO stands at the foot of College Street. Now put fuel tanks on this ground. By 1958, by UVM's count of the waterfront, there were eighty three fuel tanks holding eighty four million gallons, a tank farm with rail yards on filled land the railroad held. By 1975 the city had an ordinance giving the oil companies twenty years to vacate. In 1989 the Vermont Supreme Court ruled, in State versus Central Vermont Railway, that the filled land here was impressed by the public trust doctrine, and that only the Legislature could decide what public trust land is for. The Legislature made a list, adding arts, educational and cultural uses in 1991. ECHO was dedicated on May 31, 2003; the name stands for ecology, culture, history, and opportunities.

    3 min to stop 11Walk out onto the bike path or the fishing pier just south of ECHO for the breakwater view.

11. 11

    The Breakwater

    Burlington Community Boathouse, outer pier deck

    Map ↗Listen · 2 min

    That long low line of stone offshore is the Burlington Breakwater. It is not a reef; it is a nineteenth-century engineering project, and it is still doing the job it was built for. Work began in 1836, and the first section, about a thousand feet long, was finished in 1854. Between 1867 and 1874 crews added 831 feet at the north end and 617 feet at the south, bringing it to 2,517 feet. Underneath the waterline it is timber: log cribs laid on a rubble foundation, hemlock below and white pine above. On December 9, 1876, a winter gale drove the canal boat General Butler into the stone, and a Burlington ship chandler named James Wakefield and his son rowed out and took all five aboard to safety.

    9 min to stop 12Head back up College Street toward downtown, retracing part of your earlier route. This stretch is uphill.

12. 12

    Memorial Auditorium

    250 Main Street, at South Union Street

    Map ↗Listen · 2 min

    The big building above you has been locked since 2016. This was built to hold thousands of people at once, and it exists because Burlington citizens refused something smaller. In 1925 the editor-in-chief of the Burlington Free Press called for a large, separate memorial auditorium rather than a smaller memorial hall folded into the new city hall then being planned for Church Street. When the mayor's office presented plans with a 1,000-seat auditorium inside in January 1926, many citizens complained. They wanted a separate building, somewhere else, and bigger. Voters approved it in March 1926, and Frank L. Austin of Burlington drew it. It opened on March 28, 1928, to a crowd of three thousand. Simon and Garfunkel played this room on October 13, 1968.

    1 min to stop 13Walk half a block to Nectar's.

13. 13

    Nectar's

    188 Main Street, north side of the street

    Map ↗Listen · 2 min

    188 Main Street: a brick building with a marquee that went dark in May 2025. For fifty years this was Nectar's. Nectar Rorris came to the United States from Greece in 1956, borrowed money from family, and in 1975 opened a restaurant and bar here. It sold gravy fries, french fries under turkey gravy, and fifty years later people were still shouting for them. In the mid 1980s a young Burlington band got a residency in this room that ran close to two years, and Rorris let them work out what they were in public. The band was Phish, and in 1992 they named an album A Picture of Nectar. On July 30, 2025, the owners said the closure was permanent, after lease negotiations fell through.

    Loop completeWalk northwest back up to Church Street and climb to the top.