Burlingtonians going about their mornings on June 3 were likely unsurprised by the Main Street road closure, a regular occurrence during the past two years of the city’s “Great Streets” construction project. But they might’ve gotten a hint this one was different when they heard the drums.
Queen City parade stalwarts Sambatucada provided the percussion backbone, and a handful of puppet snow geese flew over the crowd of several dozen community members as they walked a couple of blocks up Main from Battery Street. The procession was led by a big, yellow flatbed truck hauling a ghostly white, starkly beautiful 48-foot tree — Nancy Winship Milliken’s “Lakebone,” Burlington’s newest permanent public sculpture.
A crew from S.D. Ireland carefully unstrapped, restrapped and hooked the piece with chains to a massive crane, which lifted the huge trunk until it hovered over the road. Using ropes, they gently guided it to a perch on two steel posts embedded in a concrete foundation in the new sidewalk. As the crew lowered it into place, John Higgins, the project’s structural engineer, made sure the nearly 10,000-pound piece of wood was properly balanced; Milliken pointed out subtle placement adjustments. The crowd — including dogs, kids and beaming Burlington City Arts staffers — took selfies, marveled at the perfect weather, and gaped at the feat of engineering and logistical know-how deployed solely for the purpose of art.
Public art has been part of the vision for “Great Streets” since the beginning, even before the city passed its One Percent for Public Art ordinance in 2021, which mandates that art funding be part of projects such as the current construction. Colin Storrs, who manages grants and public art for BCA, said the city put out a national call for proposals in 2022. “Lakebone” is the largest and most complex of the four selected, at a cost of $160,048 out of the project’s $500,000 total art budget.
The other three include Burlingtonian-turned-New Yorker Lydia Kern’s “Anthology,” installed last fall next to City Hall Park. It’s a brightly colored archway of flowers gathered by neighbors in Burlington and suspended in resin; when the light hits it, it glows like a stained-glass window.
The other two sculptures, both of which will be installed on June 24, are “Block by Block,” by Noa Younse of Richmond’s Pixel Patch Creative; and “Magnus” by Wowhaus studios of Sebastopol, Calif. “Block by Block,” a Lego-esque tower of interlocked shapes that reference Burlington’s neighborhoods, will be installed outside Honey Road at Church and Main streets.
“Magnus,” to be in front of the courthouse, consists of three locally carved granite snails big enough to sit on — Storrs described them as “weirdly comfortable.” The creatures reference fossils of Maclurites magnus, an ancient snail that lived in Lake Champlain 460 million years ago. The snails’ trails, made from a special aggregate embedded in the sidewalk, will glow in the dark.
Milliken’s sculpture relates to the city and its environment in multiple ways, she said last week: “It’s on the horizontal because it’s representing the trees that traveled across the lake, both back when Burlington became a lumber port and when the rail took lumber out. It was how Burlington developed, so this is honoring how the city grew — the beginnings of the city.”
The tree, which seems to float above the road, is also reminiscent of so many that bobbed down Vermont’s rivers in past floods. Milliken added that it speaks to how trees in riparian forests and driftwood barriers naturally help mitigate flooding. It’s also a nod to the very deliberate system of stormwater management that’s now in place under the new streetscape.
This is honoring how the city grew — the beginnings of the city.
Nancy Winship Milliken
Aside from the associations and aesthetics of the finished object, “Lakebone” is a triumph of planning and teamwork. Late 20th-century artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, famed for massive public projects that often involved wrapping whole buildings in fabric, used to assert that the often bureaucratic process of public art — from initial drawings to engineering to negotiating permits and dealing with municipal officials — was the artwork. The realization of this piece seems very much in the same spirit.
Finding a tree was a challenge. Storrs said Milliken decided early on that black locust, a hardwood that farmers have long used to make rot-resistant fence posts, was her first choice. Clemmons Family Farm in Charlotte came forward with one slated to be removed from its property. Uprooting it intact, and transporting it to Milliken’s studio in Shelburne, was itself a massive undertaking.
The artist then cut down the tree’s root ball considerably, trimmed branches and removed the bark — a monthslong process in which she enlisted others, including her husband, Andrew Milliken, and son, Charles. She researched and consulted with tree specialists and engineers on everything from the durability of the wood to the resilience of the white patina to the structural integrity of the piece. Higgins, the engineer, said he put 300 pounds of weight on each extremity to make sure the piece could withstand snow and, as he put it, “hooligans.”
Milliken’s studio is only 100 yards from the railroad tracks, so Vermont Rail System stepped in to transport the tree from Shelburne to Burlington before it was moved onto a truck. Now that the sculpture is in place, Weybridge conservation org Bee the Change will plant a pollinator garden underneath it.
John Magnus of S.D. Ireland was instrumental in coordinating the installation, which he described as “not the typical construction project.” But his crew was happy to take on the challenge. Public art, he said, “just makes life more interesting.”
Making life in Burlington interesting is among the main goals of the Main Street initiative — in addition to more prosaic aims, such as traffic calming and stormwater management. BCA plans to celebrate the project’s completion with a Main Street Block Party on July 17 and 18.
“We’ve all lived through this construction,” communications director Elena Rosen said, “and it hasn’t always been the easiest, but it’s such a beautiful new streetscape.
“The infrastructure is very, very cool, but creativity has been at the center of this,” she continued. “It’s so Burlington. This is what makes this city special.” ➆
This article appears in June 10 • 2026.
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