Delayed for Decades, the Champlain Parkway Takes Shape in Burlington’s South End 

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• Courtney Lamdin ©️ Seven Days
• Champlain Parkway construction on Lakeside Avenue

Anyone who has been down Burlington's Pine Street lately has seen the construction. Pedestrians are using a rocky path instead of the sidewalk that ran between Curtis Lumber and the Maltex Building. Drivers heading for Lakeside Avenue have been rerouted down Sears Lane. City Market shoppers have navigated a blasting zone to get their groceries.

The sights herald the arrival of the Champlain Parkway, a long-planned road that will connect the unfinished Interstate 189 interchange on Shelburne Road with downtown Burlington.

Designed in the 1960s as a four-lane highway, the parkway is being built as a two-lane, low-speed city street. And that rocky stretch? It will become a walk-and-bike path that will run alongside much of the 2.8-mile project.

Mired in lawsuits and permitting battles for decades, the Champlain Parkway had become almost synonymous with "delay." But against all odds, once construction started last summer, the project has proceeded smoothly. Work is ahead of schedule; the new route is expected to be finished in 2027, although some portions may open before then.

"Remarkable things are happening," Burlington Public Works Director Chapin Spencer said — though sometimes he can't believe that is the case.

"It still takes some getting used to," said Spencer, who lives in the South End. "My neighborhood is fundamentally changing."

The parkway was first envisioned to run parallel to Pine Street, where it would pass by the Barge Canal, a narrow waterway that was once used by ships carrying lumber. But the plan was nixed in the 1980s, when officials discovered the land was polluted with toxic chemicals and that digging it up would be expensive and potentially dangerous.

The rerouted parkway will start at I-189 and run north on a new roadway from Home Avenue to Lakeside, then connect to Pine Street, which will become the parkway route all the way to Main Street.

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• Champlain Parkway

Some areas along the route are already unrecognizable. Where there was once a forested stretch between City Market and Sears Lane, the former site of a sprawling homeless encampment, there's now a brand-new road with granite curbs and buried utility lines.

The Lakeside area is coming along, too. After weeks of detours and one-way traffic, Lakeside Avenue was topped with fresh asphalt late last week. Workers poured a sidewalk on Sears Lane the night before school started at nearby Champlain Elementary School.

The construction has created some headaches. A worker cleaning tables at Feldman's Bagels on Pine Street last week said she thought business was slower. Employees at the Cumberland Farms across the street said they were not allowed to speak to a reporter, but one got a word in: "It's not not been a problem," the clerk said.

There has been congestion, too, on alternate routes to downtown through the South End. The state has been working on Shelburne Road for weeks, and the city is in the midst of paving St. Paul Street.

But City Councilor Joan Shannon (D-South District), who hears from constituents when they're upset, said it's been relatively quiet on the southern front.

Spencer said that's because city officials tried to head off problems by meeting with business owners before construction began. Now that the project is under way, the city has hired an engineering and public relations firm to answer residents' questions and is sending out a regular email newsletter.

This week, the challenge is accommodating the South End Art Hop, a weekend-long celebration of artists and makers centered on Pine Street that begins on Friday, September 8. The event draws hundreds of people, but not usually to a construction zone.

Christy Mitchell, executive director of the South End Arts + Business Association, which puts on the Art Hop, said she is confident the event and roadwork can coexist. For one, the city assured her that construction will stop early on Friday, before the Hop begins. The sidewalk may be torn up on the west side of Pine, but it's still intact on the east side, where most of the shops, studios and food trucks will be located, Mitchell said. And Pine Street will be closed to traffic on Friday night, so pedestrians can "hop" around without using the sidewalks at all.

There will also be a shuttle for attendees, with parking available at each major stop: Burton Snowboards on Queen City Park Road, Switchback Brewing on Flynn Avenue, the Innovation Center on Lakeside and the Maltex Building on Pine.

The situation could have been much worse, Mitchell said: "They could have everything torn up and giant trucks everywhere. It's not ideal, but ... I feel OK with it."

So does Doreen Kraft, executive director of Burlington City Arts, whose headquarters are on Pine Street.

"Artists are really resilient and used to going with whatever challenges are put in front of them," she said. "We'll just work with what we have."

Art Hop aside, Kraft said she thinks the parkway will be a "game changer" for the South End. People will feel safer walking and biking on a designated pathway, she said, and it will be easier to travel from one end of the city to another.

Not everyone shares her enthusiasm. The Pine Street Coalition, a group of activists who sued to stop the project, had raised concerns that the parkway will increase traffic in the already congested King/Maple neighborhood, the most racially diverse along the route.

To address the issue, activists had urged the city to first build what's known as the Railyard Enterprise Project. It would connect Pine and Battery streets with a new road that cuts through several privately owned properties, including the Vermont Rail System lot. In the early 2000s, the city had proposed building the road as part of the parkway itself, but the feds dismissed the plan. It gained traction again when the parkway proposal ended up in court; a 2020 study estimated that the road could reduce traffic in the King/Maple area by 59 percent.

City officials met the activists halfway, pledging to build the rail yard project at the same time that they'd connect the Champlain Parkway to the interstate. The city estimated this work would start in 2025.

But that endeavor is behind schedule. Like all major road projects that use federal funds, the rail yard project must get a federal permit that says it won't damage the environment. The city had hoped to submit the environmental assessment late last year, but Spencer said it's taken longer than expected because the project involves historic structures, railroad rights and the potential seizure of private property, also known as "eminent domain."

City engineer Norm Baldwin said the city is "continuing to be aggressive" about the original project timeline. Could construction still coincide with the last leg of the parkway?

"I think it's ambitious for 2025," Baldwin said, "but I think it is possible."

Coalition member Steve Goodkind, who was the city's public works director when the rail yard road was first proposed, said that despite past disagreements, he believes officials see the benefit of building the rail yard project sooner rather than later.

"Our job now is to say, 'Look, forget about fighting in court — you said you were gonna do this ... Do it,'" Goodkind said. "If you do, that's a victory for everyone."

Meantime, officials are focused on the parkway. On a tour last week, Spencer and Baldwin talked about the road like proud parents of a teenager they didn't think would ever grow up. On one side of the new roadway, near City Market, was a retention pond to keep sediment from running into Lake Champlain; on the other were green spaces that could someday host pocket parks. If momentum continues, a section of the walk-bike path could be operational by late fall, they said.

As the tour wrapped up, Spencer and Baldwin headed north toward their offices on Pine Street. Spencer looked toward the city skyline.

"This is a new feature, too," he said. "It's an opening gateway vision of downtown that people have never had before."