It’s been 61 years since the road now known as the Champlain Parkway was first planned — and its June 29 grand opening didn’t let the audience forget that. A playlist of 1960s tunes soundtracked the event. Dignitaries cut a 61-foot ribbon. Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak rode off in a 61-year-old Ford Mustang after opening the endlessly delayed, much-fought-over alternate route from Interstate 189 toward the city’s downtown.
Once the shredded ribbon had been gathered, curious motorists filtered onto the parkway. Those drivers — many of whom likely were not born when the project was conceived — might ask, Why did it take six decades and $84 million to build a 2.8-mile roadway? And how did the city end up with this road — neither a direct, high-speed route to downtown nor an ordinary city street intended for local traffic only? Does the Champlain Parkway represent a happy compromise or one that should not have been built at all?
The answer to the last question depends on whom you ask. Mulvaney-Stanak, for her part, had an upbeat answer.
“Major public projects rarely achieve unanimous support, but I believe today’s parkway reflects something important about Burlington,” she said at the ribbon cutting. “We can wrestle with difficult questions, acknowledge our history and build something that better reflects who we are today.”
But Steve Goodkind, who spent 16 years as the city’s public works director, had a very different take.
“It’s a monument to ignorance,” he said in a phone interview the day the road opened. “That road never should have been built.” Decades of design changes twisted the parkway into something that no longer made sense, he said.
Over the course of 61 years, the parkway has been reimagined and redesigned a dozen times to meet the demands of South End residents; rerouted to avoid a Superfund site; and delayed by environmental studies, 10 lawsuits, and shifting federal, state and city priorities.
We can wrestle with difficult questions, acknowledge our history and build something that better reflects who we are today.
Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak
But in the beginning, there was a vision.
In the early 1960s, Vermont’s interstate highway system was brand-new. The Chittenden County suburbs burgeoned. In Burlington, the county’s retail center, nervous merchants worried about how out-of-town customers would reach their downtown stores through increasingly snarled traffic.
In 1961, the city planning commission had an idea: a four-lane, divided highway that would allow cars to zip from the new Interstate 189 interchange on Shelburne Road directly to Battery Street and the city’s center.
“The highway would swing north along the edge of Lake Champlain and connect again with the Interstate Highway north of Burlington,” the Burlington Free Press told its readers in 1963.
State transportation officials had a similar vision and in 1965 formally proposed a four-lane beltline that would encircle Burlington. Then the proposed South End road hit its first delay: Access to the city’s New North End won priority. The southern road had to wait.
The grand city-encircling beltline plan soon died, but plans for the southern segment survived. This “Southern Connector” was still a four-lane highway. The plan quickly attracted opposition in the city’s South End. Every route proposed for the new road threatened someone.
“I want to know whose homes will be moved, whose houses will be ripped from their foundations, whose backyards will be split in two,” Millie Gautherat, a resident of Lyman Avenue, said at a public meeting in 1976, the Free Press reported. Others worried about the safety of a high-speed highway through their neighborhoods and whether it would act as a kind of wall, cutting them off from the rest of the city. By 1981, 21 families would be displaced as part of a state buyout program clearing way for the supposedly imminent construction, according to the Free Press.
That same year, Joan Beauchemin, an activist who lived in a neighborhood nestled between the railroad and Lake Champlain, told an Act 250 commission hearing that “the road in its present design will demoralize and threaten the residents of Lakeside.” Beauchemin spent so many years fighting the
Southern Connector design that her efforts were mentioned in her 2014 obituary.
Under this kind of pressure, the city and state began discussing changes. An alternative plan to widen Pine Street also drew opposition, so state highway planners proposed to reroute a one-mile stretch of the road through a vacant, marshy area known as the Pine Street Barge Canal. It was a fatal blow to any build-it-quick plan. The barge canal route stalled the Southern Connector for nearly 20 years, until environmental studies ruled out putting the road through any part of the contaminated area by the lake.
Nevertheless, the plan for some kind of highway remained on the books. In 1989, the city completed the first segment, a road to nowhere that started at the I-189 interchange, ended at Home Avenue and did not open to traffic until last week.
Through the years, businesspeople and some South End residents continued to press for construction. Mayor after mayor promised the road would be finished.
“I expect the road will be completed in my first term as mayor,” Peter Clavelle told the Free Press as he ran for the office in 1989, an unfounded optimism shared by several of his successors.
In 1997, the state and city finally agreed on a two-lane parkway that would end at Lakeside Avenue, where traffic would turn right, then turn left to follow Pine Street toward downtown. That raised new concerns. More traffic — and all the noise and pollution that comes with it — would be routed through King and Maple streets, one of Burlington’s poorest and most diverse neighborhoods.
Over time, the purpose of the highway had also morphed. There was less talk about easing access to downtown and more about removing truck traffic from South End streets, including Flynn and Home avenues. Completing the highway had also come to symbolize something more. “Abandoning it risks undermining our confidence that the city can get things done,” then-mayor Miro Weinberger said as he ran for reelection in 2015.
After more than 60 years of public campaigning, public comment and lawsuits, the Champlain Parkway that opened last month is a far cry from what was imagined in 1965 and a testament to the persistence of the public in demanding changes. The roadway is two lanes, not four; the speed limit is 25 miles per hour, not 55; the road does not connect directly to Battery Street, but at its northern end relies on existing city streets: Lakeside Avenue and an improved Pine Street. The signs leading to the parkway from I-189 do not even mention that the road is an alternate route to downtown — another concession won by its critics. A shared-use pedestrian path, less of a consideration decades ago, was built alongside the road.
The parkway provides easy access to City Market’s South End location and the breweries and cidery operating across the street. It also goes right by several parking lots that will be redeveloped into more than 1,000 units of housing as part of what’s known as the South End Coordinated Redevelopment. The city council approved the first phase of the project in May, and construction could begin next year.
The parkway’s defenders, such as Public Works Director Chapin Spencer, believe decades of public process made the final product better.
“This place is not a corridor for vehicles to travel unimpeded through neighborhoods but a place to safely travel in our community while sharing the road with other users and our neighbors,” he said at the ribbon cutting.
Former mayor Clavelle biked down to the parkway the afternoon it opened and was satisfied with what he saw.
“I do think that the efforts to redesign the project to better accommodate bicyclists and pedestrians, those efforts have really borne fruit, and I think it’s a better outcome as a result,” he said in an interview.
Mark Hughes, executive director of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and who previously raised concerns about the parkway’s potential impact on the King and Maple neighborhood, said he would be keeping an eye on how the opening of the parkway affects the area. New traffic lights have been installed in the neighborhood, and advocates will be tracking data collected by traffic-monitoring cameras.
Goodkind, the former public works director, defended the project when he was employed by the city but later became a fiercely litigious opponent. He would have rather seen it abandoned instead of rerouted to Pine Street. The “Southern Disconnector,” as he calls it, should have been built as a “complete street,” or a two-lane road with shared turning lanes. Instead, he said, it retained its design as a limited-access highway despite changes over the years that made it more closely resemble a common city street.
“It was built during a time when the law said it should have been a complete street,” Goodkind said. “But because there was such an old design, they didn’t follow that idea, and so they built this monstrosity.”
Goodkind believes that Weinberger should have settled a lawsuit brought during his administration and incorporated design changes that would have made more sense.
“Nobody’s building a project like this nowadays, and nobody’s jamming traffic through a neighborhood like this if a neighborhood has any say in it,” Goodkind said.
I would hope that city officials would not see this as the culmination but as a milestone.
Peter Clavelle
Former city councilor Joan Shannon, a resident of the Lakeside neighborhood, had long raised concerns about the highway’s traffic impact. After the parkway opening, she argued that “there’s nothing about this road that connects neighborhoods.
“It’s a big road that divides the South End more than anything else,” Shannon said.
Clavelle said he understands both sides.
“I see value in the project in terms of improving access not only to our downtown but also the evolving South End of the city and the significant development that’s proposed,” he said.“But I would hope that city officials would not see this as the culmination but as a milestone.”
Clavelle and others who still have reservations about the Champlain Parkway believe it won’t be truly complete until a final piece is built. In response to advocates, the city under Weinberger proposed the Railyard Enterprise Project to connect Pine Street directly to Battery Street. Critics have placed their faith in this plan as a solution to their traffic concerns in the King/Maple neighborhood. Spencer said the city is negotiating with the privately owned Vermont Rail System to obtain the land needed on its property and would provide an update to the city council sometime this summer.
The Battery Street connector is estimated to cost $55 million, Spencer said, but the city has only found $20 million in federal, state and local funding. If negotiations are successful with the railyard owners, the city will begin the search for more money to fill the gap.
When this new connector might be built, or whether it will be built, is anyone’s guess. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Road Not Taken | Burlington officials celebrated the Champlain Parkway as a testament to public process. Some critics still question its worth.”
This article appears in The Cartoon Issue • 2026.
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