Church Street and the Queen City's Commercial Heart

Burlington calls itself the Queen City, and Church Street has been its commercial heart since the early eighteen hundreds.

The street runs four blocks from the ornate spire of the Unitarian Church at the top of the hill down toward the waterfront, flanked by buildings that span nearly two hundred years of architectural fashion. The oldest surviving structures date to the eighteen-thirties, built in the Federal style when Burlington was a prosperous young city riding the first wave of Lake Champlain trade. Later waves of prosperity brought Italianate facades with their bracketed cornices and tall hooded windows, then Victorian commercial storefronts, each layer added to the bones of what came before.

A business directory from eighteen eighty-two shows three separate jewelry stores operating within three adjacent buildings on a single block, a mark of the concentrated commercial wealth the lumber boom had brought to the city's main street.

In nineteen eighty-one, the city converted the street to a pedestrian marketplace, closing it to cars and investing in brick pavers, planting, and benches that define it today. The transformation was controversial at the time, as such conversions almost always are. Four decades later, Church Street Marketplace is consistently cited as one of the most successful pedestrian malls in the United States, drawing millions of visitors each year.

The Unitarian Church at the north end, built in eighteen sixteen, has been a fixture through all of it. Abolitionists organized in its halls before the Civil War. The congregation hosted escaped people moving north toward Canada. Some of the building's bricks are older than Vermont's statehood. The street below has reinvented itself a dozen times. The church has simply waited.