Little Italy and the Urban Renewal That Erased It

There was once a neighborhood right here. The buildings are gone, replaced by offices, retail blocks, and a parking structure, but for sixty years the streets between Pearl, Main, Battery, and Saint Paul were dense with Italian life.

Italian immigrants began arriving in Burlington in the early nineteen hundreds, many of them drawn by the same waterfront industries and railroad construction that had attracted the Irish a generation earlier. They put down roots in the lower blocks of the hill and along Battery Street, building a neighborhood of homes, gardens, social clubs, markets, and small restaurants. The neighborhood had its own rhythms: bocce in the evenings, the smell of sauce and fresh bread, a world complete enough that some families lived their whole lives within its few blocks.

In the early nineteen sixties, Burlington approved an urban renewal project that would reshape the city's downtown core. The federally funded Champlain Street Urban Renewal Project targeted the neighborhood as blighted and economically unproductive. Well over a hundred families were displaced, and by the late nineteen sixties the last of Little Italy was gone.

Urban renewal programs like this one removed tens of thousands of working-class communities across America in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, disproportionately displacing immigrant and minority populations in the name of modernization. Burlington's experience was not unique, but it was thorough.

In recent years, a historic marker has acknowledged what had been removed. Signs now mark the approximate former boundaries of the neighborhood, block by block. The marker does not give back the buildings or the community. But it refuses the easier option of simply forgetting.