April Burbank

Free Press Staff Writer

Marcel Beaudin and Bill Truex have been thinking about and working on the Burlington waterfront for at least half a century each.

"I grew up on the lake, and so I've always felt an interest in its development," said Beaudin, who grew up in Barre and visited the lake as a child, and later became a recreational sailor.

"When I was doing my graduate thesis, I had to select a problem," Beaudin said. He decided to create a vision for Burlington's transformation and began following Burlington news while he was living in New York City by picking up newspapers in Times Square.

In that thesis, long before Waterfront Park would provide space for marathons and Frisbee-throwing, before Echo Lake Aquarium and Science Center, before the bike path, Beaudin imagined parks and a marina replacing the lumber yards and oil drums that lined the lake.

He left New York to move "home" to the Burlington area a few years later in 1959. "A lot of my peers thought I was a little crazy," he said, laughing.

Truex moved to the area in 1966, he said. He recently moved back to Burlington after living in Grand Isle for 25 years.

Truex, 77, retired from his firm, TruexCullins, in 2007. He is perhaps best known for his role in transforming Church Street into a pedestrian street and also designed Burlington's U.S. Coast Guard Station as well as the bathhouse at North Beach.

Beaudin designed the Burlington Community Boathouse. At age 85, he is still working.

"I think the city's done a remarkable job," Beaudin said. "When you look at where it started, you know Burlington is used as a model by many communities for developing their waterfront."

They have watched the transformation firsthand, served on city boards and committees, and now, as the city looks toward a new chapter of development, they're both still involved.

The two architects agreed to meet at Beaudin's iconic community boathouse on cloudy Wednesday morning to share some of their decades of waterfront memories.

Beginnings

Both men remember the waterfront as an industrial site.

"It was a tank farm — oil tanks," Beaudin said of his first memories of the waterfront. "When you were out there on the lake, all you saw were oil tanks. In those days, they were barges that brought oil and stored the fuel for the winter because they couldn't run during the winter because of the ice."

In the mid-1950s, Beaudin wrote a graduate school thesis about how the city and the waterfront might change, envisioning green space to replace the vestigial elements of industry.

He didn't have it all accurate: "In my plan, I run a highway across the front of the waterfront," Beaudin recalled as he stood in the Community Boathouse he designed.

"I think it was in '57 when the City Council said they would not renew any more of the tank leases on the waterfront," Beaudin said. "Tanks started disappearing almost immediately."

"That's how I remember the waterfront," Beaudin said. "There was a scrapyard. ... It was a pretty ugly-looking place. The railroad yard, the North 40, north of the Moran Plant, that was a railroad yard."

"It was the same way 10 years later," Truex said. "Both railroad yards were active, and this little one-lane track was a connection between the two of them. ... From College Street north was all part of the railroad yard for Central Vermont Railway. And south of Maple Street was all Vermont Railway."

"This whole area in here was all part of the railroad investment in terms of oil tanks and delivery of fuel and lumber," Truex continued. "The whole lumber operation that started in the 1800s, it survived right on through with the lumber companies right here on the waterfront until the '70s and '80s."

Truex, who was chairman of the city's urban renewal agency from 1970 to 1973, said people wanted to develop the waterfront into other uses, but "the timing was wrong."

"The master plan that was being redeveloped in 1973 included plans for extending the urban fabric — the urban core from urban renewal — on down through the whole waterfront," Truex said. "There were gestures at developing a waterfront by private enterprise and public in the '70s, the early '70s, but it was just too soon. ... I think it was timing was the issue until about 1980."

The 1980s brought the dispute between the city and Central Vermont Railway over public use of the waterfront land, the start of planning for Waterfront Park, and the boathouse.

Foundations

The city held a competition for design of the Community Boathouse, and Beaudin's design prevailed over rivals — including Truex's firm — and opened in 1988.

"I had as part of my presentation an old photograph of the last yacht club building on the waterfront," Beaudin said. "And my building has elements of that old building. And it was kind of a nostalgia — when you enter competitions, you gotta second-guess the jury. ... Nostalgia plays a lot in something like this."

The building sits on top of a 30-by-99-foot barge that was brought to Burlington from a southern state, an arrangement Beaudin said was a result of uncertainty about where to locate the building.

"It actually turned out to be an amazing consequence," he said, because the barge and the docks move up and down with the level of the lake.

Beneath the barge, Beaudin said, are remnants of an original pier left over from the former Lake Champlain Yacht Club.

"It was interesting, once we finished the project, the boathouse listed to one side," Beaudin said. "I did the calculation myself, actually, how much weight we would need on the other side, so we hung concrete blocks with chains. ... We set it up so we could add to the blocks if we had to. … It turned out to be right on the nose. That was a lucky guess."

Five years later, Truex designed the three-story U.S. Coast Guard station, which replaced a smaller maintenance building there in 1993.

The transformation of the waterfront involved the city and government entities as well as private developers. Overall, Truex said, "I view the political activity as a direct result of private motivation."

Futures

The city's overall plan for the waterfront, as shown in PlanBTV, envisions mixed-use development between College Street and King Street, a significant number of new boat slips and moving the Lake Champlain Transportation ferry terminal further south. PlanBTV was the vision for the downtown and waterfront that arose from a public process in 2012.

Truex recently served on a mayor-appointed group that waded through dozens of waterfront projects to select finalists for city investment. When he first arrived in Burlington, he said, "I really threw myself into working with the city," and working on the recent waterfront projects was "like a bookend" on his career.

One of those projects, a new home for the Lake Champlain Community Sailing Center, is a personal passion for Beaudin, who designed the building. The city and the sailing center are working on details of a long-term lease agreement for the site, and the project received a $500,000 tax increment financing (TIF) commitment from the city on Town Meeting Day.

Burlington is currently poised to spend $9.6 million on various waterfront projects stretching from the Moran plant in the north to the Echo Lake Aquarium and Science Center closer to downtown. The city also recently received a $1.5 million federal grant to begin building an expanded marina at Perkins Pier, addressing a need for more boat slips and additional harbor protection.

The largest city TIF investment is earmarked for revitalizing the former Moran Generating Plant into a mixed use, year-round building with event space, a restaurant, and more — or, if the plan is unsuccessful, to demolish the building.

Charlie Tipper, a real estate investor and developer who's working on the Moran project with recent University of Vermont graduates Tad Cooke and Erick Crockenberg, described the plan in November as "a 21st-century version of what happened on Church Street 30 years ago."

Truex cautioned the group at the time that "others have tried and failed" at Moran.

Truex said in an interview Friday, however, that he agrees with the comparison to his Church Street project — and he wants to see the building preserved.

"We sort of lost that sense of what the waterfront used to be," Truex said, "and I think the Moran plant is a good way of reminding us of the transformation that has taken place."

Contact April Burbank at 660-1863 or aburbank@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AprilBurbank.