City Hall Park
In 1797, a city planned grid system was laid out for Burlington, incorporating the few transportation routes that existed, including King, Pearl, Church and Battery Streets. At the city’s center, space was reserved for a park (now City Hall Park) and courthouse. First known as Courthouse Square, the park became a focal point in the early 1800s attracting hotels, taverns, and offices in the early 1800s.
The buildings bordering the park tell the story of the city’s growth from a frontier lake port to a lumber and manufacturing boomtown to a modern city that stands today as Vermont’s foremost industrial, commercial cultural, and educational center. Although no early commercial buildings survive in unaltered form, the park’s character has changed little since the 1830s, when buildings of three story brick facades first enclosed it.
City Hall, built in 1928 on the eastern edge of the park, is its most visually imposing building. Its brick facade with extensive carved marble trim is primarily Colonial Revival in style, while its strict symmetry and multi-staged domed copula has Georgian overtones. The classical/colonial motif was intended by the architect, W. M. Kendall, to be “in accordance with the same classical principles which inspired the public buildings of the colonies and the early republic.” Most all of the finish materials - brick, marble, roofing slate, granite - were produced in Vermont. Constructed at a cost of $475,000, it was hailed by Mayor Beecher (known as “Beecher the Builder”) as “the most ambitious building project on which the City of Burlington has ever embarked.”
The old Savings Bank, located at the northwest corner of the Park, is one of the City’s most sophisticated works of architecture. Built in 1900 in the Flemish Revival style, its brick and brownstone facade, prominent wall dormers and a corner turret recall the Renaissance guild houses of Brussels and Antwerp in Belgium.
Marker can be reached from Main Street (U.S. 2) east of St. Paul Street when traveling west.
Courtesy hmdb.org
