BURLINGTON — After more than a year of renovations, Burlington’s City Hall Park downtown is reopening Friday.
Workers will remove fencing around the park Thursday night, in preparation for a weekend of festivities, including live music, city-led tours of the park, and evening film screenings. The celebration will span Friday and Saturday.
“Downtown has lost their park for over a year,” Cindi Wight, director of Burlington’s parks department, told VTDigger. “So I think it’s really great to have that green space open up that people can enjoy.”
New features of the park include a permanent art installation on water ecology, rain gardens full of native plants, and more accessible walkways. A redesigned splash fountain has been installed, and its “spectacular” colored lights will shine through the winter, Wight said.
The reopening has been a long time coming. Planning for the work began almost 10 years ago, in 2011, and the design went through several iterations. The city broke ground on construction only last summer.
The $5.8 million project has been mired in criticism for years. Some residents have warned that the park’s new design encourages “social cleansing” by incorporating architecture hostile to people without homes in the city, for whom the park has long been an important refuge.
The most fiery debates around the park, though, have focused on tree removal plans. The group Keep the Park Green objected to the city’s original decision to reduce the number of trees in the park, and lobbied for a ballot measure to cancel the redesign. In January 2019, the City Council declined to put it to a vote.
The plans were threatened again in March 2019, when a group of local property owners filed a lawsuit asserting that the city’s work permit for the park had expired, in hopes of blocking construction that summer. A judge ruled that the city could proceed, clearing the way for the renovations.
The ecology of the new park was integral to its design, Wight said; the city planted 22 new trees to replace some of the park’s older canopy — bringing the total number of trees to 48, a higher number than in original plans, and just three fewer trees than before the renovations began. More than a thousand new shrubs and perennials were planted in the park and its rain gardens, which will help to manage stormwater runoff.
Also arriving in the park is Burlington’s first 24-hour, year-round public bathroom. Particularly since the closure of the downtown mall, the city has a real scarcity of bathrooms, an annoyance for tourists and a more serious concern for the city’s people without housing. Previous park bathrooms have been open only seasonally, and the few stores with public bathrooms are limited to business hours.
Wight said the new bathroom, a one-stall public toilet, will “theoretically” will be open 365 days a year, with some challenges when temperatures are subzero. It will be a test run for the city, she said, which is considering adding more public restrooms elsewhere.
All that remained on Thursday, Wight said, were some finishing touches: Signs reminding park visitors to wear masks and remain distant, and some final construction cleanup. She was “thrilled,” she said, for the park to open up again.
