Local and state officials joined Sen. Patrick Leahy in Burlington Monday to break ground on a new transit center.
The new transit center has been decades in the making. Numerous officials speaking at the windy groundbreaking ceremony made comments about the extensive planning process.
"I don't think I fully appreciated how some projects can take the life out of you," said Chapin Spencer, Burlington's public works director and a member of the board of the Chittenden County Transportation Authority.
"The groundbreaking ceremony today really was started, yes, three decades ago," Spencer said. "The original Cherry Street terminal, which was completed in 1981, was too small the day it opened."
Finding a place for a bus terminal in downtown Burlington proved difficult, and it only came together recently to put the transit center on Saint Paul Street, just around the corner from the Cherry Street terminal. The Catholic Diocese gave an easement for the project at the edge of the property that hosts the Church of the Immaculate Conception, across from L.L. Bean and the Burlington Town Center parking garage.
The transit center is part of a larger makeover along Cherry Street.
"It really began in some ways with the new hotel [Hotel Vermont] going in at the west end of Cherry Street," said Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger. "This is another major step in it."
The new L.L. Bean store connected to the mall was another major addition to Cherry Street, which has very little commercial frontage between Church Street and the waterfront.
Weinberger also talked about plans for a major overhaul of the Burlington Town Center, the mall that runs along Cherry Street toward Lake Champlain. A big component of that plan is to make it easier for pedestrians and bicyclists to pass through the block from the northern part of town down toward City Hall Park and Main Street. Currently, north-south travel in Burlington's downtown is only possible on three streets because St. Paul Street and Pine Street are both cut off by the mall.
The mall redevelopment and the transit center are part of a larger goal to make Cherry Street - and Burlington in general - more appealing to pedestrians.
"The great majority of the stretch of Cherry Street is not really a place that is appealing to walk or that causes much reason for people to come down it," Weinberger said.
"From my perspective, Cherry Street has the possibility of being one of the most important and exciting streets in Burlington." - Mayor Miro Weinberger
Despite its lack of appeal, Weinberger said Cherry Street has the potential to be a major attraction in Burlington.
"From my perspective, Cherry Street has the possibility of being one of the most important and exciting streets in Burlington," he said. "It is the connection between Church Street and the waterfront that has the least amount of slope and grade change, and I think it could be a great walking street and one that has wonderful vibrancy on it over time. That's not what it is today," he said, even with recent developments like the L.L. Bean and Hotel Vermont.
With the mall redevelopment in early planning stages and the transit center on the way, Weinberger imagines a very different street a few years from now.
"You'll go from this place where you have this kind of hulking parking garage looming over the street, no street life for hundreds and hundreds of feet of the street," he said. "You'll go to a place where there are restaurants with seating outside, where you can see things in the windows, where the streetscape itself has been completely redesigned."
