Burlington, VT

Burlington occupies a terraced ridge between Lake Champlain and the Winooski River falls, and that grade still organizes the center. The low waterfront holds Waterfront Park and the Burlington Greenway, an eight-mile paved shore route that connects South End neighborhoods, downtown, and the city’s northern edge before continuing as the Island Line Trail. Within Burlington it passes several waterfront parks; farther north, the Island Line reaches a Lake Champlain causeway and seasonal bicycle ferry toward the Champlain Islands. Several blocks uphill, the four pedestrian blocks of Church Street concentrate shops, restaurants, public gatherings, and street programs. East across the ridge, the University of Vermont and UVM Medical Center form a campus-and-hospital district above downtown. The sequence from lakefront to commercial core, university, and medical center places very different parts of Burlington life along the same east-west rise.

Water commerce established that pattern. The Champlain Canal opened in 1823, creating a continuous water route from Lake Champlain to the Hudson River and New York City. By 1830, Burlington had become a leading commercial and industrial center on the lake: shipping and mercantile activity clustered at the waterfront, civic and business life gathered around Church Street, and UVM occupied the ridge crest. Church Street later changed from a traffic corridor into public space one section at a time. Two central blocks closed to vehicles in 1980, the Marketplace opened on September 15, 1981, the Pearl Street block followed in 1994, and the City Hall block completed the present four-block pedestrian district in 2005.

Education, research, and medicine concentrate on the eastern side of central Burlington, serving the wider region. Founded in 1791, the university combines teaching and research on a campus immediately beside the hospital. In 2026, UVM Medical Center was Vermont’s academic medical center, a regional referral hospital for Vermont and northern New York, and the state’s only Level I trauma center. Downtown supports a different daily rhythm of retail, food, arts, and public events. The Marketplace calendar carries recurring programs onto the bricks, and the 2026 Burlington Discover Jazz Festival spread performances among Church Street, the Flynn, Waterfront Park, City Hall Park, and neighborhood venues. College Street and the hill between the lake and campus connect these institutional and public settings.

Municipal electricity adds another nationally significant layer to Burlington’s modern history. On September 1, 2014, Burlington Electric Department bought the 7.4-megawatt Winooski One hydroelectric facility. The purchase allowed the city utility to source 100 percent of its electricity from renewable generation, making Burlington the first U.S. city to reach that power-sourcing milestone. The milestone covers the municipal electric supply. Building heat and ground transportation remain separate parts of Burlington’s later Net Zero Energy roadmap. Winooski One remains a run-of-river plant between Burlington and Winooski, where three Kaplan turbines feed electricity directly into the city utility’s distribution system. A fish lift and riverside park occupy the same stretch of the river.