Posts Tagged ‘Vermont’
apalling seething
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Day two in Burlington, Vermont. Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself found a great little diner in the downtown historic district – Henry’s – where we had a hearty Vermont breakfast (I had the “Lump” – two pancakes with bacon and eggs sandwiched between them) and a gallon or so of hot coffee. We had two destinations picked out, neither of which we knew too much about. Our overriding goal for this vacation – the first we’ve had since Covid began – was to spend as much time outside and exposed to nature as we could possibly manage. Last week, I described the northern peninsular area that defines Burlington’s interface with Lake Champlain – the Intervale – where the Ethan Allen Homestead and the Winooski River can be found.
On the southern end of Burlington is Shelburne, and Shelburne Farms. It’s about a 20-30 minute drive from Downtown Burlington, and offers not just hiking trails but also a dairy farm and several other working fields.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Now – as mentioned – I had no idea what this place was going to offer, and when the view above popped up – my first statement was “Who the hell were these Shelburne people”? That castle pictured above is the barn. We came here for the odd chance that Our Lady of the Pentacle might be able to interact with farm animals, and whereas I knew in advance that this nearly 1,400 square acres property (that’s nine Sunnyside Yards, Queens peeps) was operated by a non profit, I wasn’t expecting to see a megalithic example of late 19th century Queen Anne Tudor Revival architecture.
Who built this place? Who were they? I had already begun to do the math on this as we walked along the curiously meandering and perfectly sited pathway cut into the grass. Had to be railroad, thought I. Maybe timber, but probably railroad. They also had somebody noteworthy lay this place out… Everything was “just so” and placed exactly where it should be, and the path placements seemed intuitive somehow. The logic indicating you should go one way or another seemed familiar to me. Hmmm…
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Let’s start with the Bridegroom, who was an extremely impressive fellow but the less important member of the family who built this place. Actually, a less important family would be a more accurate way to describe the situation, but it’s hard to look down your nose at the Webbs. William Seward Webb studied undergraduate medicine in Europe and graduated from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1875. A wealthy and distinguished family were the Webbs, and his siblings include railroad executives, Yale lawyers, and even Civil War General Alexander Stewart Webb. His grandfather was a member of George Washington’s staff. Another line of his family is connected to the Dutch era of NYC. They were highly placed and respected members of NYC society.
Saying that, Webb still married well.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It all started on Staten Island in 1794. The farm boy was born into dire poverty and started working as a child on shallow two mast cargo boats called Periaugers that would carry goods and passengers back and forth from Pike Slip in Manhattan to St. George on Staten Island. In 1810, the farm boy borrowed $100 from his mother to buy his own boat. By the 1850’s, the farm boy controlled every boat in NY Harbor in one way or another, and via the Erie Canal – a significant amount of the shipping activity on the Hudson River and Great Lakes. When the farm boy died, in 1877 – two years after William Seward Webb graduated medical school, he had amassed a fortune of more than $100 million. He had also started a rather successful rail road business. That’s about two billion dollars in modern money, incidentally.
That farm boy was Cornelius Vanderbilt, aka the Commodore. William Seward Webb married his granddaughter – Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It seems that the Webb/Vanderbilt union was a happy and productive one, with four children. Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb inherited ten million dollars from her grandfather’s estate, and used her financial largesse in pursuance of creating Shelburne Farms. The overall property is just under 1,400 acres, which involved the buying and incorporation of dozens of smaller farms into a single property. They closed public roads, turning them into internal lanes, and hired architect Robert Henderson Robertson to design and build the grandiose structures on the property. For the landscape and overall design of part of the property – covering about 3,800 square acres, they hired Frederick Law Olmstead – the designer of Central Park in Manhattan.
Shelburne Farms is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is a National Historic Landmark District.
Holy smokes, we just came here in the hope of petting some goats and possibly milking a cow. We somehow blundered our way into a Vanderbilt mansion.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Incorporated as a non profit educational organization in 1972 by the Webb’s descendants, Shelburne Farms is open to the public for recreational and educational pursuits and they have all sorts of programming going on here during normal times. I was told they do fairs here, and you can theoretically book sections of it for private events like weddings.
Seriously, last thing I expected to find myself doing in Burlington was considering… Staten Island…
More tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
doubly potent
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
They’re not exactly hurting for scenery up there in Vermont, I tell’s ya.
At the end of College Street, right on the waterfront, is a boathouse which tenants a bar/restaurant sort of situation. They do cocktails and lobster rolls, burgers and beers, that sort of place. Most importantly, Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself were able to grab a table and a couple of chairs and just reflect on what was a very fun day wherein we had experienced 3-4 different weather forecasts within 12 hours.
We were tired from what ended up being about 15 miles of walking.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Doesn’t sound like a lot of walking, 15 miles. Saying that, I spend all of my time on the mostly flat tidal plain that NYC is embedded onto. I grew up in a gray area of Canarsie and Flatlands, which was right next door to Flatbush. Notice how the word “flat” keeps coming up? In Burlington, getting to the next corner could involve walking up an inclined street to get to an intersection that is fifty or sixty feet higher in elevation than the one you started on.
It would have been nice to have some sort of personal transportation, but when we needed to get someplace distant, ride share LYFT cars were never too far away and even our longest ride fare never broke past $20 before tip.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Burlington is immaculate. That’s something I kept on noticing. Street litter is largely nonexistent. There’s also a paucity of, but still some, graffiti. Most of the graffiti observed adjured the reader to love themselves, and others. Real hippy dippy messaging, if you know what I mean. People I talked to were aware of combined sewers and that street garbage would inevitably end up in Lake Champlain so they made an effort to keep that from happening. There were litter bins – garbage AND recycling – on every corner. The air was clean and fresh, you didn’t smell rotting garbage or standing water. There was no sound of fart cars, or police helicopters, or anything like the constant standing wall of buzzing noise offered by NYC.
Could you live here?
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The biggest local employers are a company that has taken over functions at an old IBM factory in Essex Junction, which is where we debarked from the Amtrak “Vermonter” line train. That’s where the money is, I’m told. The other big employers are the colleges – University of Vermont and Champlain College. Burlington is surrounded by farm country, as in a little more than half hour drive from the city center and you’re looking at cows and horses. An hour out and you’re deep in “the country.” A significant number of Vermont natives live in deep poverty. There’s no more than 643,503 people in the entire state, according to the 2020 census, and the average median income for a hypothetical family of four would be about $53,000. Remember, that’s median, so 53k is the 50% mark with half of those six hundred forty three thousand souls earning far less.
Population wise, Vermont is the second least populous state after Wyoming. That means that your vote for National Office holders like Congressman or Senator really counts. As far as income rank, that 53k median mentioned above makes it the 28th most wealthy state – per capita.
By the way, if the fact that 53k for a family of four puts you in the middle of the income chart for the USA doesn’t scare the hell out of you and make you rethink what you think you know about economics, I think you should talk to your doctor about getting on some kind of pill.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Burlington enjoys a hot summer version of a continental climate, with average temperature ranging between 20 degrees Fahrenheit in January to 72 degrees in July. They get outlier days, of course, but those are the averages as offered by the government meteorological types. Despite the northern latitude, they don’t seem to get as much snow as you’d imagine. An average of 37.5 inches of precipitation falls annually on Burlington. That’s around ten inches less than New York City gets these days, actually.
Politically speaking, Burlington is far to the left of New York City – it’s Bernie Sanders’ home base, after all. The City operates on 100% renewable power, solar panels are installed everywhere, there are generating windmills, the place is squeaky clean and mostly litter free.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The answer is that yes, you could live here and have a pretty ok life, and obviously so if you’re in the upper income percentile over 53k per year. The median cost for a house in the City of Burlington is about 131k. The price of housing drops off the further away you go, of course. There are real steals available in farm country, and living fifty miles outside of the center doesn’t mean the same thing in Vermont that it does in NYC. In NYC and its exurbs, it can take you two hours to go 5 miles, even on the highways. An hour drive in Vermont can find you living in a vernal paradise of barely populated and quite aboriginal woodlands. The trick is finding a way to move there with the salary you’re earning in NYC.
Woof. Back next week with more pics and stories from Vermont. Vermont was, of course, just one of the places I’ve been to in September. It’s been a wild ride, lords and ladies.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
waxen mask
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Welcome back to a travelogue of a series of adventures experienced in the month of September, wherein an Amtrak rail pass was utilized to visit several other cities in the northeastern section of the USA. This section details a 72 hour interval spent in Burlington, Vermont. There are two other posts preceding this one, and this is hardly the last Burlington one.
Pictured above is the summit of Church Street, where the Unitarian Church (aka the Brick Meeting House) has towered over the City of Burlington since 1817. The original bell for this church was cast by Paul Revere, and its steeple was replaced in 1958 after a lightning strike caused catastrophic damage to the original model. Worshippers who call this building home are the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, Vermont.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Church Street Marketplace is a pedestrianized four block open air shopping district, and has been since 1981, one which is encapsulated by a larger Burlington Historic District. The shot above looks down the hill from the properties of the Unitarian Church, at the intersection of Pearl and Church Streets. The ornate building on the left is an apartment building, the one on the right is a Masonic temple.
There are a few national chains located here – CVS, LL Bean, that sort of thing. A series of locally owned shops, selling all sorts of stuff you probably don’t need but want, await shoppers. There’s also a series of restaurants and bars, and at the bottom of the hill is Burlington City Hall.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Apparently, a former Mayor of Burlington back in the 1960’s hated commercial signage impinging on and hanging over the public way so the City has strict laws about such matters. There’s all sorts of rules that apply to you in this particular area that are ignored or don’t apply just a couple of blocks away. No smoking or radio playing, for instance. There was a not insignificant number of homeless people and or junkies milling about in this area, panhandling. Everybody has to make a living, I guess.
Saying that, the Burlington Police Department and municipal government seemed to practice a somewhat lighter touch than the NYPD and NYC would regarding this particular population. It’s not a difference of scale, either, both law enforcement and other municipal employees were personally witnessed by me as being respectful and kind towards the street people. Maybe they kick the crap out of them somewhere else that the tourists can’t see, like NYC does, but I didn’t sense that sort of move as being the local modus operandi.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a lot of New England goodness in Burlington, and I could have spent days wandering the streets and marveling at sights like the Flynn Theater Marquis pictured above. Officially known as “The Flynn” in modernity, this theater complex opened in 1930 and presented both Vaudeville Shows and movies. It was renovated, restored, and reopened in 1981, and serves Burlington as a live music and theater venue for several groups, including the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. The Art Deco Societies of America lists the restoration of the Flynn as being one of the 10 most important restoration projects in the entire country.
The hour was growing late on our first day in Burlington, so Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself made a right on College Street and headed down the hill towards the shoreline of Lake Champlain where we had spotted a waterfront cocktail establishment earlier in the day. Sunset was coming.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the side of the 1840 built Follett House at 63 College Street pictured above, which we passed on the way to get our sunset drink. It’s the last of a line of Greek revival mansions which once overlooked the water from the ridge it sits on, and was built by a wealthy Real Estate and Railroad Executive named Timothy Follett. It’s on the register of National Historic Places too, but that seems to be old hat for Burlington.
I try to maintain a nearly military schedule when traveling, incidentally, one which is the utter opposite of my night owl NYC persona. I wake up early, often before sunrise, and am showered/dressed/walking out of the door by 6:30 – 7:00 a.m. In the rest of the country, breakfast fare is not served after ten in the morning, you’ve got a ninety minute interval for lunch that starts at 11:30, and they start rolling up the sidewalks by about an hour after sunset so if you don’t eat dinner by seven or so – it’s a microwave burrito at a gas station convenience store for you.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
We finished our first full day in Burlington therefore quite petered out, and a couple of pints of beer were gladly quaffed. We had done the waterfront walking trails heading north, swung through and took a look at Lakeview Cemetery, visited the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum and its trails, visited Church Street, and now we were going to wind down Day One with a drink while watching the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself descend.
Tomorrow – sunset at Lake Champlain.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
immemorial lore
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
As mentioned yesterday, Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself recently spent 72 hours in Burlington, Vermont after arriving here on Amtrak’s “Vermonter” line. Our desire involved being outside as much as possible, and one of the three big outdoor excursions we embarked upon was a visit to the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum on the north side of Burlington. The land here is often referred to as the Intervale, I’m told, and it was home to a Native American culture called the Abenaki. Ethan Allen was a Connecticut native who became a backwoodsman and settled on the Intervale in the late 1780’s. He was the leader of the Green Mountain Boys during the American Revolution, and is credited with leading the capture of Britain’s Fort Ticonderoga. That’s his house, pictured above.
The Intervale property operates as a public space today, has a display of an Abenaki camp, and there are miles and miles of groomed trails which you can explore. Just as we arrived, that rain storm brewing on the New York side of Lake Champlain mentioned yesterday arrived and we sheltered in a camping area for about 20 minutes while it blew through. I cannot possibly describe how utterly delicious the air smelled after the rain with all of this wet vegetation around us.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Ethan Allen site’s northern side is defined by the Winooski river, a meandering and seemingly shallow river that flows down out of the Green Mountains into Lake Champlain. It’s alternately called the “Onion River” and that’s sort of what “Winooski” translates to in the native tongue of the Abenaki. It’s ultimately about 90 miles long, and the prevailing view amongst the geology crowd offers that it predates the Green Mountains themselves, meaning that this “antecedent river” was flowing as the mountains grew around it.
Vermont is seriously interesting. If the winters weren’t so brutal, I’d have long ago moved away from New York City to Vermont.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Our Lady was occupying herself with observations of woodchucks and other animal life, whereas a humble narrator was instead making himself busy with the tripod and the camera. A raucous cacophony of bird song and cicada buzzing was hanging in the air, which had turned a bit warmer as the rain storm continued eastwards and the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself appeared from its occlusion. There was still a not insignificant amount of wind.
I didn’t get the shot of them, since I was set up for a longish exposure with an ND filter on my lens, but of a murder of what had to be five or six dozen crows were spotted. KRAWWW!
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The Intervale grounds at Ethan Allen Homestead, which I’d love to explore in depth sometime, offered somewhat manicured paths for visitors. A variety of landscapes are offered along this path, sometimes woodland like the one above, others are cultivated farm fields. There was a working farm there, and a field or two that were in fallow phases.
As a City boy, it would be folly for me to try to understand land management in this sort of circumstance.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One last shot from the Intervale, and this is about when Our Lady and I decided to move onto our next destination and luncheon in the City center of Burlington. The center of things, where the Burlington City Hall and governmental center is found, is called Church Street. The idea for pedestrianizing Church Street goes back to 1958, but it was accomplished in 1981. Church Street Marketplace, as it’s known, sits in the Church Street historic district of Burlington.
We got around in Burlington using ride share services, specifically Lyft. It took about 20 minutes for a car to come get us and then drop us off nearby Burlington City Hall.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
There’s a series of local shops, and national chain stores too, at Church Street Marketplace. There’s also a series of bars and restaurants. Other than eating there, we had little interest at this particular moment in exploring the area (that happened on our last day in Burlington, which will be discussed in a subsequent post.)
One observation about Burlington that I’d offer is this – they don’t have much of a street litter problem. This is a very, very clean place. Church Street is where the homeless population of Burlington seems to gather, who are allowed to camp out in City Hall park overnight. The City Hall park also has a program going which offers free food to the hungry. The trademark physical consequences of heroin addiction was visible on the faces of many of the homeless here, but there was an entirely different vibe than the one you experience on the mean streets of NYC coming from them.
Back tomorrow with more.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
awed sessions
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Burlington, Vermont is found along the shoreline of Lake Champlain. You’re not terribly far (45 miles) from the National Border with Canada in Burlington, and it’s something like a two hour drive to get to Montreal. Burlington is a college town, with a large campus devoted to the University of Vermont and another to Champlain College. Just under 43,000 Americans call this city home, but Our Lady of the Pentacle and I were just visiting for a mere 72 hours.
Burlington has a feather in its cap, as it’s the first and only city in the entire United States to power its ambitions using renewable energy sources. Everywhere you look, there’s solar panels and wind turbines, and apparently the local power plant burns locally grown and farmed wood rather than fossil fuels to motivate the dynamos. It’s the home base of political superstar Bernie Sanders, who was Mayor of Burlington for an interval, and it was under his watch that the City transformed its post industrial decay into what it is now.
Look at that – the answer to all things isn’t “Luxury Condos,” and politicians who don’t just talk, they do.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
To the west, on what I believe to be the New York State side of Lake Champlain, storms were brewing. If you haven’t been to this part of the country before, it’s essentially a temperate rain forest. The mountains aren’t huge, but there are a lot of them, which means a lot of valleys too. When the sun rises, mist and fog do as well, which agglutinate into fairly unpredictable overhead weather. You experience distinct climatological conditions in Vermont depending on what time of day it is.
Our Lady of the Pentacle and myself desired to be outside, nevertheless, after our long hermitage during the Covid lockdowns. There’s a series of waterfront bike and pedestrian paths, created by the Sanders era urban renewal projects, along the Lake Champlain waterfront. We followed them.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One was intrigued by the various islands found in Lake Champlain, some of which are occupied, as I was told by some of the locals. Obviously, you need to have your own boat and dock to interact with the rest of the world, but what a splendid sense of isolation this sort of lifestyle must offer.
The rain building to the west was moving towards us, and we decided to move away from the waterfront on the way to our next destination.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Lakeview Cemetery was established in 1872, and several notable Vermonters are interred there. It’s officially a “Victorian Lawn Park” cemetery in design, and had that certain New England sort of stolidity encoded into every monument and planting. Beautifully maintained, like many cemeteries it was teeming with birds and bees and critters. Accidental island of green, cemeteries are.
Alongside those notables, lots of common folk are also buried here. I didn’t do a deep dive into research for Lakeview, since – as mentioned above – we were only going to be in town for 72 hours. Saying that, we were out of the hotel room every day in the early morning and didn’t come back until well after dark.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
That’s the Louisa Howard Chapel, a high Victorian gothic style chapel gifted to the city of Burlington by (notable) Louisa Howard. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places. One observation about this part of the country is that they don’t fool around when they’re building churches.
The Chapel is tiny, but it could probably bounce an artillery shell off of its stout walls and masonry. There are massive churches of every denomination here in Burlington and the surrounding towns which are – as the Brits would say – “gob smacking.” I could spend weeks and possibly months photographing them.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
In terms of the politicians actually “putting up or shutting up,” another thing that I can recommend about this northern city of just under 43,000 people is this – if you’re a refugee fleeing from some war torn situation, Burlington sets out its welcome mat for you. Vermont is one of the “whitest” states in the northeast, and Burlington’s population is something like 85% of European decent. When you see Middle Eastern or Far Eastern faces there, they kind of stick out. Casual chats with strangers revealed Afghani, Syrian, even West and North African inflected accents who described the new life they were experiencing in America and the generosity and kindness of the Vermonters when they arrived here. That’s the good stuff, I tell’s ya.
Tomorrow – more from the northlands.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
The Newtown Pentacle 