Burlington, Vermont officials on Tuesday celebrated the opening of the first phase of reuse of a former power plant on the Lake Champlain waterfront. The Moran Plant began operating in 1952 as a coal fired power plant. In 1977 it converted to burning wood chips until it was decommissioned in 1986. Since then, the hulking tiered structure has languished as redevelopment proposals stalled. In February 2020 the City Council approved a plan to strip the building down to its steel superstructure, now called the Moran Frame. Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger talked about the significance of opening the first phase of its redevelopment with WAMC’s North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley.
After a lot of work the first phase of the Moran Frame Project is complete and open to the public. And some of the details of that that people may not be aware of are that there’s new lighting. If you go by there at night it’s lit up in an exciting way. There are new walkways in and around the building that weren’t there just a few weeks ago. And the other thing that we’re announcing is that there’s a new organization called Friends of Frame which is starting up and which is going to ensure that we use that building in new and exciting ways going forward. And they’ve set up some additional swings that are a lot like the swings on, the popular swings on the boardwalk, but they have a little Moran twist to them. I do think the future of the Moran Frame is that it will be host of all sorts of exciting different arts events in the years to come. And this Friends of Frame group is going to be starting today, at New Year’s and then again throughout the spring and early summer going to be experimenting with a variety of different programming down there. And we have a design team that is going to be watching carefully and working with Friends of Frame and is already taking steps towards thinking through what a future phase of Moran Frame might be based on how some of those experiments work.
I know that this has been in the plans for a long time. What does this mean for the future of the waterfront as a whole to have this progressed this far with Moran?
It’s almost hard to remember, Pat, but I’m sure you do. Anyone who looks back at what the waterfront was in 2013 there’s been a huge transformation of the whole northern waterfront. The completion of the Moran Frame kind of marks the end of this chapter of rebuilding this waterfront, taking this post-industrial eyesore of an area and turning it into this active 21st century waterfront. Very little had been done on the northern waterfront prior to 2014. Now essentially everything from Waterfront Park to the Urban Reserve is complete. There could be more phases of it but we’ve basically finished this exciting chapter of restoring our waterfront.
And so if somebody goes down to Moran Plant tomorrow what can they do there?
It’s a park’s feature right now. You can walk through it. You can sit on the swings and kind of enjoy the lake. There’s a brand new waterworks park right next to this which is a great place to take kids or dogs. You know if you’ve never been down there a lot of people haven’t discovered this beautiful new park that the city has. In the warm weather months I think that you’re going to have all sorts of activities happening around there, the Moran Frame will be integrated into. The Sailing Center, the skate park, the new marina are all right around this structure. And as we go forward I think that there will be even more that can be done in and around the building. It will become a site of further events. And that’s what this Friends of Frame group is going to help us figure out is how to make sure that that happens
The budget for the Moran Frame was $6.55 million dollars, funded with $3.5 million from the city’s Waterfront Tax Increment Funding district and a $2 million loan from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Agency. The Burlington Electric Department provided $950,000 for environmental remediation of the site.
