 We have three. Hi, welcome to CCTV Channel 17 Live at 525. It's the Preservation Burlington Show. Preservation Burlington is a non-profit 501C3 organization. Our mission is to preserve and protect the historic architecture and livability of Burlington through education and advocacy. I want to thank everybody for joining us this month. As usual, Lisa and I are co-hosting the show tonight. And we have some folks from Champlain College, Vandora and Lily, and we'll get more into... We're partnering up in a program, right? So we're going to talk about that tonight. It's going to be really cool. I mean, you guys have done all the heavy lifting. Yeah, well, it's easy for you to say. Well, it's amazing. I can't wait to talk about it. But we're winding down for the season, right? What do we have going on? We've got one more big event planned, and that is our Lakeview Cemetery Tour on Saturday, this coming Saturday. The 28th of October at 10 a.m. And so that's going to be... Well, fingers crossed, the weather's going to be good because we got rained out last week. We had to postpone. But we've got some folks coming from the General Standards Society to talk about General Standard and his legacy and anniversary events that they're planning right now. And we've also got somebody coming to talk about General Otis Howard, right? General Otis Howard. Okay. Well, I live in one of the Howard houses from Burlington. And I don't know how he relates to General Otis. Maybe we can figure that out by Saturday. I'll learn that on Saturday. It'll be good. It'll be a fun event. I always love Lakeview Cemetery. It's beautiful. As long as the weather's great, you can see the lake, and it's like one of those turn of the century... Park-like cemeteries. Yeah, which is always pretty neat. Yeah, it's a beautiful place. Lots of history, lots of great characters, and there are lots of stories. Some good, some bad, some a little rascal-ish. Yeah, so we've got that, and we had our annual awards this past week. Celebration, and that was great, so... Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Carolyn Bates, who does all our photography for all of our events and the homestore and everything, she's putting out three volumes of a new book called Burlington Murals. Volume one is out, and it's just pretty neat because she's very excited and animated about the whole thing, and she's been meeting all these artists and researching by-gone murals, and it's pretty neat. And current ones too, yeah. Yeah. And Carolyn, we have to give Carolyn a shout-out because our featured speaker had to cancel unexpectedly. Yes. Unfortunately, and Carolyn stepped up at a moment's notice and regaled the audience with stories about her books. Like, I had no idea Burlington had so many street murals, let alone three volumes worth, right? Right. So they were really fascinating, and she knows every artist's name, where every mural is. Chase them all down. Oh, she was just like, it was great. Yeah, yeah, it was really fun. It was really nice of her. So introduce yourselves. Okay, sure. Well, hello, everyone. I'm Vandora Williams, a professor at Champlain College, also the assistant dean for administration in the Division of Communication and Creative Media, but for your purposes here. I am the faculty that is part of the grant and project on Urban Renewal, which is, I believe, what we're here to talk about. Yes, there you are. Who are you? I'm Lily Sakiniwa. I am a recent Champlain College graduate, and I have been working on this project along with Dr. Williams. I've been responsible for putting together the documentary that's going to be coming out at the end of November. And I've also done some stuff with some podcasting around the topics. So, yeah, that's awesome. Well, welcome to our little show. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. And it's exciting, because we were invited by Champlain College to be the community partner in this grant. It's not an NEH grant. What's the grant? So the grant is from the Council on Independent Colleges, Public Humanities, Grant Public Humanities Research for Good. Grant. It's a very long name, but it's basically, we were awarded a grant to use, to connect students to these special collections at their college institutions, and to do some sort of public project with it. So, working with Erica Donis, the Special Collections Archivist at the time, we went into the Special Archives to see, you know, well, what can we do? What's here? And she, Erica was wonderful. She pulled out so much of it. So much, yeah. Right. How did you choose this? Sort of my happy place. Yeah, it's classic. Right. And I was like, well, what can be compelling and what story is there that they have? And I looked at the urban renewal and looking at what was, how Burlington had changed over time under the urban renewal policies. And I was like, okay, this is a good one to use and to get the students connected with it. So, that was sort of the genesis of it. It's neat because that's such, and you'll be able to tell us more than anybody right now, but it's such a, it's an ongoing Yes. Discussion. Issue, discussion process. I mean, as they're still doing work in that area, you know, it's just this evolution now that was sort of kick started for, in my opinion, the wrong reasons, you know, but maybe I'm wrong. So, but yeah, so I thought when I heard that that's what you were interested in, I was just like really excited to be a part of it. And I think it's like, and again, that's a part of Burlington that we've, you know, the original part, the neighborhoods that were there are lost, you know. So we try to tell that story as best we can. But you dove deeper into it. So how did you come to the idea of urban renewal and researching that? So I think that when I first started working on this project, I kind of, I started as, for my kind of final senior project at Champlain, I'll do like a capstone project. So that's how I got involved with this. And I think the idea of working within the framework of urban renewal was always there. It was more so my choice to kind of be like, all right, you get to decide exactly how you want to tell this story and through like what lens you want to show people. So, you know, like Dr. Williams said, I was working really closely with Erica, who was, you know, just giving me all sorts of really good avenues to explore and go down. And I really just kind of connected with the idea of, you know, people like having this really amazing kind of self-built community that was meeting all of the needs and taking care of all of the people that were there, kind of like on its own without any outside help or support. And having that, having something so like beautiful and natural be just like taken away for something, you know, that didn't even really, you know, in theory, there were a lot of like big ideas and some of them were great. Some of them maybe weren't so well thought out, but in the end, it still doesn't really take away from the fact that we lost something really great and people should know about that. Yeah, these neighborhoods were like little miniature towns within the town, you know, and you're right, it was erased for a vague notion that, you know, it's arguable whether it was ever achieved or, you know, I mean, that's a truism around the country, right? It's not unique to Burlington. Oh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, that's a great way of saying that in my past life as a journalist, I did in Norfolk, Virginia, I came across the same thing, the same themes of a neighborhood that was vibrant and it was meeting all of the needs of the community and the city and then it's like, we need to, you know, urban renewal, we need to revitalize everything and the revitalization was basically destruction, right? So I started to see some of those similar themes here in Vermont and I was like, well, what does that look like here? So we were able to, I think Lilly really found a great story in what that looks like in Vermont and what's, you know, what was lost there. So I don't want to give away too much because we have to come to the local history event. Right, right, right. We want people to still come to that. It's a little, it's just a little tease, just a little tease, but it's, I think it's just fascinating where we're able to tell this story and show how a federal policy, how city and state and federal policies that are meant to help or assist communities to, you know, help them in their physical structures and how that policy just turned into something that really destroyed lives, which was not intended. And in every community, it may look slightly different, but the same result. The dynamic is the same and then the end results are often the same, you know, and it was like, and you're right, it's not some mean conspiracy or anything like that. It's just this, again, vague notion, this well-wishing, this is like, oh, look at these communities. We want to do this thing that's going to be so much better. And then sometimes something like our one-story mall was there for a long time, you know, because I guess we needed another one-story mall. You know, but yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're telling the story. I know there's the documentary and I've got a preview of that and I think it's like, hey, you did an amazing job and everybody should come on the 30th. The local history events at Champlain College are always fun. It's always a big deal and it's always fun. I have a second question for you, but so with the documentary, you mentioned a podcast. So how did you decide to share this information? How did the podcast work out in the documentary? Yeah, totally. So I think the way I decided to do it was in my podcast, because podcasts, obviously, are something that, you know, or mainly you can't really see it, it's mostly you listen to it and that's a really unique opportunity to kind of really, what am I trying to say, activate your imagination, I guess I'm trying to say, like you really can submerge yourself in just like the world of what, you know, the little Italy neighborhood, which is the neighborhood that we focus on, was what it was like, you know, back in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, you know, when it was a thriving and vibrant community. Nice cool picture. Oh, there it is. Yes, but so yeah, I really wanted to use the kind of podcast medium to allow people to listen and you know, figure out what it's been like to walk down the street and hear what people were saying or, you know, what was like, what the kids were doing and fun things like that and so we really kind of used it as an opportunity to explore the more personal side of, you know, the people that were impacted and the lives that were, not just, you know, lives as in people, but you know, the livelihoods that were lost, people had businesses there, they set up their whole lives there and things like that. So having all those things taken away from you is something that's incredibly difficult. So it was really cool to be able to give people a way to learn all those cool things but also use their imagination and be able to kind of imagine what it would have been like and so, and then for the documentary, I kind of wanted to definitely still talk about that aspect of it but focus a little bit more on the kind of gap that we see between kind of government federal agencies trying to figure out from the top down, okay, well, what do we think communities should look like versus the people who are actually there living there every single day and just that kind of disconnect between the two. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm curious, you know, what were your resources? Where did your research lead you? Who did you talk to as you were starting to assemble this documentary? Well, I talked to a lot of really good people for this project, so I was very lucky I found a lot of great sources. I did a lot of my research components through the Champlain College Archives, I utilized the UVM archives, the Vermont State Archives, I found a lot of great stuff there. I was able to find some people who still live in the around Burlington today. Monica Farrington specifically, she lived in the Little Italy community when she was growing up. Her whole family lived there as well. I talked to John Vercione, who also his family, he grew up there. They were living in the Little Italy neighborhood when urban renewal happened, so they had a lot of, you know, very impactful things to share. I also was able to talk to some people like Pat Robbins, who was, you know, a brilliant architect and designer. I'm pretty sure that's why he designed the Church Street. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just getting his opinion on, you know, how government worked then and kind of, you know, the behind the scenes of, like, how decisions were made and understanding a little bit more of that process and that side of that story. I also spoke with Brennan Kellacher, who's so knowledgeable on the topic. He's written so many amazing papers about Burlington and Monuski in general, so he had a lot of great things to share. And I've talked to so many people, but yeah, yeah. See, we've got some pictures that you brought cycling through. Can you talk about those a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So this is actually a picture of Monica's family. This was right after a wedding and they got married at their house, which was on South Champlain Street, one of the streets in the urban renewal area, which, and I just love this picture because it shows just, you know, how many fun things happened and how many people's lives were lived in this neighborhood. People got married there, you know? What years do these... Well, this is a different one. What span of years did you find? So these are probably from the, anywhere from the 40s to like the late 50s, I would say. And this picture is cool. I found, I included some from what would have been Horizon Tower, one of the kind of newer, more modern buildings that they wanted to bring into now. This one never came to fruition, right? No, yeah, it did not come to fruition, which is a, you know, kind of another interesting aspect of this work. And another example of the top-down, you know, this is what the new New England is going to look like. This is what you need. Right, exactly, exactly. A tower. Yes, yeah. This is John's family, so... Nice. Yeah. I'm loving the shoes, though. Yeah, I know, I know. The outfits. We really... Halloween's coming up! Yes, yes. Is that South Champlain? This is the corner of, yeah, North Champlain Street and Bank Street, yes. So I've included somewhere in here there are some before and after pictures of the streets. So this is College Street. And it's also just, you know, for me, having lived in Burlington for only a couple of years, it's just so amazing to know that, like, it even looked like this at one point, you know what I mean? Like, and this is some of the aftermath of after the destruction happened. Sort of in process of just erasing the neighborhood. Yes, absolutely. With high hopes of a giant tower. Mm-hmm. Because you just tell dramatic that is. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. This was a local market in the neighborhood. It's Morola's. Yes, yeah, Morola's. It moved up to North Ave. Oh, really? For a while. Yeah. Not there anymore. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So I'm sure you've talked a little bit about it. You came across tons and tons of research and material and sources. How did you decide what to leave in and what to leave out? Well, there's a volume two and a volume three. Is there a sequel? Well, there could be, for real. Yes. But so that, you know, that was definitely one of the hardest parts, I think, when we were first figuring out. Yes. I think Dr. Williams started, she was like, all right, it'll be 10 minutes. And then I came back and she was like, all right, we can make it 15 now. And then I came back and she was like, okay, maybe 20, 20 is the most. Right, right. Ended up being. It's actually about in total 18 minutes. Okay. And that includes the credits, so I think that sounds bad. That's pretty good, yeah, that's pretty hard to achieve. I know sitting at some of the meetings, planning for the event for the 30th, you know, we're trying to parse out who gets what time for what. And you know, you don't want to you don't want to shortchange anything. You had fellow students that did other components, right? What were some of those? Yes, so we, in the spring, we asked, we partnered with another liberal arts class and it was called Urban Sonic Placemaking. And so the students were just, you know, they're all about looking at sound and how to incorporate that into what they're learning. So we said, you know, we went to the professor and said, you know, an assignment maybe, one or two around urban renewal and what does it sound like? Right? Or the sounds of the city and how it has changed from one neighborhood to the next. So, and I think the students loved that. They went overboard and the students created an album. Oh, wow. And we even have, I think, a song that was absolutely brilliant and very, very clever. So. Was that the one about the restaurant? Was that, I liked that one. Single pebble. I do remember that one. Yes. Single pebble. Yes. My family loves the single pebble. So, yeah, there were several songs and just sound effects and everything on that particular album, which I think the students really enjoyed. And it was, again, one of the goals to connect the students with the special collections research and then interpreting that into the tools that they wanted to. So, that was one class and then we had the photography class where students went to take pictures and looking at the different architecture, looking at the physical structure of the city based on the urban renewal parts and the old parts and the story there. What can we learn from that? So, those were the two classes that we did that worked on it in the spring. So, at the local history event, we're going to exhibit some of those photos and the songs and the sound effects as well. Yeah, that's going to be fun. I like the fact that, you know, in seeing some of their work, you know, it was mostly based on current conditions, right? So, what's there now? You know, and when you, like you said, juxtaposition, when you put that next to all your research, it's powerful to see every, the story you're telling and then to see what's there now and then, once again, you know, there's another tower that's going to go up and it, maybe it's great, maybe who knows, you know, it's better than nothing, right, better than the pit. But, you know, it's just such connections. It's not just the physicality and the sound, but also the voices and the story. So, it was really wonderful to bring all of that together to say, you know, this wasn't any place that you go to. It's not just rocks and cement and there's a story here. There are lives, right? There's, there's something that was created. There's culture there that you don't know about and perhaps you should learn about that. Because, at least, my ulterior motive, right, history matters, you know. Thank you for saying that. So, where, where does it go from here? I mean, you've done the documentary, you're unveiling and you're, we're having this event on November 30th. Where does it go from here? Well, I will encourage Lily to submit her documentary to some film festivals. We're also going to submit it to Vermont PBS and I believe they may be of interest so that it will be a statewide broadcast. If, you know, I'm not going to, you know, push the envelope, but I'm hoping that, you know, they will definitely say yes with that. But also just to extend this type of project and it will live online for, for, for posterity, for others to work with. But other than that, I think it's up to the young people where, what do you want to do with that knowledge? You know, once you graduate, you know, if you become a reporter at a station or something like that, do you want to extend that knowledge and bring that into what, what you do every day. Whether it is in, in media or some other platform to have that real deep understanding of, of a place and respecting that, I think it's something important, but who knows? You know, maybe I don't know. But I, but I love, I love the, the openness to see where it will go. Yeah, for sure. And I think, rather than couragely, I think you should force her to submit it. But, that's fair. Yes. Congratulations. You've graduated, right? Yes, yeah. So what are your hopes with, I mean, so this was a really neat project. You pulled this whole thing together. Well, do you mean specifically? Not to put you on the spot. Oh, no, no. Specifically generally all of the above. Okay. Well, I agree, I think that, well, I agree with Dr. Williams, I think that it will be really cool to see what people make of this documentary and how they choose to, you know, take that information. I think it will be particularly interesting to see in the next couple of years as Burlington kind of develops with all the new kind of construction that's going on there. I think that will be one big area where I actually, after graduating, I did recently just take a job as a reporter. So, yeah, and I'm really loving being able to, like Dr. Williams said, use all of this kind of knowledge and like passion to really dig in and really understand. I've really, through this project, I've become very passionate about Vermont as a state and also our city just kind of understanding like not only how we got to where we are, but you know, where we can go from here. So I think it's really able to use that kind of passion to share important information about this kind of stuff with everybody, you know, that watches our channel. So it's cool that I'm really, I feel really lucky that I get to do that for people. So you like to tell stories? I do. I do like to tell stories. You like to do that research and then tell those stories. Yes, yes. Which is so important back to your comment, you know, I mean about history and just about our culture and you just said where we are now and how we got here and where we go from here. It's so important to, you know, to telling those elements from the past or future, making those connections because that is the one thing that people, you know, gets them interested, holds their interest, right? Right. And keeps their brains engaged. So storytelling is hugely important and how you tell the stories and who you tell them to really makes a difference. Right. Right. And telling the story of Urban Renewal hopefully will inform how they make decisions in the future. Yeah. Going to Wood, right? Right. We hope, but I think it's just really important that as I tell my students there's always a story, there's always a history to it. If you understand the history, your storytelling will be so much more stronger, much more informed and, you know, it will ignite your passion about what's been here and what is going to be here. Right. So always encouraging them through that because I'd never heard of Little Italy until we got that. I just knew, oh, okay, there's construction and they couldn't raise the funds to build the building, so it's just there. I didn't realize it was maybe 50 years in the making and still in the making. You know, there's something to be said about that. I know. That's quite a lot, but we won't go into that. Right. But that's interesting. That's the whole story and the backstory about all that. Yeah. Well, we also know that when less than positive things happen in communities, it tends to get buried and, you know, the stories sort of get pushed aside and it's really great to see them come to the forefront and humanize them so that people start caring again. Yes. And I posted about the event on social media. I don't know what social media is, but I did it and I said that, mistakes, mistakes are made, always made. Well, hopefully we learn from the, once we learn about the process where we got, how we made those decisions and made those mistakes and what are we going to do from here? That's the whole big thing, especially with this project and the documentary you put together, the active growth of what's trying to be created there, which is erasing something that erased something else. Yeah. You know, that's such a crazy process to watch and be part of, but just to be aware of that whole history of that is just so amazing. That's why this is important. You hit on those two two spots. One is the top down, sort of, we know what you need and what will help you mentality, as well as this sort of brushing aside and forgetting and so many people come in with a passion to serve their communities, this, that, and the other and then don't realize what was there, right? And we always have to keep looking back and people tend to forget that. So, Yeah. I love that where perhaps policymakers, even down at the local level, can learn to, you may, I see an area that you think needs revitalization or change before you make these decisions, ask the people that live there, you know, what do you need. This should be in their orientation packets. This should, should be. Perhaps in the you know, approaching it from the bottom up. What does that look like, right? And, and on a national level, that's, that's sort of been the stories of small, small communities, large communities where they've gone through this urban renewal process and it's always been the same as the top down and real destruction of some vibrant communities that have hurt the city in the future. Right. And keep hurting. Right. Yeah. That's really don't think there's much future, really thinking about the future, the tax base and what people bring to the table. Right. I think there's, there may be some, they're not really thinking deeply enough about that. About the community, about what the community wants and needs. Deep pockets, not deep community. Right. Yeah. That's a little bit of human nature. I don't, I'm going to go out on a limb here. In a bunch of years. I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so. I like that. I like that. Is it Pine Street and Champlain are going to be reconnected? I like that. Yes. You know? That was really the only thing about the mall that drove me crazy. I couldn't go straight through. I was like, you know? Right. Because I can never remember so I always hit it and then I have to turn. It's a big thing. That's, that's interesting that I don't want to keep going on and on. But one of the decisions were made. It was because of cars. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And removing structures just to make place for this new technology that keeps you mobile. Jane Jacobson, her arch enemy. What was his name? I just bought his book. He was the urbanist. It was all about cars and circumferential highways. And it'll come to me after the show is over. Of course. I just want to thank you guys. It's like where we've run out our clock because I can talk for another hour, but I can't wait till the 30th. Thank you. Thank you so much for all your work. It's been really fun being a part of this and being the community partner in Champlain College. I'm glad you're not the Invisible College anymore. Thank you. You guys are right there on the hill. Doing great things for that neighborhood and community. So thank you both for being here. Thank you so much. And we're going to put the event on the, on our website and a link to yours and all the information and highly encourage people to come out and see it. After the fact with your permission we'll share the documentary. Absolutely, absolutely. Like you said, we want to keep it going. Well, we want to keep it tight-lipped until the 30th. It's really good. It's really good. It really is. Yeah, he's got it. Yay. I'd like to thank everybody for tuning in to CCTV live at 525, Preservation Burlington. Thank our guests and always the community stuff is just so much fun. For more information on Burlington history, our tours and events, including the one coming up, or to get a marker for your historic house, go to preservationburlington.org and we'll see you next month. Thanks for watching.