Main Street Landing: “Thirty years and counting”
Main Street Landing
Main Street Landing has been in business since 1982. We are entering our 30th year of being on Burlington’s Waterfront creating positive change. Thirty years ago the Burlington Waterfront was a place that most parents told their children to stay away from. It was full of rail tracks, barbed wire fencing, a scrap metal yard, grainery with a handsome rat population, empty brick buildings, and overgrown weeds and shrubs. Just imagine living in Burlington during that time and never going to the waterfront because it just wasn’t a place where people were supposed to go. The Union Station was then owned by The Green Mountain Power Company, and the Haigh Mill and McKenzie Buildings were abandoned. The Pease Grainery and McNeil Power Plant were still in operation, but soon to be closed down. The tall brick chimney at the Haigh Mill reached lonely into the sky as did the Pease Grain Tower. Both structures were considered historic although in disrepair. It took years before the City of Burlington would allow Main Street Landing to have them removed. They were icons of a time long ago when the Burlington Waterfront hosted Presidents and yachtsmen, children on sleds, and ladies in big hats arriving from New York by train or steamship.
The Burlington Waterfront fell into decay at the end of the majestic steamship and railroad era. Let us just look at the waterfront today. We have a Community SailingCenter, ECHO and the Leahy Science Center, a Skate Park, daycare, performing arts center, restaurants, bike path, park and boardwalk, beautiful trees and flowering shrubs, renovated historic buildings alive with commerce and retail, numerous visual arts venues, a tourist lake boating industry, and outdoor summer festivals that bring tens of thousands of people to the shores of Lake Champlain each year.
In just thirty short years, the Burlington Waterfront has been transformed into one of the top locations that tourists visit when coming to Vermont.
This next year – 2012 – is an exciting year for Main Street Landing. We are producing a 45-minute DVD on the History of Burlington’s Waterfront which takes our history show created in 1983 and updates it to present day. There is a wonderful historic narration that follows 600-historic images and supported by a beautiful musical sound track. Being premiered in February, 2012, at the Film House, we will also distribute the DVD to schools, libraries, and organizations interested in learning and teaching the rich and vibrant history of our Waterfront.
Main Street Landing’s Performing Arts Center in the Lake & College Building at Sixty Lake Street is a versatile and distinct daily rental facility. Mariah Riggs is its Director, and Ren Hall is the Daily Rental Dude who assists clients who utilize the daily rental spaces. There are seven spaces in the building that range from the state-of-the-art Film House with a capacity of 220 people to the intimate Board Room for meetings of thirty-five people or less. Main Street Landing strives to assist their daily clients with personalized professional care and diligent customer service. If you are planning a business meeting, art opening, conference, concert, dramatic play, or film screening, Main Street Landing has a space that will fit your needs. The Gallery is our new daily rental space that will feature changing artwork by local artists and is designed to be utilized for a wide-range of uses from meetings to events.
“Movies at Main Street Landing” is a new project which premiered on November 15th, 2011 with the Wizard of Oz to benefit the United Way of Chittenden County. We are bringing great cinema to the big screen for free to the people of the Burlington area. This is a weekly event every Tuesday night at 7 p.m. in the Film House at Sixty Lake Street. It is designed to benefit the people of the area both culturally and as a fundraising tool for local non-profits. We will work with a different non-profit each month. We create the established event, and they can shape it to fit their own vision. The film selection will focus on a different “theme of the month”. For example February is “A month with Oscar” and the movies that are scheduled are some of the most critically acclaimed films ever made like “Gone with the Wind”, and “The Godfather”. The movies are shown as they were intended in Dolby Digital surround sound and on a 25’ screen. This series is Main Street Landing’s way to foster cinematic appreciation in our community. Movies at Main Street Landing is about cultural enrichment – both through supporting charitable organizations, and also by bringing classic and great cinema-for-free to the Burlington citizenry.
This article was taken from vermontbiz.com