[A] historic Winooski “mansion” will now get to keep its spot on the Vermont State Register of Historic Places — a reversal of a previous vote to delist the property that had to be re-evaluated because of a procedural error with the first vote.
The December decision by the Vermont Advisory Council on Historic Preservation was rescinded after it came to light that public notice wasn’t mailed out in time for Winooski residents to attend the original council meeting.
As a result, the first meeting saw little public commentary, and the council unanimously voted to delist the house, as per the request of Jeff Mongeon, the property’s owner.
Mongeon had proposed tearing down the early 19th-century home on the intersection of Main Street and Mansion Street in Winooski, and replacing it with a four-story, 75-unit apartment building — housing that he said the town badly needs. Two neighboring homes would also be demolished for the new building’s construction.
Mongeon has reportedly spent “hundreds of thousands” of dollars based on the original decision. While the mansion remaining on the registry does not bar new development, it will make it harder to complete the project as planned.
City regulations note that demolition of structures on the registry is prohibited unless prior approval is received from the Vermont Division of Historic Preservation, or a letter from a qualified historic preservation consultant shows the historical significance has been lost.
David Roy, an architect working with Mongeon on the proposal, noted that outside, the building has entirely new plastic siding, and inside, the house is divided into six apartment units — neither of which convey the building’s history. He said Winooski’s form-based code actually encourages this exact sort of development.
“You have a very heartfelt and emotional response to this property, and there is a historical narrative that we are planning to preserve,” Roy said.
To stay on the register, a property has to meet two criteria: it has to have historical significance, and the building’s physical integrity must convey that significance.
Devin Colman, state architectural historian for the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, laid out a number of areas in which the house has historical significance — agriculture, architecture, government, religion, industry, and ethnic heritage — but his determination was that none of those areas’ significance was directly related to the structure itself. As such, Colman recommended that the property be delisted.
“I work in historic preservation — we don’t take these things lightly,” Colman said. “But I kept running into the fact of ‘what is there today?’ The building as it exists does not reflect the historic narratives we’ve been talking about and the historic significance due to alterations and loss of architectural features and historic spaces over the decades.”
The mansion, built around 1803, was home to Francis Childs, a politician and close colleague of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. A number of concerned Winooski residents and historians voiced concerns at the meeting about delisting the home that they said has immense historic value to the town.
“Winooski has always been and still continues to be a very working-class community,” said Joe Perron, president of the Winooski Historical Society. “For this house to have survived, in a working class community, the boom and bust years around is really remarkable.”
“We’re depriving the future of a heritage in an attempt to make Burlington and Winooski the Manhattan and Brooklyn of the North,” said Merlin Atcomb of Burlington. “Places to eat and drink are the most ephemeral of enterprises.”
After several hours of discussion, the committee voted 4-1 to keep the mansion on the registry.
