April 23, 2026

Lighting Project Helps Downtown Thrive

In Montpelier, VT, the downtown is recovering from a natural disaster that struck more than two years ago. One linchpin of the rebound is the illumination of 10 downtown bridges over the river that inundated the city.

Beyond the lights themselves, downtown leaders worked to establish a new identity for the capital city as The City of Bridges.

The bridges crossing the Winooski River are lit every day from dusk until 10 or 11 p.m. depending on the season. The bridges around Langdon Street, a dining and retail destination, remain illuminated Thursday through Saturday until midnight.

"This project has brought so much light to our city, and it’s a beautiful reminder of what we can build when we come together," Vivian Ladd Tomasi, downtown’s bridge illumination coordinator, says.

Details on funding and promoting Montpelier’s downtown bridges appears in the April issue of Downtown Idea Exchange newsletter.

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Recommended Reading

Main Street Renewal: A Handbook for Citizens and
Public Officials

We are pleased to present, Roger Kemp’s highly regarded Main Street Renewal.

In its pages, Kemp has collected 44 articles with some of the best information available on small town economic development. He includes articles on:

• How to organize and manage economic development programs
• Tools for small-town economic development, and
• Case studies of economic development in action.

The case studies cover everything from specialty retailing as the focus for redevelopment, to bringing residential streets back to life, using plazas and public spaces to bring people downtown, lessons from suburban malls, using downtown’s infill development potential, and more.

The communities examined in the handbook are typically small, ranging in population from a few thousand in rural locations to over 50,000 in cities such as Santa Monica, CA, and West Palm Beach, FL. But the lessons they offer can be applied to communities of all sizes.

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Main Street Renewal is just one of the many books on Downtown Economic Development available from the Downtown Development Center.