Pagoda Dogwood – Cornus alternifolia

The Robarge-Desautels Apartment House is a historic multi-unit residence at 54 North Champlain Street in Burlington, Vermont. Built about 1900, it is a well-preserved example of a Queen Anne style apartment house. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.^[1]

The Robarge-Desautels Apartment House stands on the east side of North Champlain Street in Burlington's Old North End neighborhood, a short way south of its junction with North Street. It is a long rectangular 2+1⁄2-story wood-frame structure, with a gabled roof augmented by long shed-roof dormers to provide a full living space in the attic level. Its vernacular Queen Anne features include gabled bracketed hoods over two of its entrances, which flank a central projecting polygonal bay. That bay is capped by a gable that projects beyond the corners of the bay. Along the right side there are two porches, one set above the entrance to the third-floor unit, the other two stories at the rear. In between is a polygonal bay.^[2]

The apartment house was built about 1900, during a building boom caused by Burlington's rapidly increasing demand for workers in its burgeoning lumber-related industries. It was built by John Robarge, a blacksmith who built several properties on North Champlain and nearby streets in an area that had formerly been a private estate. He used the building as a rental property, and in 1921 his widow sold it to Wilfred and Clara Desautels, who occupied one of its units for thirty years.^[2]

• National Register of Historic Places listings in Chittenden County, Vermont