Their steadfast home was a summer place in Heath, Mass., an old farmhouse Mark's family bought in the 1940s. His father was an Episcopalian minister, and the family moved around during Mark's childhood. Mark was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, the youngest of three sons of Elsom and Elizabeth Whitehead Eldridge. 'The planning director has to deal with that on a daily basis, and Mark did that well.' 'One of the things that makes Burlington a challenging place for a planning director is: We have not had, and still don't have, a consensus about how we should grow and develop as a city,' Clavelle said. Mark was not only an effective and forward-thinking city planner, according to people who worked with him, he was a kind and thoughtful person who stayed above the fray of politics. From left: Elizabeth, Thomas and Mark EldridgeДЄnother measure, the condominium conversion ordinance, protects tenants from displacement if their apartment is converted to a condo.An ordinance adopted under Mark's leadership, known as inclusionary zoning, requires that developments of a certain size include affordable housing. During his tenure, the city developed and implemented land-use and housing policies that recognized equity, inclusion and affordability as core tenets, according to former colleagues. Mark served as Burlington's director of planning and zoning for two decades, from 1985 to 2005.

'It couldn't have been a better environment to go,' she said. Mark died of multiple myeloma on December 27, 2021, Nancy said. The family held a 24-hour vigil by Mark's bedside for a week or so, with a Christmas tree placed at the foot of his bed. The Eldridges were together last year at Christmastime, a final gathering of the foursome in their home. That's what their daughter and son called the structure when they were kids growing up in the New North End. In the Eldridge family, the Burlington landmark is known as 'Daddy's boathouse,' said Mark's wife, Nancy Rockett Eldridge. It sits on a barge that was pushed from Texas to Burlington by a Lake Champlain Transportation vessel called Miss Piggy. The idea would come to fruition in 1988 with the opening of the Burlington Community Boathouse. 'The boathouse really was in the context of creating Burlington's waterfront,' Monte said. At the time, he was assistant director of the Community & Economic Development Office.

Michael Monte, now CEO of Champlain Housing Trust, recalled that meeting in the mayor's office nearly 40 years ago. Mark Eldridge (August 8, 1943-December 27, 2021), director of planning and zoning, had an idea: What about a floating boathouse, similar to a mobile opera house in Italy that bobbed up and down the coast of the Adriatic Sea? The proposed structure in Burlington, if built on a barge, could move to the site that would become the focus of a waterfront reimagined for public use. The city owned almost no land at the waterfront, yet department heads were considering its future and what might be possible at Burlington's western edge.

At a meeting in mayor Bernie Sanders' office in the mid-1980s, city officials were discussing the Burlington waterfront.

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