You won’t find it promoted in the official state tourism brochures, but Vermont is home to the “World’s Largest File Cabinet,” a rusty 40-foot-high tower of stacked filing cabinets welded together. The low-key art installation lives on a parking lot a few miles away from the University of Vermont. It turns out that Burlington architect and artist Bren Alvarez meant her piece to be the Leaning Tower of Bureaucracy. Her 2002 art piece was a statement mocking the local government for taking forever to build a proposed road project that was first discussed in 1965. Ironically, in 2020 the file cabinets needed to be moved 100 feet to make room for that same road project.
