Posts tagged ‘Lowell National Historical Park’

May 20th, 2013

Author Paul Theroux Reports on Lowell Visit for Barron’s Online

by PaulM

Acclaimed author Paul Theroux visited Lowell a few months ago on assignment from Barron’s online journal. The Medford native rode the train to Lowell, retracing his mother’s route to college in the late 1920s. She earned a teaching degree from Lowell Normal School. Theroux spent a day in Lowell, hosted by Deb Belanger of the Greater Merrimack Valley Visitors and Convention Bureau. The author of many notable travel books and other volumes was much impressed by the transformed textile-factory city. Read his descriptions and observations in a lengthy article released on May 18. 

It’s a city of reversals and, for that reason, a remarkable place of proud and engaged citizens–and quintessentially American. That certainly was the message of the most recent movie to be made in Lowell, Mark Wahlberg’s The Fighter (2010), about a Lowell boxer, “Irish” Micky Ward, battling his way back from the brink. Lowell has known the heights of fortune and the depths of economic depression. The mills were still spinning–three shifts in the Boott Mill, 24 hours a day, in 1928—when my mother was taking the one-mile walk from the station to Lowell Normal School, now the vastly expanded UMass-Lowell. Many mills were even spinning when Kerouac was a boy, as he recalls inThe Town and the City and Maggie Cassidy. But soon some transitioned to patent medicine, or munitions, or printing. Kerouac’s father, Alcide, ran a print shop here.

Paul Theroux (web photo by Jason Grow courtesy of online.barrons.com)

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May 17th, 2013

Historic Preservation and Cultural Heritage Awards

by PaulM

Congratulations to the recipients (see image above for names) of this year’s awards for exemplary work in historic preservation and cultural heritage conservation, including this blog’s executive editor, Dick Howe Jr. Well over 100 people attended the reception and ceremony for the honorees. This event has become one of the highlights of the year on the history front. Linked to the popular Doors Open Lowell program, now in its 12th year, the awards ceremony is an opportunity to call a time-out from the good work being done every day in the city so that a few outstanding persons and organizations can be recognized for excellence. It is important to encourage people to “do the right thing” when it comes to taking care of our distinctive place and special stories. Lowell National Historical Park Supt. Celeste Bernardo hosted the gathering in collaboration with the City of Lowell and Lowell Heritage Partnership.

Kudos to Sue Andrews for her fine work in organizing the awards event and for Lowell Historic Board Administrator Steve Stowell for making Doors Open Lowell one of the best preservation-advocacy programs in the Northeast.  One of the reasons Doors Open is a success is because it’s fun to visit the fascinating historic places on the list each year. Supt. Bernardo gave a well-deserved shout out to the Park’s Asst. Supt. Peter Aucella for his brilliant and tireless effort this year (and the past few years) to protect the Pawtucket Falls Dam from attempts by the local hydro-power company to alter the historic character of this unique structure that is fundamental to Lowell’s genesis story.

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May 12th, 2013

Art Night

by PaulM

Gates Block (web photo courtesy of LHS Photo)

The massive, exuberant crowd at the official opening of the Arts League of Lowell (ALL) Gallery confirmed again that art-making is one of the city’s top enterprises.  The spacious exhibition and sales gallery occupies most of the first floor of the Gates Block (1881), 307 Market Street, a prime example of a Victorian Commercial-style building that was built for Joshua Gates and Sons’ leather goods company, which thrived there until 1909. Before the Gates Block, Lowellians would find at this address Waugh and Nealy’s West India Goods Store, and later Entwhistle’s cotton machinery production firm. At some point a Greek newspaper was published at this location. More recently, Merrimack Rug and Linoleum held this building and the corner building at Market and Dutton. High-profile developer Nicholas Sarris of Lowell is renovating the four-story Gates Block as a multi-purpose arts center that will include artist studios on the upper floors.  (Read Kathleen Pierce’s 2012 article in the Boston Globe about the city’s re-energized visual arts scene.)

The gathering last night reminded me of another artists co-op, Art Alive!, whose dozens of members shared a gallery in a former fabric store on Merrimack Street across from St. Anne’s Church. The space was donated by Lowell National Historical Park until the non-historic building was removed.  Photographer Kevin Harkins and painters Janet Lambert-Moore and Richard Marion were at the opening last night, living links to Art Alive! of the early 1980s. The event last night was an Art Alive! happening times five, with a large percentage of ALL’s 200-plus members in attendance, along with friends; colleagues from Western Avenue Studios, The Brush Gallery, UnchARTed, 119 Gallery, Whistler House Museum of Art, and Zeitgeist; patrons of the arts, and familiar Lowell “culture vultures.” The place had a big-city buzz with live music, heaping food stations, and lots of talk. Around the back of the gallery is the new home of Steve Syverson’s Van Gogh’s Gear art-supplies shop, making this a convenient one-stop for viewing and loading up on paints, paper, and more.

One section of the gallery is a co-op space for sales by members who rent by the foot (there is a waiting list already), while another area is exhibition space. For the opening, the special exhibit featured works from private collections in the city (Martha Mayo, Jack Moynihan & Carolyn Walsh, Charles DeWan , Mary Ann Kearns & Walter Wright, Darren End & Bill Reedy, Enterprise Bank & Trust, and Gallagher & Cavanaugh). This was a brilliant decision, emphasizing the importance of patronage in sustaining fine arts in Lowell. The featured artists in the collectors’ show are numerous, from Meredith Fife Day and Lieby Miedema Bouchard to Tony Sampas and Jim Higgins.

Congratulations to everyone involved in turning an idea into reality. ALL has been persistent and inventive in its efforts to make a larger place for artists and art downtown. With this new home, the members have an opportunity to settle in and turn their full attention to making art instead of worrying where they may have to move to next. The gallery and studios will complement the Whistler House Museum of Art around the corner on Worthen Street. The Gates Block is destined to be a creative hot-spot. Lowell’s creative industries continue to grow. In the city, one can sense a synergy between the increase in creative places and the expansion of community gardening. I think these two movements are related and say much about people’s commitment to Lowell. The attitude is positive. The energy is locally generated. The outcomes feed us in important ways.

CategoryCulture, History, Lowell | Comment7 Comments »

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May 5th, 2013

‘Boarding House Stage: The Supt. Creasey Effect’ by Richard Marion (2011)

by PaulM

“Boarding House Stage: The Supt. Creasey Effect” by Richard Marion (2011), Copyright (c) 2013

See more artwork at www.richardmarion.net

Click on the image to see a larger version.

 

 

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March 9th, 2013

Folklife at the National Park: A Look Back

by PaulM

Following is another excerpt from “Mill Power: Reclaiming Lowell’s Place and Story,” the book I’ve written about the national park in Lowell. This piece is a sidebar, a flashback to the Lowell Folklife Project of 1987-88, when a team of scholars recorded in pictures, on tape, and in field notes our way of life. The project team from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress was led by Dr. Doug DeNatale, who was based at the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, where I worked. I interviewed Doug in North Carolina while I was in the area attending a conference. Here is his view of what the folklorists did and learned in Lowell.—PM

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Listening to a Memory Worker 

On a sticky morning in Carrboro, North Carolina, in April 1989, Doug DeNatale, Ph.D., was writing his wrap-up of the Lowell Folklife Project, a comprehensive survey by the American Folklife Center (AFC) of the Library of Congress. The heat was ninety degrees at 10:00 a.m. On the porch a hummingbird sucked red syrup from a tube. Living room walls and shelves were covered with artifacts: a dulcimer, a small mud-green ceramic catfish, Hmong story cloths. There were two black-and-white photographs from Lowell: a picture of a Portuguese woman singing at the IV Seasons Restaurant on Central Street and a group portrait of young skateboarders in the Acre neighborhood.

The project was sponsored by the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission. From June 1987 to May 1988, Lowell’s way of life was under a microscope. AFC fieldworkers fanned out across the city—recording songs, making photographs, taping interviews, and collecting stories. Their efforts paralleled a similar project undertaken shortly after Congress established Lowell National Historical Park in 1978. Every important building and structure in the historic district was catalogued in a multi-volume report called the Inventory of Cultural Resources. But those researchers focused only on the built environment. The folklife project made a record of Lowell’s people during the course of a year. After the field work, DeNatale returned home to North Carolina to sort through the data in his red-brick bungalow in a suburb outside of Chapel Hill.

DeNatale’s team collected a truckload of information on subjects as various as songs about the French Canadian-American neighborhood of Little Canada and the informal names for favorite swimming spots in the Merrimack River. The folklorists considered the meaning of ethnic flag-raising ceremonies at City Hall and listened to anecdotes repeated by Park Rangers who had met retired mill workers while leading canal tours. In his documentary bag he had a Greek recipe for baked lamb, transcriptions of Puerto Rican song lyrics, and harrowing accounts of journeys out of Southeast Asia told by Cambodian refugees.

     “It’s clear that there’s a high level of historical consciousness in the community,” said DeNatale. “Lowell is in the memory business, and that’s a wise decision. When you wipe the slate clean, you have nothing to start with. People read each other’s experiences in the city by what they understand their own history to be. Their understanding of their grandparents comes down to them, and they apply it to their view of others in the city. I don’t think this is the best basis for understanding the new immigrants. You are as far away from your great-grandparents’ experiences as you are from the experiences of new people coming to the city.

“Lowell has plenty of lessons for any city that has experienced immigration and industrialization. At the same time, Lowell is atypical because of the recent revitalization, a process not easy to duplicate. The best book about Lowell will have to be written by somebody from Lowell. It would be impossible for me to define Lowell. In my writings, I hope people will find something that they had forgotten or see something they don’t know about. I’m sure some people will say, ‘Well, that’s good, he knew about that in our community, but he didn’t know anything about this, and it’s the most important thing here!’”

Portuguese fado musicians Duarte Tavares and Olivete Maria Poulart perform at the IV Seasons Restaurant, Lowell, Massachusetts, November 14, 1987. (Lowell Folklife Project Collection. Photo by John Lueders-Booth, courtesy of Library of Congress)

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March 5th, 2013

from ‘The Park Bill Becomes Law’: Ray LaPorte’s Story

by PaulM

Here’s another excerpt from the book about the origin and impact of Lowell’s national park that I’ve been working on for the past two years. With luck, the book will be available by the end of 2014. The search is on for a publisher that can distribute the book widely, probably a university press because of the specific subject. The following is from a sidebar feature about Lowell native Ray LaPorte’s experience in Washington, D.C., helping then-Congressman Paul Tsongas get the Park legislation passed. The diary continues through the final votes in Congress. Ray worked for the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission and now lives on Martha’s Vineyard.—PM

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Ray LaPorte, c. 2010

from “The Park Bill Becomes Law: A Staff Diary” in Mill Power: Reclaiming Lowell’s Place and Story

     Ray LaPorte finished his master’s degree requirements in Political Science at The New School in New York City in December 1977, and went home to Lowell for the holidays to figure out what to do next. At 26 years old, he says, ‘the school gig was up’ and he needed meaningful work. He had been away from Lowell at boarding school and college in Worcester, and spent summers at his family’s beach house in Seabrook, N.H. Despite being a fourth generation Pawtucketville neighborhood native, and having played along the Merrimack and its canals as a kid, he did not feel rooted in the place. Bored at Christmastime, he became curious about the Park chatter in the newspaper. His mother urged him to talk to Pat Mogan at City Hall. Without an appointment, he dropped in on for a talk, but Mogan did all the talking.

“’I was spellbound by his enthusiasm, intrigued by the community planning efforts, and dumbfounded at how little I knew of Lowell’s history,’ says LaPorte. ‘When he said that all further action about the Lowell Park legislation was to be in Washington, D.C., I knew where I was headed after New Year’s Day.’

“LaPorte arrived in D.C. with no money, no place to stay, no job, and no plan other than to deal his ‘woeful deck of resume cards around Capitol Hill with enthusiasm and a smile.’ He roamed the halls of the Capitol until he found the office of his member of Congress, Paul Tsongas. The appointment secretary told him to come back the next day, which he did—waiting almost all day until Tsongas returned from committee meetings and floor votes. ‘In a flash, there I was sitting alone with Paul, who was fully engaged in my story, interests and our shared Lowell childhoods and families,’ says LaPorte. A week later he was in place as an intern. Following are excerpts from a diary he kept during the run up to the passage of the Park legislation.

“January 27, 1978: Lunch in the Members’ restaurant with the Congressman. I was assigned to work with legislative aide Fred Faust on Park legislation. We conferred with the House subcommittee staff about final draft language of the Lowell Park bill.

“February 16: Met Karen Carpenter of Human Services Corporation and Pat Mogan at the Health, Education, and Welfare Dept.’s Teacher Corps office; I ran back to office afterwards, so missed a surprise meeting they had with Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus! Got things ready for hearings. Met Lowell City Councilors Ed Kennedy and Ray Lord, City planner Bob Malavich and Lew Karabatsos of the Lowell Museum.

“February 17: Subcommittee hearings from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.  A love-in, favorable hearing. The NPS is supportive, but they want to do it their way, meaning scattered sites for Park activities instead of an intensive-use zone covering the core of the city—and less money. Pat Mogan, Lowell City Councilor Sam Pollard, and mill operator Ted Larter were excellent.  . . .”

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March 4th, 2013

Inspired by Lowell: Michael Leary

by PaulM

Some of our readers know that I’ve been working on a book about the origin and impact of Lowell National Historical Park for the past two years. Following is an excerpt from the section about preserving the historic structures and places in the city. Michael Leary is an urban studies scholar from London. — PM 

Michael Leary

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“Inspiring is the response of Michael Leary to the industrial vistas of Lowell. His enthusiasm is not quite in the category of John Greenleaf Whittier who on first sight described Lowell as ‘a city springing up like the enchanted palaces of the Arabian tales, as it were in a single night—stretching far and wide its chaos of brick masonry. . . .’ Leary is a senior lecturer in the Department of Urban, Environmental and Leisure Studies at London South Bank University in England. He visited Lowell to do research for his book about preservation-based urban regeneration in Lowell; Manchester, England; and the Gastown district of Vancouver, B.C. Interestingly, French economist Michel Chevalier in 1834 had compared Lowell to Manchester, writing, ‘This then is not Manchester . . . Lowell, with its steeple-crowned factories, resembles a Spanish town with its convents. . . .’ During his Lowell stays, Leary begins and ends the day at the same place.

      Coming from Manchester, England, the place that I found most moving was the site of the former Lowell Machine Shop. This is a rather overly modest, diffident name for a colossal engineering, technological innovation, and manufacturing complex covering many acres. As the sun passes over this semi-wild cityscape, half returned to nature, during the day and early evening the site changes its visual character. Under the dark grey of a stormy blue sky the site is full of industrial doom. Early evening can see it bathed in a warm golden hue of endless optimism. From present disused dereliction it transforms into fascinating wildlife sanctuary and reminder of a once-world famous industrial past.

Nowhere is the past more evoked than looking east over the canal junction of Swamp Locks. Here, when the sun is right, light, water, and sky combine to produce fantastic reflections. Here, too, the complexity of the canal system and ingenuity of the nineteenth-century hydraulic engineers can be grasped instantly. The remnants of the rail tracks hint at the huge amounts of raw material brought in and the array of heavy machines and locomotives sent out. Spending time early in the morning with a red-tailed hawk that has a penchant for patrolling the sky overhead was a wonderful experience.

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February 17th, 2013

Recollections of M. Brendan Fleming (1994)

by PaulM

Following is an excerpt of a 1994 interview (oral history) of M. Brendan Fleming, professor emeritus of UMass Lowell and former mayor and city councilor of Lowell. The interviewer was Maryrose Lane. The full transcription of the oral history is available on the website of the UMass Lowell Center for Lowell History at the Patrick J. Mogan Cultural Center on French Street downtown.—PM

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“B: I’m from the City of Lowell. I’ve always lived in Lowell. I’m sixty-eight years old. I’ve spent the sixty-eight years, except for time when I was in the service during World War Two,  I spent my time here in Lowell.
M: I understand that you were involved in a lot of politics….
B: Well, back in 1963, I was appointed to the Lowell Redevelopment Authority. That was the name of it. And that’s the time when Urban Renewal started to really get busy in Lowell. And we had the Northern Canal Project, which is the area that we’re talking about here. And when we talk about the Merrimack Mills, one of the buildings we tried hard to keep was the row houses on Dutton Street. [They were] beautiful buildings . . . that you could be proud to have in the City of Lowell, especially as, I won’t say a monument of what went on in the past, but at least it would give people at the present time, give them an idea of how the individuals lived who worked in the mills back in the 1840’s, 1850’s, 1860’s. We didn’t get anywhere. We tried. And if I remember correctly, at the time that we were trying to save the row houses, there was also a project going on up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire . . . called Strawberry Bank. . . . I understand they use [the buildings] now for historic purposes. I understand people are living in them. But again, I haven’t been up there for quite awhile, so I don’t know what the current status is. But all I know is that the row houses here in Lowell are gone, and that’s too bad, but the land was part of the Northern Canal Project, and the decision was made to take the buildings down. That’s the way it stands today. That’s where the new, new high school is.  

M: How did you get to be involved with the Lowell Redevelopment Authority? How did you get appointed?
B: I was appointed by the City Manager. The City Manager at the time was Connie Desmond. And he wanted to fill a position that was vacant, and he knew of my activity in the city. And at that particular point in time, I was not actively involved in any politics, but that was 1963. And when I saw the way things went with Urban Renewal, I began to really take a very close interest in what was going on. I have always been interested in the city of Lowell. I was telling you the other day how many times back then when I was in Boston, I’d go to some of the older bookstores. And I would find books on Lowell, and I would be able to buy the books for practically a pittance. Nobody wanted them. Now those same books, if you went to the same bookstores, they’d cost a lot more, because of the change in the, shall I say, the historical culture of the city and recognizing the value of the history of the city. I went before the City Council around 1966. And I requested that the City Council consider establishing an Historic District, especially in and around the downtown area where we had the canals. And at that time I was told that the history of Lowell best be forgotten. I’ll never forget that statement being made. And I thought it was just so lacking in knowledge of the history of Lowell that that particular statement would be made. I said at that particular point in time that I was going to try to do something about it. If I couldn’t do it from outside the City Council, I’d try and see if I could do something within the City Council. So in 1967 I ran for the City Council, and I came in 10th, if I remember correctly. But I ran again for the 1970 Council. I got on the Council in 1970. One of the first things I did was to propose that we have an Historic District, and it went through. And since that time, I have found that the history of Lowell has been recognized much more so than it was long before that. There were individuals like Joe Kopycinsky, who was over at the library at Lowell Tech at the time, and Joe was very much interested in the history of the city of Lowell. And there was Arthur Eno. And he still is. Arthur is still around. He’s very much interested in the history of the city of Lowell. And it’s just that at that particular point in time, people were not that much interested in Lowell’s history. Now it’s a different story. The history of Lowell is something that people like to study. In fact, just by way of conversation, there’s one thing about the history of Lowell, is the labor movement, if you studied the history of the labor movement in the country, you really can’t study that history without including Lowell, because you not only had the men who were involved, but you had the women who are involved in the labor movement. And of course you have the child labor laws, and so on. That part’s very interesting also. But that, that was, that shall I say, that’s indirectly related to the row houses.”

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February 1st, 2013

‘Monuments and Memory’ by Martha Norkunas (2002)

by PaulM

Martha Norkunas is a scholar, a folklorist, who was the director of cultural affairs at the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission in the early 1990s. Her book “Monuments and Memory: History and Representation in Lowell, Massachusetts” was published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 2002. In it she catalogues the various forms of remembrance, public remembrance, in the city. Some of the chapters are “Inside the Memory of Class and Ethnicity” and “Relocating the Memory of the Dead.” Following is an excerpt from the Introduction.—PM

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“In 1996 a series of small granite sculptures, a work of public art funded by the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, was dedicated to those Yankee women who formed a part of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in 1840. Fifty yards away a “Winged Victory” statue rises up before the obelisk dedicated to the first two Lowell soldiers to die in the Civil War. Behind that is the city hall, with monuments to Lowell’s Franco Americans and Lowell’s Polish Americans prominently placed on the front lawn. Still within sight is Cardinal O’Connell Parkway with a large pedestal and bust of the cardinal, and monuments to the Irish and Greek communities of Lowell defining opposite ends of the small greenway. Nearly every five blocks there is a monument with the names of Lowell’s ethnic communities, the war dead, politicians and priests, civil servants, coaches, athletes, volunteers, donors, children, or women.

“Bearing witness to the multiple collective memories of this old industrial city, the creation of these monuments describes ideas aboutthe rise of American industrialism, the good citizen, and the heroic death. . . . ”

 

 

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January 13th, 2013

Lowell in the Early 1970s: Recollections of Fred Faust

by PaulM

Following is an excerpt from an interview with Fred Faust, who has worn a lot of hats and coats in Lowell since he came to town as a radio reporter at WCAP. In 2003, historian Mehmed Ali, then on the staff of Lowell National Historical Park, sat down with Fred to talk about the origin of the national park and the city’s redevelopment. The full transcript of the interview is available—one of many oral histories in transcribed or audio form at the UMass Lowell Center for Lowell History, which has an outstanding collection of witnesses to Lowell history. Note that I edited out extra “you knows” to smooth out the statements and deleted Ali’s brief questions and prompts between Fred’s responses. These days, Fred has his own business, The Edge Group, a real estate consulting and brokerage firm. He is one of the first Fellows named to the Gateway Cities Institute of Massachusetts, “which envisions vibrant mid-sized cities driving regional economies.” The excerpt below picks up after Fred explains that he was born in the New York City area and then went to college in 1968 to study communications at Emerson College in Boston. After graduation, he got a job in Lowell.—PM 

 

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“I came up to …Lowell…and worked in news at WCAP. I was somebody who grew up in the suburbs of New York City, and then spent time in Boston in college for four years. So Lowell was very different for me. On the bad side, obviously, it had a huge chip on its shoulder in terms of the economic status of the area. And people seeing the whole history of the mills, and the deterioration of the economy, and the loss of textile industry—they took that in a very personal way. When you would ask people about Lowell and what the serious issues were, the first thing in everybody’s mind was unemployment. And the area I had been from, in New Rochelle,  there were certainly affluent sections; it was working class, too, but not to the extent of what was in Lowell. So I’d never really been in a real working-class city before, and one that considered itself a little bit down and out. When I was working at the radio station one of the stories I was assigned to cover one night was a meeting at the Smith Baker Center with Pat Mogan, and a professor from the University of Pittsburgh, and Brad Morse who was the Congressman at the time. And that was the first time I heard about the National Park concept. I hadn’t known anything about Lowell’s history. Didn’t know what these big red brick buildings were, or why there were canals running along and perpendicular to the streets. And all of a sudden everything made sense to me. And as somebody who was interested in planning and urban ideas, it just really made some connections, and I thought it was a very neat idea.

“I started as a reporter. I had just graduated from college. In 1972, the Rialto was a bowling alley. Again, I was interested in history and politics, and urban areas. I quickly had to find my bearings in a very complex political climate like Lowell, which you’re forced to do right away, because everybody is calling you on the phone, the city councilors, the school committee people, wanting to make sure they get the best kind of coverage. So one of the things you had to do is sort out the players and the interest groups. I remember being completely amazed going to the city council meetings, and the school committee, because so much a part of the meeting was rhetoric. It seemed like somebody could speak for an hour and a half on a pothole. And everything was politics, but for somebody who was reporting it was a fascinating kind of learning experience. I think I was a reasonably fast study and saw the lay of the land, and met a lot of interesting people and started to become familiar, more familiar with the community.

“A lot of [the political alliances] generated from the mayoral races. Who was in and who was out. I remember when I was around, at that point Ellen Sampson was the mayor. There weren’t too many women mayors. She was  a character, or maybe a caricature in and of herself. There were in Lowell at that time the young, newer, reform types: the Paul Tsongases, the Dick Howes at that point. They had just come off replacing Charlie Gallagher as the City Manager. Paul Tsongas would be leaving the council shortly thereafter to run for Middlesex County Commission on a reform slate. And then there were the Sam Pollards, the Ray Rourkes, the more traditional politicians whose work was sort of based more on old alliances and constituent services and so forth. And at the same time there were starting to be, thanks to Pat Mogan and the Model Cities folks, very different kind of ideas for redeveloping Lowell and for focusing pride on the history of the city, which again at that time was just about completely covered up. So there was the old group and the new group. The old group also consisted of a lot of downtown business people who had hung around, weren’t really making much money, were basically complaining about everything. You couldn’t get anybody to agree on anything at all. There were a substantial number of buildings in tax title in those days. I believe Paul Sheehy at that time was the City Manager. And it was just hard to get any momentum going or to overcome the psychology of failure.

“There were different ideas of how to bring Lowell back. There was everything from monorails to urban cultural parks, to taking down the downtown, putting up new buildings. And Lowell wasn’t very demanding when it came to development, which was scary because of some of the existing buildings that were here, and the potential loss of integrity. I came in just after Merrimack Manufacturing was taken down, and the boarding houses on Dutton Street were taken down. And that clearly evoked some concern in the community. I remember walking by and watching for a while as they took the flat iron building down where the Central Bank is today [Central and Prescott streets], and thinking, what a shame, that’s such an attractive building. And certainly at that point I was not into historic preservation, but it was an attractive building, and it seemed a waste to be doing that.

“There didn’t seem to be particularly coherent plan. The urban renewal at that point was urban renewal. It was handled by the Development Authority, which again had a lot of older established industrially oriented members. And one of the things that started to happen in Lowell, and I believe under Paul Sheehy, was that Frank Keefe was hired as the Director of Planning and Development. I remember asking Frank, ‘What’s a planner do?’ And he said, ‘A planner is a clear thinker.’ And Frank well defined that. He had great grasp of all kinds of ideas, projects, complex projects, and he, Pat Mogan, Brad Morse succeeded by Paul Cronin [as the congressman], and certainly Paul Tsongas defined the new ambitions for the community. Each played a role in a very different way of trying to get the community to a critical mass to accept some new ideas and grasp what the real potential of an Urban Cultural Park, and then a State Heritage Park, and a National Park were all about, and get past this terrible image that everybody had in the back of their minds that Lowell was a ghost town, a mill town, with the highest unemployment rate in the state, etc. etc.” . . .

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