RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Lowell Politics: October 25, 2026

On Tuesday, the Lowell City Council voted to borrow $3,373,000 to purchase the Senior Center Property at 276 Broadway. The memo that accompanied the proposed loan order laid out the rationale for the purchase which I’ll summarize below after some historical context for this transaction.

The city long-ago owned this property, purchasing it and the lot across Broadway (now a Market Basket grocery store) in 1869 for $20,000. The Market Basket property was home to the city’s street department while the Senior Center property was home to the “ashes and waste” department in the era before trash pickup was privatized. These uses pre-dated motor vehicles, so wagons and many horses were involved. To house the horses, the building on the Senior Center lot was known as the “city stables” (sometimes, “city barns”) while the smaller brick building closest to Broadway on the same lot was known as the “blacksmith building” (horses need blacksmiths).

That’s how things stood until the late 1990s when the city launched its Acre Urban Revitalization and Development Project. The newly constructed Market Basket on Broadway anchored this plan which included the rehabilitation of 500 units of housing and the construction of 150 new units throughout the neighborhood.

The city also decided that the city stables building would be a good site for a dedicated senior center. Before that, the Lowell Council on Aging had a place in the Smith Baker Center, across from City Hall, but that facility was lacking in space and amenities essential to a modern senior center.

In 2001, the city conveyed the city stables parcel to private developers Nick Sarris and George Behrakis as trustees of City Barns Trust. The developers agreed to rehabilitate the existing buildings and construct a new addition. The city would then lease approximately 60 percent of the building to be used as the senior center with the city paying rent pursuant to a 20 year lease. At the end of the 20 years, it was understood that the developers would “gift” the property back to the city although that reversionary language was omitted from the deed conveying ownership to the developers. The developers would also rent the remainder of the property which constituted two uses: a portion of the senior center building to be used as a drug store which was leased to Walgreen’s Pharmacy and the full blacksmith building used by and rented to a physical therapy business.

The deal was structured this way so that the city could use federal Community Development Block Grant funds to pay the lease rather than paying it from the city’s annual budget or by borrowing money for the rehabilitation and adding to the city’s bond indebtedness.

In recent years, the lease expired on its own terms, but the parties continued as if it was still in effect. (The city did not convey the property to the developers until 2003, and the senior center did not open until 2004, so I assume the 20 years began in one of those years which would mean the lease expired in 2023 or 2024.)

Whenever the lease expired, the city stopped paying rent. Because there was no valid lease in place, the city auditor could not authorize any rental payments, so the city fell in arrears on its rent. For whatever reason, the developer allowed the city to continue using the senior center while the arrearage grew.

To resolve the expired lease and rent arrearage issues, City Manager Tom Golden negotiated a proposed lease extension which he presented to city councilors last year. However, the council rejected the lease proposal on a tie vote which sent Golden back to the negotiating table. The present agreement emerged from that effort.

Notably, in July 2025, the developer “condominiumized” the property by creating three condominium units. Unit 1 was the senior center space. It consisted of 22,193 square feet and accounted for 57.4 percent of the overall building space. Unit 2 was the Walgreen’s Space (the portion of the building once occupied by the Walgreen’s Pharmacy which has since closed). It consisted of 12,283 square feet and accounted for 30.7 percent of the space. Unit 3 was the Blacksmith Building which consisted of a standalone 6,789 square foot building which accounted for 11.9 percent of the space.

The current agreement negotiated by City Manager Golden and ratified by the city council by their vote on Tuesday to borrow the money needed for the deal will pay the developer $3,373,000 to buy out the developer’s ownership interest in the property and to settle any claim for unpaid rent for the senior center space. Essentially (but not expressly) the agreement does “gift” the senior center condominium unit to the city while selling the city the Walgreen’s condominium unit, the Blacksmith’s Building condominium unit, and the parking lot.

City Manager Golden was not at Tuesday’s meeting, however, CFO Conor Baldwin answered fiscal questions raised by councilors. Baldwin explained that the city will bond this new $3.37 million indebtedness over 20 years which will require roughly $250,000 per year in payments by the city for those 20 years, an amount which will come from the city’s operating budget rather than from federal CDBG funds which cannot be used for that purpose. He also explained that while Walgreens Pharmacy closed several years ago, Walgreens continue to pay rent for the space per its lease which runs into 2028. Also, the physical therapy business that occupies the Blacksmith condominium unit rents that space on a month-to-month basis and continues to pay rent.

Presumably, once the city acquires title, which is supposed to occur in December, it will become the landlord and receive rental payments although I’m not sure how that works from a municipal finance perspective. Will the rent received be allocated directly to the bond payment, or will it have to go into the general fund? In any case, I assume that if Walgreens is paying rent for that space, the city will be unable to use that space since if the city did take it over, it would let Walgreen’s off the legal hook created by its lease. (I assume Walgreen’s had a significant operating loss while the pharmacy was open and decided to cut its losses by closing the drug store even though it was obligated to continue paying the lease until it expires.)

The building is also in need of repairs. The city’s current capital spending plan contains $450,000 for repairs to the senior center space, but according to the City Manager’s memo, the overall space, including the senior center, needs immediate repairs that will cost approximately $1,850,000, plus another $5.7 million in repairs during the next five years. CFO Baldwin said that the next proposed capital plan will include at least some of those funds.

I think everyone would agree that the city needs a functioning senior center. Given the history of the current center, the politics – present and past – involved, the legal ambiguities surrounding the rights of the parties and the lack of a feasible, affordable, timely alternative, the city’s acquisition of the property under the terms laid out on Tuesday seems like the best possible outcome.

Still, the willingness of recent city councils to spend money seems out of step with what’s happening in the country today. Economists and national elected officials tell us that the economy is doing great, but most people don’t see that when they pay for housing, gas or groceries.

Four years ago, the city received a fiscal windfall of $75 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. My memory is that that money was spent on social impact programs ($13.4 million); water & sewer infrastructure ($10.6 million); fire department vehicle replacement ($10 million); neighborhood & parks improvements ($9 million); enterprise fund replacement ($8 million); school building upgrades ($7 million); business revitalization ($7 million); non-profit sector support ($4.6 million); premium pay for essential workers ($3 million); and administrative costs ($2.4 million).

Instead of saying, we were fortunate to get all of this unexpected money, we spent it wisely, now let’s hold the line on future increases so we don’t recklessly inflate the cost of government, the council has continued to spend as if ARPA-like cash infusions are a regular occurrence. Anytime you leave your house these days, it seems you encounter some road repair project as part of the city’s so-called “horizontal construction” boom; the fire department seems to blow through its annual overtime budget in the first quarter of the fiscal year; given the spike in fuel prices, I assume there will be a supplemental city budget to pay for higher gasoline and diesel costs; interest rates continue to rise which makes the city’s borrowing of money more expensive; and the city has acquired several major real estate properties (40 Market Street from Align Credit Union in July 2025, the former St. Jenne d’Arc School from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston in May 2025, and now the senior center complex in 2026). All three have acquisition costs and future operations and maintenance costs that are all new to the city budget.

Taken separately, each of these council spending decisions can be rationalized, but collectively they set the city up for a much harsher fall when the economy turns downward as it inevitably will. It’s important that someone in government acts as the chaperone who has the foresight to take away the punchbowl just when the party is really warming up. Presently in Lowell, that role seems to be vacant.

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Thanks to everyone who attended this fall’s Lowell Cemetery tours. Between the two regular tours on October 3rd and 4th, and the Edgar Allen Poe-themed tour on October 17th, we had 445 people participate. I’ll announce the dates of the spring 2027 tours after the first of the year, but for now, if you’d like to get a taste of the cemetery tours, local YouTuber Ratbas (aka Steve Albert) recorded the full 90-minute Poe tour.

Steve also captured on video most of the events on the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac weekend including the incomparable Kurt Phaneuf’s “Kerouac’s Characters” tour of St. Joseph Cemetery in Chelmsford.

One of the graves featured on that tour was the burial place of Louis A. Biron (1861-1947), the longtime editor and proprietor of L’Etoile, a French language newspaper published in Lowell continuously from 1886 until 1957. Biron hired Leo Kerouac to work for the newspaper as a printer. That job opportunity caused Kerouac to move from Nashua to Lowell where his son, the celebrated author Jack Kerouac was born in 1922. Now, Biron’s granddaughter, Louise Peloquin, has published the story of L’Etoile in Lowell complete with examples of the paper’s coverage in French with English translations. L’Etoile: A Star on Prince Street is available for purchase online.

A longtime contributor to my richardhowe.com website, Louise graciously allowed A Star on Prince Street to become Volume 3 of my Encyclopedia of Lowell History series. This is my effort to preserve the city’s print legacy by publishing books on Lowell History.

Volume 1, Lowell: A Concise History, and Volume 2, Regret to Inform You: The Human Cost of World War II in Lowell, Massachusetts, are both available for online purchase and are also for sale at lala books at 189 Market Street in Lowell.

Local attorney Jay Gaffney also has a new history book. Fathers and Sons in Native New England: Massasoit, Passaconaway, Their Sons, and the End of Two Great Algonquian Nations tells the story of early New England, especially of King Philip’s War, a deadly conflict that devastated this region and helped shape the community that would become the city of Lowell. The book is available for purchase online.

Finally, Henri Marchand has written a comprehensive article on the history and closure of the Pawtucketville Social Club. The article was recently published in Résonance, an electronic literary journal published under the Franco American Program of the University of Maine.

Vanity in the Space Age

Vanity in the Space Age

Stephen O’Connor

Gazing out of the window of the Apollo space craft, Neil Armstrong had an epiphany. “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

I imagine that this cognitive shift stayed with Armstrong. He was not beguiled by the ticker tape parades, by the cheering crowds that greeted him and the other Apollo astronauts at airports around the world, by fawning reporters, by the Presidential Medal of Freedom, or the numerous other medals and trophies that showered the first human to walk on the moon. In spite of his “giant leap for mankind,” he didn’t see himself as a giant, but as a “very, very small” being trekking about a tiny blue marble suspended in a dark void of dimensions incomprehensible to the human mind. Who can conceive of this spaceship Earth orbiting one star out of 400 billion in our Milky Way galaxy, which NASA estimates is but one of two trillion galaxies in the observable universe.

It’s not likely that we will ever have the view of the Earth that so humbled Armstrong and the other astronauts. We humans have always lived with illusions of grandeur, often connected to ideas of fame and immortality. Both the Greek hero Achilles and the Irish hero Cú Chulainn accept an early death provided that the glory of their deeds would live forever. “The Hávamál, The Sayings of the High One,” are Norse verses probably composed orally in the 9^th century that stress the immortality of reputation:

Cattle die, kinsmen die.
The self must also die.
One thing now that never dies,
The fame of a dead man’s deeds.

We are so accustomed, despite Copernicus, to see ourselves as living at the center of the universe, that vanity comes naturally. Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Julius Caesar sought immortality as conquerors. And yet, what are any of them when viewed from Neil Armstrong’s window on the universe? I think of Yeats, writing three years after the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin:

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

Shakespeare claimed an immortality through his verse. In Sonnet 55, he writes, “Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” In Sonnet 18, he promises his beloved that “thy eternal beauty shall not fade.” His words grant immortality, for:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

In more unsentimental, yet still lyrical moments, Shakespeare wrote of the futility of our dreams of immortality. At the conclusion of The Tempest, we have Prospero’s oft-quoted speech:

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

Shelley mocks the vain human desire for immortality through fame in the poem “Ozymandias,” in which he speaks of meeting “a traveller from an antique land” who describes to him the tumbled ruins of a monumental stone statue:

“And on the pedestal, these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ozymandias never suspected that he was just another weasel fighting in a hole. He might have saved himself the trouble of constructing self-aggrandizing monuments if he had considered the words of Marcus Aurelius, “Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.”

When Odysseus travels to the Underworld and meets the ghost of Achilles, who had traded life for eternal glory, he tries to comfort him, telling the “breaker of ranks” that at least he is an honored lord among the dead. The shade of Achilles responds, “Let me hear no smooth talk of death from you, Odysseus, light of councils. Better to be a hired hand to a poor man, a dirt-poor man who scrapes to keep alive, than lord it over all the strengthless dead.” Fame is an illusion in this life and worthless in the next.

Human vanity is not new, though it can be argued, and has been, that it is has assumed a more virulent form than ever in the age of the “selfie” and the TikToc celebrity. Yet I recall my grandfather, in his last days, reminding my father to make sure not to forget, before he was “laid out,” to tell the undertaker to put his teeth in. It’s difficult for me to imagine that I would be concerned about dentures as I lay dying, but there you are. It would be his last appearance in public, and he wanted to look his best. A modest vanity, I suppose, compared to the grand vanities that impel so many to live for their obituaries or to leave Ozymandian monuments behind.

The British physicist Brian Cox speaks of what it means to live a finite life in a vast eternal universe or possibly multiverse. He says that there may be no intrinsic meaning other than the meaning that we highly evolved beings give it. Joni Mitchel wrote in her song “Woodstock,” that “we are stardust,” and this is true of the atoms that make up our bodies. Brian Cox believes that we are “the cosmos made conscious,” or as I once heard someone say, “We are the eyes of the universe looking at itself.”

It’s a privilege to be alive to wonder, in both senses of the word, and to find meaning in a finite life in those we love, in Nature, philosophy, art or our conception of the divine. I can no more get to the bottom of it all than my dog could learn to play chess, but perhaps the simplest and most essential directive, in the meantime, comes once again from Shakespeare: “To love that well which thou must leave ‘ere long.”

Prayers, Pies and Prizes

Prayers, Pies and Prizes

By Leo Racicot

I’d be lying if I said our mother looked forward, as did so many of the parents of our Saint Patrick’s School classmates, when the school year rolled around to school community-related activities such as raffles, school fairs, bake sales, paper drives. As a widow, and as someone who was innately shy, she felt not entirely comfortable among the other parents, most especially the mothers of students who had early before I entered the flock in second grade (I spent my first grade year at The Morrill School across the street) formed impenetrable cliques. I don’t think my mother was paranoid about not fitting in; even as a child, I observed a certain, if not snobbery or disdain, a palpable reserve towards her from other mothers. There was, indeed, a stigma attached to a young widow, a widow’s children. I never talked with Diane about how she felt but I, myself, experienced the curiosity, if not the downright scorn, of classmates as being one of the only two kids in the whole school whose father had died. (The other was Karen Waite whose father or mother (I forget which) had died, leaving her half-orphaned. Whispers about the two of us were heard, no matter how hushed, whispers and insults. I remember being so incensed by remarks aimed at me by a group of students one day at recess in the school yard that I found myself countering with, My mother’s been married seven times so I have seven fathers! No one seemed to challenge this and one kid, Danny Mullen, looked at me in an awe usually reserved for astronauts.    So, there was this to be lived with — being fatherless for us, Diane and me — being husband-less for our mother.

School group gatherings were awkward for her, I could plainly tell second only to root canals on her list of “things to be avoided”. As I started out saying, she cringed whenever an invitation from the nuns was sent home with us requesting her participation in this or that fundraising event: a solicitation for a cake for a bake sale, say, or an appeal to volunteer her time for a paper or penny drive. Appeals to craft homemade aprons and potholders for school hall raffles made her an absolute wreck. She’d protest, What are you kids getting me into now??  One “ask” we all three of us wanted to run from was the two or three times a year the nuns asked families to sell chances, raffle tickets for a fair, or Holy Childhood Seals drives, whatever the parish deemed necessary to fatten its coffers. Good sport that she was, my mother sometimes bit the bullet (you couldn’t bite the bullet every time the nuns asked or you wouldn’t have any teeth left in your head) but she was game to once-in-a-while try to lend a helping hand to her two very put-upon children. I’d inherited my mother’s shyness, either that, or it had imprinted itself upon me, so I wasn’t too eager to go knocking on neighbors’ doors for what seemed to me like panhandling. Classmates from nearby streets were knocking on the same doors. It wasn’t uncommon for me, when I’d find the courage to approach neighbors, to be told they’d “already given”.

In spite of all this donation trepidation, lame sales pitches, I did like the end results of the fundraisers. All anxiety melted away once we entered the school halls, the church basements, greeted by the festive cakes, the brilliantly decorated tables, the colorfully-draped ceilings, food and drink goodies so abundant, a child’s eyes, hands and appetites didn’t know where to begin. Usually the centerpiece of these events was The Money Doll. “Money dolls” were an arts and crafts fundraising staple where a doll (often dressed like a bride or a First Communicant girl) had paper currency — usually ones, fives, and tens — folded, fanned, pinned, origami-style all over its dress or attached as a cascading skirt. These were quite the popular money-maker themselves; everyone bought a ticket hoping to win the jackpot. There could be only one winner though but everyone left with something before going home, if only a full stomach, a satisfied sweet tooth. The frenzied scramble to become overnight salespeople was left far behind. Until the next time…

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PTA mothers in the 1960s

Our mother in the 1960s

Bake sale table

Holy childhood seals

Money doll

Seen & Heard: Vol. 42

A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. 

Author Interview: Min Jin Lee on CSpan’s America’s Book Club hosted by David Rubenstein. Lee is a Korean immigrant who came to the United States with her family at age 7. She did well academically, graduated from law school, and practiced corporate law for two years before concluding the law wasn’t for her. With the support of her spouse, she quit and became a fulltime writer. It took a while but her novel, Free Food for Millionaires, was a success and her second book, Pachinko (2017) was a bestseller with the New York Times naming it one of the 100 best books of the century. Lee’s newest book, American Hagwon, was just released. I enjoy these interviews which last about an hour. They explore the writer’s life story and writing process. Although I read nonfiction almost exclusively, I find the fiction writers to be more interesting interviewees which suggests I perhaps should read more fiction. 

Newspaper article: “China broadens its military reach with an Air Force installation in Laos” by Chris Buckley, New York Times, October 11, 2026. Anytime I read something that touches on geopolitics in Southeast Asia, I read it carefully mostly because so many of our neighbors come from there and still have family ties in many cases. Laos is a landlocked country with Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south, Thailand to the west, and China to the north. Thus far, there are eight training-style aircraft operating out of this base, although the runway that was constructed there could accommodate the largest and most sophisticated aircraft used by the Chinese. With the US shrinking its military presence in the Far East as well as the commitment to allies in the region, it seems the Chinese are rushing in to seize the initiative. 

Newspaper article: “How ‘Da Bears’ immortalized Ditka” by Mike Peed, New York Times, October 13, 2026. The death of former Chicago Bears tight end Mike Ditka earlier this month prompted this article which is about a Saturday Night Live sketch that debuted in 1991 shortly after Ditka was fired as the team’s coach. The sketch features four guys in Bears shirts sitting at a table in a bar or restaurant, each wear Bears baseball caps, aviator sunglasses, and walrus mustaches, looking much like Ditka at the time. The four lament the firing but express their optimism for the Bears in thick Chicago accents. I only ever watched SNL regularly in the late 1970s so I missed the Bears sketch when it originated but it popped up in my YouTube feed not long ago and I found it hilarious, a funny commentary on the state of American football fandom. 

Book Review: The Perilous Fight, by Colin Kaepernick (2026). When he was an infant, Colin Kaepernick, who is Black, was adopted and raised by a white family in California. He was a multisport athlete in high school and was drafted by the Chicago Cubs baseball team. But he opted to attend the University of Nevada and play football where he excelled. He was drafted by the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers in the second round in 2011. The following year when the 49ers starting quarterback was injured, Kaepernick stepped up and led the team to the Super Bowl where they lost to the Baltimore Ravens. The following year, the team, led by Kaepernick, made it to the NFL championship game. Through all of this, he became increasingly aware of his Blackness in a white-dominated country. He consumed Black literature and political writing. In 2016, a series of police killings of young Black men haunted Kaepernick. He concluded that he would show his displeasure with how America allowed the police to treat young Black men, he would refrain from standing during the National Anthem at the start of each game. The first few games escaped the attention of most, but then the story burst on the national scene. He was injured and unable to play but the team cut him and no other team would sign him despite desperately needing an upgrade at quarterback. He continued to practice and stay in game shape. Eventually, coaches would reach out about playing for them but the owners always shot down the idea. Kaepernick sued the NFL which settled the case but insisted on a non-disclosure agreement. He never returned to the NFL but Kaepernick runs a nonprofit, co-produced a TV mini-series and has now published this memoir.