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For about three hours last night, from the anticipation to the grateful applause, there was a thick layer of happiness spread on the front yard of the Boott Cotton Mills in the form of a return engagement by Lyle Lovett and His Large Band. Again, as in past appearances, they…
Read More »Murk failed to dampen the spirits of the festival faithful on the second day of the annual cultural extravaganza uttered on the downtown streets of Lowell late every July. The morning sky was murky for sure. It did not look like a promising day for an outdoor party. But the…
Read More »The 2015 Lowell Folk Festival is upon us. It begins with the kick-off parade which leaves City Hall at 6:30 pm and ends at Boarding House Park for a night of music and food. (The Dutton St. Dance Pavilion will also be in operation tonight). The Festival continues tomorrow and…
Read More »Web image courtesy of amazon.com Get your walking shoes, cowboy boots, sneakers, brogans, flip-flops, loafers, boat shoes, sandals, Doc Martens, slippers, whatever makes your feet happy—get them ready for this Saturday at 10 AM outside the National Park Visitor Center, 246 Market Street. Free parking is available in the…
Read More »From citylab.com, thoughts and findings about what makes a city function best. And the analysis links back to famed urban thinker Jane Jacobs. I see a lot of overlap with the ideas that are the basis for the national park in Lowell or what used to be called “the urban…
Read More »The Boston Globe today reports on the Peabody-Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Mass., planning to expand its exhibition and curatorial space, a major step forward for the already formidable museum. This is worth noting in Lowell because we must keep our eye on the regional competition in the creative economy.…
Read More »For the Fourth of July, Independence Day, here’s a poem from the nation’s capital. I wrote this prose poem after a family trip to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2004. There were John Kerry-for-President signs in the windows. GOP posters for “W,” too. Barack Obama was a figure on…
Read More »Before Luna Theatre, before the Lowell Film Collaborative, there was FLICKS! (For Lowell Interesting Cinema KaperS!), a local film society that was popular in the early 1980s. The organization screened films, often at the Speare House restaurant on Pawtucket Boulevard (it was near the Dunkin Donuts, opposite the UMass Lowell…
Read More »This past Saturday, eighty people participated in the Literary Lowell edition of Lowell Walks. Tour guide Sean Thibodeau, the Coordinator of Community Programming at the Pollard Memorial Library, prepared a handout that listed many books about Lowell or written by people from Lowell, and added the names of other notable…
Read More »If you are downtown in the next three days and want to talk to an expert about community empowerment, grassroots organizing, neighborhood dynamics, coalition building, and all the good things that make for a competent, healthy, and just society where you live, just look for one of the 660 community…
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