RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Seen & Heard: Vol. 11

Seen & Heard: Vol. 11

Television: The Oscars telecast – Sunday night was the Academy Awards show on ABC. I watched it for an hour before moving on with my night (I go to bed early and like to read before that). What I saw was enjoyable. The host, Conan O’Brien, was funny and didn’t have many “cringe” moments. I saw the Best Supporting Actress award which went to Amy Madigan who I’m not familiar with for her role in Weapons which I’m not familiar with either, although I just watched the trailer and it looks creepy but interesting. I also watched a musical number built around Sinners which I did see and enjoy. I’ve enjoyed reading the followup newspaper stories about the event which were mostly positive, and I was pleased with the results because I did see the movies that won the most awards (One Battle After Another, Sinners, Hamnet, FrankensteinI). I also saw Train Dreams which was good but didn’t win any big awards. I’d like to watch more movies which I like doing at home and with all the films available via streaming, there is no shortage of choices. I think writing this weekly column helps motivate me to keep watching which is one of the reasons I do it. 

Movie Review: Hamnet – I watched this 2025 film before the Academy Award Ceremony. It won the Best Actress Award for Jessie Buckley, who I understand is the first Irish woman to win that award. Directed by Chloe Zhao and starring Paul Mescal as Will Shakespeare and Buckley as his wife Agnes, the film is based on the well-received 2020 historical novel by Maggie O’Farrell. The movie follows Agnes Hathaway (an eccentric and earthy “healer”) and Will Shakespeare, an aspiring writer, as they meet, fall in love, and start a family. Their happy life takes a devastating turn when their 11-year-old son, Hamnet, dies from the plague. The rest of the movie explores how each parent dealt with the grief of that loss and suggests that Will’s play, Hamlet, was his outlet for that. (Hamlet and Hamnet were used interchangeably at the time). The movie is now available for streaming on Peacock and is one of this year’s Best Picture nominees at the upcoming Academy Awards. While it is a strong, emotional film much deserving of the nomination, so were several other nominees, particularly Sinners and One Battle After Another. 

Op-Ed: “History is being erased in Lowell” – by Renee Loth in the March 6, 2026, Boston Globe. This essay tells of two historical films once regularly shown at Lowell National Historical Park that have been purged in accordance with President Trump’s executive order that bans any items that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” The offending portions of these films, presumably, recount the onerous and unhealthy working conditions faced by Lowell mill employees and the responding labor organizations that fought such conditions. So organized labor joins slavery, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and climate change as things being erased from our history. Some are fighting this in court but the fear among historians is that institutions will self-censor to avoid the controversy altogether. Revisionist history is nothing new in America. In the early 20th century, Southern historians promoted that narrative that the Civil War was all about “state’s rights” and that slavery had little to do with it. Unfortunately, that view, undoubtedly boosted by rampant racism throughout the country, came to dominate the “accepted version” of the Civil War. But by highlighting the words of rebellious southerners that the war was unequivocally about slavery, current historians have restored some accuracy to that narrative. But since “Make America Great Again” involves a restoration of the open racism that plagued the country in earlier eras, these new narratives must be suppressed. 

Op-Ed: “America cannot withstand the coming economic shock” – by Gina Raimondo in the March 9, 2026, New York Times. The Secretary of Commerce under President Joe Biden and the former governor of Rhode Island, Raimondo writes of the employment threat posed by artificial intelligence and how the country is failing to prepare for the resulting economic disruption. Personalizing the story, she writes of how her father, a 30 year employee of the Bulova Watch manufacturing plant in Providence, was left unemployed at age 56 when, taking advantage of the new free trade rules of the 1990s, the company chased cheaper labor and moved all manufacturing overseas. His story was repeated millions of times across America and this hollowing out of manufacturing jobs with nothing to replace them helped “produce the politics of division that plague us today.” Raimondo asserts that history is about to repeat itself with the broad deployment of AI and that the government today is doing the same as what was done in the 1990s to prepare for this – which is nothing. She advocates the transformation of higher education into something more modular and credentials-based with financial assistance to help those displaced by new technology to rapidly acquire the skills needed for the jobs that are available.

‘A Nation Once Again’

This prose poem appears in my book What Is the City? (2006), which is out of print but sometimes available in used condition on internet sites. Jackie Brady was a champion boxer in Lowell, Mass., in the 1960s. The local scene from the 1980s described here predates the easing of tensions, even the prospect for peace, resulting from the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 to end the brutal “Troubles” (more than 3,500 deaths) and the related British-Irish Agreement a year later. As a measure of how charged the peace process continued to be, the issue of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland of the UK was a key to resolving the Brexit situation in the UK. The Republic is part of the European Union, and after Brexit the “invisible border” is maintained between the south and north.–PM

A Nation Once Again

Jackie Brady’s Irish pub near the Spaghettiville train bridge gathers a lunch crowd of American-Irish from Sacred Heart and the late St. Peter’s parish. The slow dark pint, a cold Harp, beans & franks and burgers with the best hand-cut fries, sprinkled with vinegar. Chunky soup and chowders, sausages on seeded buns, fat lobster rolls. The jukebox spills out crooners, gangsta rap, Hibernian chestnuts. On the four walls, glossies of Brady’s bouts, Victorian-Lowell streetscapes, map of the Isle, and the electronic paint of TV.

“Who tripped Bobby Orr when he scored his Cup-winning goal in 1970?”

“Barclay Plager of the Blues?”

“Noel Picard.”

“The Fabulous Moolah?”

“Who’s that?”

“Who’s got what horse?”

“Are you going to the Derby this year?”

“Did you see the Bruins Friday night? Ray Bourque’s got a stiff hip.”

Martha, Colleen, and Sue, friendly as your favorite aunts, drive the kitchen operation. It’s Irish Culture Week with Masses, Mary Noon’s soda bread, a tour of St. Pat’s Cemetery with Dave McKean, the flag-raising and Gaelic anthem on the City Hall steps, ceili shindig at the Elks, and Variety Show.

The center-table group will converge at Our Lady of Good Voyage in Boston on Easter Sunday to praise old martyrs and young hunger-strikers, the Four and the Eight, all jailed by and for politics. Outside, the faithful buy medals, buttons, and cards. Our day is near, they say, and, as he does each year, Liam Murphy, who claims that he scrapped as a boy in the 1916 rising, will turn around in his front pew, making a finger-gun: bang, bang.

Paul Marion (c) 1987, 2006

Jackie Brady, 1964 Greater Lowell Golden Glove 112 lb. Novice Champion; 1964 112 lb. New England AAU Champion. (photo and data courtesy boxrec.com)

Lowell Politics: March 15, 2026

The agenda item that dominated the Tuesday, March 10, 2026, Lowell City Council meeting was a public hearing and vote to amend the city’s Zoning Code to impose a one-year ban on new or expanded data centers in the city. After much public comment and discussion among councilors, the new ordinance was adopted by a 10 to 0 vote with one councilor abstaining (Dan Rourke is treasurer of the Lowell Youth Football League which receives some funding from Markley Group, a data center operator).

Let’s start with some background: The impetus for this vote was the rapid expansion of the Markley Group data center in the residential neighborhood known variably as South Lowell, Sacred Heart, and The Bleachery. Markley arrived in Lowell in 2015 with overwhelming support from city government. Back then, cloud computing was the big thing in the tech world. The “internet” was migrating from customized servers maintained by individual companies in their own spaces to centralized facilities that more efficiently delivered the broad infrastructure needed to be a presence online.

But technology never stands still and in recent years the onset of artificial intelligence has exploded the demand for data centers. Wisely, from a business perspective, Markley has taken advantage of this by expanding its operations in Lowell.

However, a big part of what Markley provides is a guarantee of 24/7 operations. A global customer whose entire operation depends on the internet doesn’t want its business shut down when South Lowell suffers a power outage, so Markley relies heavily on diesel generators for emergency power. These must be able to run for multiple days, so a large quantity of diesel fuel must be stored on site, and they must be tested regularly, which means these generators don’t just turn on when there is a disaster. Both the fuel storage and the generator operation (and perhaps some other things) have been disruptive to the neighborhood which is almost entirely residential outside of the Markley compound.

This conflict has persisted for several years, and the city administration and the council have tried to mediate things between the company and the neighbors, however, my general sense is that Markley has committed to some remedial measures but was then very slow in implementing them. I think this cost the company some credibility with councilors.

Still, this was a difficult vote for councilors. Lowell has a good reputation among midsize cities in the region, but big companies are not beating a path to the city, so no one wants to lose one that is already located here. Perhaps more importantly from a political perspective, many Markley employees and many of the union tradespeople who work on Markley expansion projects appeared at the council meeting to urge councilors not to mess with their jobs.

Offsetting that were the many neighbors who appeared Tuesday night with concerns about noise, safety and pollution. Others who live elsewhere in Lowell spoke in favor of the moratorium on similar grounds.

In the end, the unanimity of the council vote was driven by two things: First, the moratorium only lasts for a year and, while it could be extended, it does have a fixed end date so that if the council neglects the issue it will end by its own terms. Second, the moratorium only affects further expansion of the Markley facility so current jobs there should not be threatened (or so the councilors believe although Markley management has a say in that).

The ordinance adopted by councilors (available here) incorporated some modifications suggested by the Lowell Planning Board which, by law, must review any proposed zoning amendment before the council votes on it.

The Planning Board held a public hearing on March 2, 2026, and then, in a March 4, 2026,  letter to the city council recommending adoption of the moratorium, cited as reasons:

(1) The rapid growth of AI and cloud data warrants the City’s need to review the impact on the City’s infrastructure including energy, water consumption, health concerns, emissions, drinking water, effects on ratepayers, noise, and sewage; and (2) The moratorium will provide the City time to create standards addressing the impact of Data Centers.

In the same letter, the Board recommended several modifications that the city solicitor said had been incorporated into the measure voted on by the council.

Although Markley would likely disagree, this seems like a good outcome for the city, however, that will only remain so if the council and the city administration stay on top of this issue rather than let it fade away for a year until the moratorium is set to expire. Communities across the United States are dealing with this same issue and no one has yet figured out how best to address it. Given Lowell’s long history of managing (or falling victim to) changing industrial technology, the city is well-suited to provide some leadership on this issue. Whether the current players choose to do that remains to be seen.

Speaking of industrial history, a common complaint about the Markley facility is that an operation of that scale should not be situated amid a residential neighborhood. While that’s true, it’s also ahistorical.

Long before any houses existed, this site was used for industrial purposes. In 1833, the Lowell Bleachery was established on the Markley site. This was a specialized facility for bleaching, dyeing, printing, and finishing cotton and woolen fabrics produced by the Lowell mills. All those processes required a large quantity of water which the Bleachery obtained from the adjacent River Meadow Brook. Not surprisingly, the water discharged from the Bleachery was heavily polluted but as was the practice at the time, it was just dumped back into the brook which carried it to the Concord River and beyond. None of that prevented developers from constructing densely packed houses all around the facility to provide residences for Bleachery employees.

Although the Lowell Bleachery technically hung on until after World War II, it was mostly gone by the start of the Great Depression. In 1939, Prince Spaghetti Company, which was founded by three Sicilian immigrants in 1912 on Boston’s Prince Street, purchased the main Bleachery site and constructed a large pasta-making facility.

Boosted by the memorable slogan, “Wednesday is Prince spaghetti day,” the Prince facility thrived and provided jobs for hundreds of residents of the neighborhood. That changed when the Pellegrino family, which had controlled Prince since 1941, sold the company to the food conglomerate Borden, Inc. in 1987. Ten years later, Borden closed the Lowell plant which resulted in the loss of over 400 jobs, most held by Lowell residents.

In the intervening years, the facility had several uses that didn’t amount to much until 2015 when Markley arrived. One of the things that made the site attractive to Markley was that robust buildings designed to hold tons of flour and water for pasta-making were eminently suitable for a 21st century high security data center.

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Several councilors spoke favorably about a Department of Planning and Development report on the use of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) and Tax Increment Exemptions (TIE) to incentivize economic and housing development.

The report explains that Lowell utilizes TIF and TIE programs to drive private investment and job creation by offering partial tax exemptions on property value growth. These incentives have leveraged $250 million for housing and thousands of quality jobs. Unlike other cities, Lowell maintains shorter, lower-rate exemptions to maximize long-term municipal revenue. For example, most Gateway Cities offer average exemptions of 45% over 10 years, but Lowell’s TIE schedule averages only 14% over 7 years.

Councilor Dan Rourke said, “fixing potholes is important, but this kind of stuff deserves more attention. It shows how a Gateway City can use these tools to get businesses to come here and offer employment and home ownership. We get criticism that these programs are ‘tax giveaways’ but there is a big payoff that should be recognized and acknowledged.”

I agree with Rourke. It’s unfortunate that to attract businesses to Lowell, we must provide a tax incentive, but since every other community does it, Lowell must do it as well, otherwise businesses will just go elsewhere.

The same misguided dynamic identified by Rourke often is applied to UMass Lowell. For years, any time the University acquired a new property, there were those in the city – including a few councilors – who decried the loss of property tax revenue, while completely ignoring the many ancillary benefits that a thriving University bestows on the city.

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all who observe. Councilors will not be constrained in the celebration since they cancelled their regularly scheduled March 17th meeting on account of the holiday.

Back in 2022 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the arrival of the first Irish immigrants in Lowell, Dave McKean and I produced a book, Lowell Irish 200. The book tells the story of the Irish immigrants who dug the canals and helped construct the textile mills when Lowell was first established and explores the subsequent contributions of the Irish of Lowell in education, labor, politics, business, and culture. Besides Dave and I, other contributors were Gray Fitzsimons, Bob Forrant, Joyce Burgess, Christine O’Connor and Walter Hickey.

Lowell Irish 200 may be ordered from Lulu Press at this link.

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Also available from Lulu Press is my newest book, Lowell: A Concise History, which tells the city’s story from the arrival of the first English explorers in the 1620s up until the present. A print copy of the book may be purchased here and a PDF version may be downloaded for free from richardhowe.com at this link.

Some would-be readers may have confused Lulu Publishing with our own lala books, Lowell’s great independent bookstore at 189 Market Street. However, lala books has graciously agreed to offer some copies of Lowell: A Concise History for in-person sales, while they last.

Mother at the Stove

Mother at the Stove

By Leo Racicot

     “Memories hold the key not to the past but to the future.”

Corrie Ten Boom

Our mother wasn’t Julia Child but she was no slouch at the stove either, and when she, at a young age, found herself a widow and bereft, she, nevertheless took her maternal responsibilities by the horn and saw to it that Diane and I were fed, and fed well. She downright mastered the food stuffs of the day, plain fare by today’s standards but nourishing and good: her forte was Shepherd’s Pie, an always welcome sight when I’d come home from school to find bubbling in the oven. A variation on this was a dish I believe has disappeared from the American table, scrambled hamburg, which, when served with sides of mashed potatoes and another vegetable, usually peas or green beans. provided a not-unpleasant sensation for the palate. It was the habit in the ’50s and ’60s to mix different foods together, as when my friend and library co-worker, Fran Grady, used to make what she called “garbage soup”, where pretty much anything you have at hand, leftover beans, meats, a stray soup bone or two, were tossed into the pot, a not entirely attractive mess but tasty and “Hey”, Fran would say, “It’s food, isn’t it?”

For a quick, satisfying lunch, our mother also liked to feed us fried baloney sandwiches. She’d fry the slice in tons of butter, serve it up on bread, potato chips beside it on the plate (usually Royal Feast which were out-of-this-world potato chips — the longtime company whose ramshackle headquarters was located on the same stretch of Route 110 that included Cathay Garden – went suddenly under, no warning. I miss its red, white and blue chips bag and the blue bucket we’d bring the chips home in. I don’t know that I’d eat a fried baloney sandwich today. There is the possibility it would trigger Proustian moments of our mother’s kitchen or maybe it would make me retch, for the saem reason I stopped eating sausages, hot dogs and Spam — I simply don’t know what’s in them and probably don’t want to know.

One day, I walked in from my Saturday wanderings and found – mirabile visu! — that Ma was trying her hand at making donuts. A newly-acquired fryer was on the burner. I delighted in watching her place the circles of pasty, beige dough in it, listening to them sizzle, one by one turning magically a golden brown. They were and are still the best doughnuts I’ve ever had and I could tell Ma was pleased she’d succeeded in this, for her, new culinary attempt, pleased, too, seeing how much Diane and I enjoyed them.

Another staple of her kitchen table was pork scrap (scrapple) which Ma learned to make from her French-Canadian sisters-in-law, who lived next door. Pork scrap was so satisfying, spread between thick slices of French bread. When she didn’t have time to whip it up, a quick trip across North Common to Cote’s Market on Salem Street, did the trick. They also sold the best homemade pork and chicken pies, and the world-renowned Rochette’s beans, a Saturday meal favorite of ours. I liked going to Cote’s, liked seeing the couple who worked the kitchen there. Both were small, stout folks and due to the smallness of the cooking area, seemed to walk in tandem, as they served up the food. The Mister had a pronounced limp, due to one shoe having an orthopedic lift. I liked watching him hobble, in his cooking “whites”, aprons stained with meat juice and butcher’s blood. He gave character to the colorful shop. I could be wrong but I think their names were Wilfred and Gertie Levasseur. Their son, Roger, a good-looking, friendly fellow, was often a presence in the store. The “mom and pop” quality of their shop provided a reassuring contentment to a curious, hungry, young boy.

I don’t know that I, or any kid, for that matter, could appreciate all that my mother did for Diane and me. The after-meal clean-up — doing endless sinks full of dishes, scrubbing the oven and stove (no Easy-Off in those days), keeping the kitchen floor spotless — these daily grinds had to be hard for our mom, struggling at the same time to navigate the loss of her husband.  I, myself, have learned I don’t like seeing dirty dishes piled up in a sink. I’ve actually learned to like doing them. Kitchen chores (working for the Sheas in Cambridge, working for Marriott Dining Hall Services at Wheaton College) and here at home, have given me a new appreciation for what our mother (and most housewives and mothers of her time) did for their families. Let’s face it — I’d rather be doing most anything (reading, shopping, watching a movie) than chopping vegetables, a deadline looming on the horizon. I’m sure Ma would’ve to. My hat’s off to her gutsy determination to carry on, a single woman with two kids to feed, clothe, rear. I hope it helped heal her soul a little knowing her two children were fed, and fed well.

Cote’s Market

Fried bologna sandwich

Homemade plain donuts

Pork Scrap

Royal Feast Potato Chips

Shepherd’s Pie

Wilfred Levasseur