RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Lowell Politics: April 19, 2026

Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting was a business-like gathering with no overt controversies. However, a couple of innocuous items on the agenda shed some light on the workings of local government and some important public policy considerations so I’ll discuss them first.

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A routine public hearing on a request by Boston Gas to replace an existing gas main on Fletcher Street generated an interesting discussion. Several members of the public spoke, recommending that instead of replacing an entire stretch of pipe, that the gas company just fix the leak. The reasoning is that replacing the entire pipe is more expensive than plugging the leak but because the gas company just passes the cost onto its customers, it doesn’t have an incentive to do the less expensive repairs.

Mayor Gitschier countered that these gas pipes are likely 50 years old and if a pipe starts leaking in one place, it’s likely to have a second and subsequent leak nearby, so replacing the entire stretch of pipe can be cheaper in the long run. Also, the gas company tries to replace pipes just before the city repaves a street. If the “just plug the leak whenever it happens” approach is used, a newly paved street could be dug up repeatedly which devalues that benefit of the repaving project.

As I understand it, most of the gas pipes buried beneath Lowell’s streets are made of cast iron which is brittle and prone to cracking from ground movement caused by freeze-thaw cycles and heavy surface traffic. Utilities now use plastic pipe which is more durable in that it does not rust, corrode or react to acidic soil, while also being flexible which allows it to move with the ground as it freezes and thaws.

I also believe this pipe replacement effort is partially in response to the 2018 gas explosions in Lawrence and Andover. In that incident, a series of fires and explosions ripped through those communities killing one, injuring two dozen, and damaging or destroying over 100 structures. The catastrophe occurred when a gas crew that was replacing old cast iron pipes with new plastic ones botched the job which caused gas to flow through the old iron pipes at a pressure level far higher than the system could tolerate. This in turn caused gas regulators on appliances in countless homes and buildings to fail which allowed gas to flow into those places. Wherever it found an ignition source, it exploded, hence all the destruction.

In response, the state of Massachusetts, among other things, significantly accelerated the time in which utility companies must replace older gas pipes since the newer pipes and their ancillary fittings reduce the risk of a similar occurrence.

However, the state has also imposed rules that will help move away from our reliance on natural gas which is used primarily for home heating. Although gas hookups in new construction have not yet been banned, state policy provides strong incentives for shifting from gas heat and cooking to an “all electric” home that relies on heat pumps and induction stovetops.

Which is all to say that public policy, particularly at the local level, is quite complicated with many moving parts. Nothing major came out of this public hearing, but it provided insight into the balance that must be struck between safety and cost.

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The second policy issue arose with twin votes by the council to accept deeds for the real estate parcels located at 251 Church Street and at 60 Clairmont Street. Both were “deeds in lieu of foreclosure” only the foreclosure contemplated would have been for unpaid taxes.

In general, a deed in lieu of foreclosure is a mechanism whereby a homeowner who is facing the foreclosure of their mortgage “hands over the keys” to the house in exchange for the lender releasing them from their mortgage debt and halting further legal action. This is done by the homeowner executing a deed which conveys ownership of the property to the lender who then becomes the outright owner of the property.

In the two deeds on the Tuesday agenda, the city stepped into the shoes of the mortgage lender, except instead of the delinquent debt being an unpaid mortgage, it was unpaid real estate taxes. Once the deed is signed by the homeowner, the city will record it at the registry of deeds, and the city will own the property.

Historically under Massachusetts law, the city would “take” property for the nonpayment of taxes by recording a Notice of Taking at the registry of deeds. However, that did not mean the city immediately owned the property. Instead, it kicked off a long, complicated legal process which would end up with the city owning the property provided the property owner did not bring their tax payments (along with fines and interest) up to date.

Instead of getting cash for the unpaid taxes, the city would get the property itself. This was a draconian remedy since if the tax liability was just $500 but the property was worth $500,000, the city would end up owning a property worth $500,000 and the property owner would get nothing despite having $495,500 in equity in the property.

But a city needs current revenue, not a big property portfolio, so instead of pursuing this long legal process to its end, the city instead began auctioning off its right to conduct tax foreclosures to private companies which would pay the city money upfront and then pursue the foreclosure in their own names, eventually selling the property to a third party and reaping a substantial profit.

This all came to a screeching halt in 2023 when the U.S. Supreme Court held in a Minnesota case that the kind of absolute foreclosure used in Massachusetts for tax takings was an unconstitutional taking of private property in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

Recognizing that the Massachusetts law would also be deemed unconstitutional if challenged, municipalities across the Commonwealth, including Lowell, paused any new tax lien foreclosures and delayed scheduling tax lien auctions. A Massachusetts trial court subsequently confirmed this assumption by ruling the state’s tax lien law unconstitutional under the new Supreme Court precedent.

While the Massachusetts state legislature is reportedly working on a legislative fix, the suspension of tax lien foreclosures has had practical consequences for local governments. Cities have temporarily lost one of their primary legal tools to address abandoned, dilapidated, and tax-delinquent properties, leaving local officials frustrated as problem properties remain untouched.

Consequently, it was great to see that the city is adopting new tactics in its efforts to collect back taxes. Unfortunately, the deed in lieu of foreclosure route requires (1) the homeowner to assent to it; and (2) the property to be free of any other encumbrances like an outstanding mortgage or creditor liens. Still, in the right situation – the two properties acted on Tuesday night were both relatively small undeveloped parcels – it is a useful tool for the city to use.

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The council also endorsed a motion by Mayor Erik Gitschier that that city rename the stretch of road in front of University Crossing from its current name of Pawtucket Street to the new name of Meehan Way in honor of UMass President Marty Meehan.

On Tuesday, many councilors spoke of all the good that Meehan did for UMass Lowell and for the city while he was chancellor of the school from 2007 until 2015 when he became president of the entire UMass system, and for his service in the US House of Representatives from 1993 until 2007. The catalyst for the street renaming was the recent announcement that Meehan was making a $1.5 million charitable gift to UMass Lowell to support paid internships for current students. In gratitude for the donation, UMass Lowell will rename its University Crossing building the Martin T. Meehan Student Center with a dedication ceremony on Saturday, May 2, 2026.

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One hundred sixty-five years ago today, two young men from Lowell were shot and killed in Baltimore, making them two of the first of 725,000 people to die in the American Civil War. Luther Ladd and Addison Whitney, two mill workers, were also members of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia Regiment, that era’s National Guard. When, on April 12, 1861, the South Carolina militia attacked the US Army’s Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteer troops to come to Washington DC to help suppress the rebellion.

The Sixth Massachusetts was among the first to mobilize and move out. As it passed through Baltimore on its way to Washington on the morning of April 19, 1861, the Massachusetts soldiers were attacked by a mob of Confederate sympathizers. Ladd, Whitney and two other soldiers were killed and a dozen were wounded.

Despite the bloodshed – the soldiers returned fire and killed more than a dozen rioters – the Sixth made it to Washington, the first northern military unit to do so, and helped protect the capital from seizure by nearby rebel forces.

The remains of Ladd and Whitney were returned to Lowell where they were memorialized as heroes and called “the first martyrs of the rebellion.” On June 17, 1865 – Bunker Hill Day – the city dedicated an obelisk monument to their memory. Known as the Ladd and Whitney monument, it stands just to the front of Lowell City Hall on Merrimack Street. The grassy triangle the monument sits atop, historically called Monument Square, is also a cemetery since Ladd and Whitney are both buried there.

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If you are interested in learning more about Lowell’s history, come to one of my Lowell Cemetery tours which will be held on Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, at 10am from the Knapp Avenue entrance of Lowell Cemetery. (Same tour both days).

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This week in Seen & Heard, I wrote a review of the book The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II; commented on an article by McKay Coppins in The Atlantic on his experience with legal sports gambling in the US; and commented on another article in New York magazine about the tragic loss in a flash blood of 37 girls attending a summer camp in Texas last summer and the controversial efforts of the camp to reopen this year.

Donuts Back in the Day

Donuts Back in the Day

By Leo Racicot

There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s when Lowell could have earned the nickname, The Donut Capital of Massachusetts. The city was home to many.

Let’s see now: there was Donut Shack. Its made-on-the-premises, old-fashioned donuts have been a crowd pleaser with Lowellians for years. I’m not sure — I don’t often find myself in the Highlands but think the place is still going strong on Westford Street. As I recall, it opened extra early in the morning and would remain open until its morning supply had run out, bought up by eager, hungry customers heading to work or school so – pretty fast, given its tasty offerings…

Mary Lou’s Donuts held forth on Chelmsford Street (close to Plain Street) for more years than I can count. The lines to get in the door were long. It wasn’t uncommon to see early risers lined up on the sidewalk for its filled-to-bursting jelly and marshmallow wonders. And I mean real jelly and real marshmallow; today’s jellies and marshmallows hardly compare and have me wondering what the heck passes for a marshmallow donut these days.

Eat-a-Donut on School Street was another favorite among locals. Before our morning shift started, my pal, Connie Carrigg and I used to take our CTI vans there to start our long days with a piping hot cup of fresh coffee and a treat. I liked the shop’s Bismarcks, beignets and “sinkers”. Not sure but I heard The Board of Health shut the place down due to sanitary issues, must have been in the early 2000s?  That shop was always mobbed, a crowd lingering outside at any time of day. It was one of the city’s most popular stop-offs.

My favorite long-operating donut spot was Quality Donuts run by John Apostolos. It was so convenient, being a two-minute walk from our house, at the corner of Fletcher and Butterfield Streets where John held court for lots of years. Its tiny space for a long time sold only coffee and donuts (Honey dipped, plain and crullers — this last word “cruller” seems to have disappeared from the lexicon — you never hear it said and I gave up years ago asking for it in bakeries by name. I guess the Dunkin’ Donut jelly stick and glazed stick come closest nowadays to the crullers of my youth. I miss the ridged, twisty shape of a cruller, especially a sugar cruller, the crisp exterior, the moist, cake-like interior. Sorry but the Dunkin’ version simply doesn’t compare.  Later on, John “expanded” his menu  to include steamed hot dogs on a plain bun. As with the other donut establishments described above, John’s (we always called it “John’s” was always always a mob scene. Many’s the time we’d go in, only to be told all the donuts had been sold. I can still see the morning cars, workers on their way to the job, stopping mid-Fletcher Street one-after-another, the driver getting out, going in and coming out quickly with their donut and coffee, continuing on to their destination. It was a common sight finding neighbors and friends of our mother inside, having a nosh, shooting the breeze with the always affabe John: Jane “Jenny” Tournas, Ellen Wilkerson, Doris Pratt, the Dubes, the Brissettes, Virginia Chateauneuf, her husband Al, their son, also Al. Virginia liked to stop in with her dog, Rinny, for a honey dip (her fave and Rinny’s). It was a sad day in The Acre when John decided to close up shop. The tiny space now houses the equally popular Eliu’s Hole-in-the-Wall.

Now, we have the ubiquitous Dunkin’ Donuts which may I say I’m not all that crazy about — too much cream in their coffee, plastic-y looking, plastic-y tasting pastries. Unfortunately, it’s the only game in town that I know of.  For a time in the ’90s, there was talk that a Krispy Kreme outlet was coming to Lowell but that never, as far as I know, happened.

Here’s to the old-fashioned coffee and donut shops of yesterday. They not only served up yummy treats but also served as community gathering spots for gossip and casual, friendly social exchange.

Tray of donuts

Quality Donuts

Mary Lou Donuts

Enjoying a marshmallow donut

Donut Shack

Eat-a-Donut

Living Madly: Lost Worlds

Photo courtesy of burcubyzt 85

Living Madly: Lost Worlds

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

On my website, I often write essays about places, and sometimes people, that were once an integral part of my life but today no longer exist. Some of them are part of what I call the Lost World Series, but there are others that aren’t titled this way. I write a new one every so often when an idea strikes me. But they are difficult to write, as they inevitably dredge up old feelings and memories I’d forgotten about, which almost always makes me feel nostalgic and wistful.

The idea to write about vanished places was inspired by a photographer I knew when I was younger. He had a website dedicated to photographs of places he’d once visited that were gone: the Word Trade Center in New York; Soviet Moscow; pre-revolutionary Cuba; old movie theaters; the Berlin Wall. Sometimes the photos had people in them: a gas station attendant checking someone’s oil; women hanging laundry on a clothesline.

Looking at these images, I couldn’t help but think about the people these lost places had touched, what their everyday lives had been like. I also felt grateful that this photographer had shot these photos, and that he had decided to make them available to the public. Because people—all of us—have a tendency to lose sight of the past, to forget the places, their sights and sounds and smells, both good and bad, that make up the building blocks of our lives, our families, our cultures, even ourselves.

It’s also important, I think, to share memories of lost places with people who weren’t around to see them. It helps the places live on in way, and it fosters a better, more ground-level understanding of where and from whom we came, and how we arrived where we are.

It’s good to know the grocery store parking lot used to be a corn field, for example, that the asphalt wasn’t inevitable. Knowledge such as this helps us appreciate that although the sacrifices of those who came before us have made our lives more convenient, they have also sometimes made them meaner.

On a personal level, writing about lost places that were once part of my life has helped me see significance in things I never considered valuable. It’s helped me understand where many of my ideas, preferences, and opinions originated.

Last year, for instance, I wrote an essay about how my elementary school, which my grandfather and his three brothers had also attended, was bulldozed by a real estate developer when I was eleven years old. I was sad about it at the time. I knew it was incredibly unfair, but I wasn’t able to put my finger on why that was.

In writing about it, I was able to see the circumstances surrounding the school’s destruction more clearly: My neighborhood was mainly made up of poor and working-class immigrant families; the school building had been neglected and needed costly renovations; there was money to be made by building houses on the land.

Today, the people living in the neighborhood where I grew up are upper middle class. Few of them are even aware that there was once an elementary school on the corner of Greenhood and Colburn. They don’t know about the families who once lived there, how they emigrated from Quebec and Ireland, Poland and Italy to give their children a chance at a better life. When they sit out on their porches in the evening, they don’t hear French or Gaelic. They don’t smell sausages and tomatoes and garlic cooking.

I’ve come to understand that when a place is lost, even if it’s a rundown elementary school in a poor immigrant neighborhood, an entire world vanishes. It might not disappear all at once. Usually it fades away slowly, like a newspaper left out in the sun, which is worse in way because it makes it harder for anyone to notice when it’s finally gone.

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Emilie-Noelle Provost (she/her) – Author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award, American Fiction Award, and American Legacy Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Visit her at emilienoelleprovost.com.

Seen & Heard: Vol. 15

Book Review: The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II by David Nasaw. This 2025 book popped up in my Kindle (the e-reader) recommendations recently, so I downloaded it, mostly because of my current research project on Lowell residents who died in the military during World War II. I found Wounded Generation to be fascinating and a counterpoint to the “Greatest Generation” theme of previous decades. This book proceeds logically through many issues. Here’s a sampling: The psychological trauma and its after affects suffered by hundreds of thousands of service members was poorly understood and ineffectively treated, if treated at all, which gave rise to alcoholism, domestic violence, and societal difficulties. Casualty rates during the fight across Europe in 1944-45 were so high that very young men and older men with children were shoved into a draft notice to frontline infantry pipeline at rapid speed with tragic consequences. The dread of those who survived the fight in Europe of having to go to the Pacific and endure further combat there led 85% of Americans to support the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. After the war, the military planned to keep large armies in Europe and Asia but public pressure to rapidly demobilize and let servicemembers get on with their lives forced those plans to be scaled down substantially. President Roosevelt wanted a societal-wide social welfare program at the end of the war to ease the transition from a war economy to a strong peacetime one that would not continue the Great Depression, but conservatives in Congress wouldn’t support that and instead mandated that all benefits go solely to those who had served in the military. Furthermore, Congress insisted that those benefits be administered by the states, not by the Federal government, which ensured that existing racial and gender hierarchies were affirmed and strengthened. The most successful portion of the GI bill was the education benefits provided to (white male) veterans. By putting millions in college, it kept them out of the work force which prevented unemployment from becoming an issue, and the monthly cash stipend given to these veterans was sufficiently large to support a family living frugally, so all of that government money was redirected into the economy which helped drive a surge in consumer spending. 

Magazine Article: “My year as a degenerate gambler.” – By McKay Coppins in The Atlantic, April 2026. For me, Coppins is a must-read author. Off the top of my head, I can’t cite particular articles of his, I just know most of them have been quite good so I always read his stuff. This continues that trend and was especially interesting to me because I’ve been fascinated by the rise of legal gambling in our culture in recent years. When Coppins’ editors assigned him to write an article on gambling, they wanted it to be participatory journalism with him gambling himself then writing about it. This presented a problem because Coppins is a Mormon and that religion forbids its followers from gambling. The editors had an answer: They would stake him $10,000 of the Atlantic’s money to gamble with over the course of a year, he could pay back that advance and then he and the magazine would split any winnings. In that way, he wasn’t really gambling but was doing research for his article. Coppins got his bishop to grudgingly sign off on the arrangement and he was off. After a random early bet won him some money and gave him a false sense of confidence, he hit a losing streak which led to consultation with gambling experts who basically said, to come out ahead, you must obsess over this and even then if you only win even a little, you’ll be ahead of 95% of the gamblers in the US. The obsession part came easy because the now ubiquitous gambling apps and the wall-to-wall advertising that leads people to them proved as addictive as every other addictive (and harmful) practice from drugs to alcohol to tobacco. At the end of the year, Coppins had lost the entire $10,000, and struggled to extricate himself from the mental cage gambling had constructed around him. Finally, he not only deleted all the gambling apps from his phone, he also filed a self-exclusion form which is a state mechanism which bans online gaming companies from allowing the filer to do business with them. 

Magazine Article: “Could the girls of Camp Mystic have been saved?” by Kerry Howley in New York magazine, April 5, 2026 – In the early morning hours of July 4, 2025, a catastrophic flash flood struck Camp Mystic, a long-running all-girls Christian summer camp located along the Guadalupe River in Hunt, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 27 campers and counselors. The event was part of a larger, devastating flood system that claimed over 100 lives across Central Texas, but the tragedy at Camp Mystic was especially notable due to the high number of children lost. This article reviews what happened but it does it primarily from the perspective of several of the parents whose children died. Several have sued the camp alleging negligence in that the camp was in a known flood-prone area and that the camps’ inadequate response at the start of the flood contributed to the deaths. However, as the article makes clear, the clientele for this camp for decades has been the daughters of the Texas elite so there was a strong support for the family that owned and operated the camp. That sentiment won out and the camp will reopen this summer. The bigger picture was a depiction of a philosophy of life that treats life – to me, at least – in a cavalier fashion, reasoning that whatever happens is a manifestation of “God’s will” whether that be making guns freely available at the cost of mass school shootings, or disregarding reasonable collective safety measures in the face of a deadly pandemic, or allowing young kids to spend four weeks of the summer in a place that will predictably flood in a way that is hazardous to life.