There was no Lowell City Council meeting this week due to the summer schedule but there are plenty of other things to write about. On Wednesday, UMass Lowell announced an agreement with the Futures Collegiate Baseball League to bring a new team to the University’s LeLacheur Park next season. Although the announcement acknowledged that “the league and the university are working to identify potential owners of the Lowell franchise,” there seems to be little concern that a team will materialize by the start of next baseball season.

Whether you are a baseball fan or not, this is great news for Lowell. LeLacheur Park is an important asset that has been underutilized for the past few years, and bringing more activity to it will have broader benefits, particularly because it is in the Lowell Innovation Network Corridor (LINC), the ambitious UMass Lowell initiative that is central to the city’s economic well-being in the coming years.

The other partner in this agreement, the Futures League, was founded in 2011, in part by former Lowell Spinners owner Drew Weber. The league provides a showcase for top college players to compete with wooden bats in a professional baseball-style setting. (Several Futures League alumni have made it to the major leagues.) Each team plays 62 games from May through September followed by playoffs and a championship series. Notably, the Futures League also strives to capture the cultural magic of minor league baseball we all experienced when the Lowell Spinners first came to the city.

Lowell will be the seventh team in the league. The others are:

• Nashua Silver Knights (New Hampshire)
• New Britain Bees (Connecticut)
• Norwich Sea Unicorns (Connecticut)
• Vermont Lake Monsters (Vermont)
• Westfield Starfires (Massachusetts)
• Worcester Bravehearts (Massachusetts)

There does seem to be considerable churn in membership. Here is a list of former teams in the league:

• Bristol Blues (2015-2019)
• Brockton Rox (2012-2024)
• Martha’s Vineyard Sharks (2011-2018)
• North Shore Navigators (2012-2020)
• Old Orchard Beach Raging Tide (2012-2014)
• Pittsfield Suns (2012-19, 2021-23)
• Seacoast Mavericks (2011-2017)
• Torrington titans (2011-2016)
• Wachusett Dirt Dawgs (2012-2017)

Although the Spinners era seems like just yesterday to me, the team was born 30 years ago next year, so some history is warranted. In the early 1990s, Lowell was racked by the dual regional collapse of real estate and high tech, with the bankruptcy of Lowell-based computer maker Wang Labs and the foreclosure of its world headquarters (today’s Cross Point which sold for $500,000 in a 1994 foreclosure auction) emblematic of the distress.

Seeking to catapult the city out of the resulting malaise, Paul Tsongas, who had just finished second to Bill Clinton in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary, believed that securing a professional sports franchise would help Lowell move to the upper echelon of mid-sized American cities. Tsongas was instrumental in obtaining an American Hockey League franchise for Lowell with a team that became the Lowell Lock Monsters. Almost as a spinoff of that effort, Tsongas also secured a minor league baseball team, the former Elmira Pioneers, and, most importantly, a Red Sox affiliation.

The new team, the Lowell Spinners, debuted in 1996 at Alumni Field, a refurbished high school baseball stadium on Rogers Street, on the condition that the city construct a new ballpark that met minimum professional standards. To make that happen, Tsongas orchestrated funding from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, UMass Lowell, and the city of Lowell (notwithstanding the bitter local political fighting that characterized efforts to move Lowell forward in that era). The result was the 5000-seat stadium on the south bank of the Merrimack River that was named LeLacheur Park for former State Representative Ed LeLacheur who was instrumental in securing state funding for the project.

With the Spinners already a local phenomenon, they commenced playing at LeLacheur Park in the 1998 season. Tickets were affordable, the experience and setting were terrific, and the bonus of seeing future Red Sox players begin their pro careers was priceless (more than 110 former Spinners made it to the major leagues with current LA Dodgers superstar Mookie Betts at the top of that list.)

The Spinners success story came to an end in the fall of 2020 when Major League Baseball shrunk the number of minor league teams from 160 to 120 and the Lowell Spinners ceased to exist. In 2022, the city of Lowell sold the stadium to the University of Massachusetts Building Authority on behalf of UMass Lowell. Since then, the field has been home to UMass Lowell Riverhawks baseball and a few Little League tournaments but has, as far as I know, been infrequently used in the summer and fall. Hopefully that will change next spring.

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Usually, I don’t write about international events but because Lowell has the second largest Cambodian American population in the United States, any time articles about Cambodia enter my news feed I pay attention. That happened earlier this month when fighting broke out between the armed forces of Cambodia and Thailand along the border between the countries. The Boston Globe explored the local angle with a story this week that interviewed current Lowell City Councilors Vesna Nuon and Paul Ratha Yem, and former State Representative Rady Mom. (“My heart cries for all: Truce brings relief to local Cambodians and Thais.”)

Conflicts between Cambodian and its eastern neighbor, Vietnam, have dominated the news in the post-Vietnam War era, but disputes between Cambodia and its western neighbor, Thailand, go back to the 13th century and the rise of the kingdom of Siam (today’s Thailand). Prior to that the Khmer Empire (today’s Cambodia) ruled the region for nearly 500 years, but a variety of factors led Siam to overtake and dominate the Khmer Empire.

The tensions between the two countries were made worse by French colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries. France established French Indochina (today’s Vietnam and Cambodia) alongside the still-independent kingdom of Siam. A treaty between France and Siam in 1904 set the boundary between Thailand and Cambodia in a way that baked-in territorial disputes. Specifically, the 11th century Preah Vihear Temple was located on the Cambodian side of the French-drawn border although Thailand claimed ownership of it. Friction over the Preah Vihear Temple escalated in 2008 when Cambodia’s application to make the temple a UNESCO World Heritage Site was allowed.

The current violence commenced in May when a brief exchange of gunfire on the border left a Cambodian soldier dead. Just over a week ago, five Thai soldiers were wounded by a land mine which Thailand accused Cambodia of recently planting. That incident caused heavy fighting including air strikes, artillery shelling, and rocket fire to break out. A ceasefire agreed to on July 28 continues to be observed.

For all the faults of the current Cambodian regime, hopefully the fighting has ended since many of our Lowell neighbors have friends and family still living in the parts of Cambodia most affected by the fighting.

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The Preah Vihear Temple is one of more than 1200 places designated World Heritage sites by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Another UNESCO initiative that has a Lowell angle is the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities which features 350 cities from 75 countries that are committed to making lifelong learning a reality at the local level.

Surprisingly, there is no UNESCO City of Learning in the United States. Back in 2018, retired UMass Lowell political science professor John Wooding sought to change that by launching a still-active effort to make Lowell the first UNESCO City of Learning in the US. At the time, John wrote an article for my website that explained what a City of Learning was and why it would be such a great fit for Lowell. His efforts continue to this day.

Unfortunately, Lowell’s path to City of Learning status became more difficult when the United States recently announced it would withdraw from UNESCO entirely. This was not a complete surprise since the US previously withdrew from UNESCO during the first Trump Administration only to have President Joe Biden rejoin the organization in 2023.

“Lifelong learning” was the mantra of Pat Mogan, who many see as the “father” of the Lowell National Historical Park. Mogan had an inspiring vision for the city that utilized its history and cultural resources (in the broadest sense) to create what he called “the educative city” or a place that provided learning opportunities for residents throughout their lives. That should still be a shared objective for us, even if the formal City of Learning designation is no longer available to Lowell (for now, at least).

To learn more about Pat Mogan, check out this short video on my YouTube channel.

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An excellent example of Lowell as a Classroom can be seen on a new website jointly launched by UMass Lowell’s Saab Center for Portuguese Studies and the school’s Departments of History and Art & Design. It’s called the “Back Central Project”, and it does a deep dive into Lowell’s Back Central Neighborhood. The website draws together the cultural and architectural history of the neighborhood, particularly its Portuguese residents. It also includes in-depth building-biographies of 41 properties in the neighborhood and the families that have occupied them over time.

So please check out the UML Back Central Project.

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I have a couple of Lowell History talks and tours scheduled:

On Wednesday, August 20, 2025, at 6 pm, at the Pollard Memorial Library, I’ll give a talk on the Founding of Lowell which will explore the birth of the city in the 1820s.

On Sunday, September 7, 2025, at 10 am, at Tyler Park, I will lead a tour of the Tyler Park Historic District in partnership with the Friends of Tyler Park. (Rain date September 14, 2025).

On Saturday, September 20, and on Sunday, September 21, 2025, both at 10 am, I will lead a tour of Lowell Cemetery. The tours will begin at the Knapp Avenue entrance of the cemetery and are free. The same tour occurs both days.

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This week on richardhowe.com:

Leo Racicot wrote about growing up in the Acre in the 1960s and 70s.

Paul Marion posted a classic Lowell photo by Kevin Harkins and wrote about the lasting impact of the image.

Louise Peloquin has more about the Hood Milk as reported by L’Etoile, the city’s French-language newspaper.

Terry Downes has his monthly baseball poem, Pitchers’ Duel.

Steve Edington shared his recent essay on national politics that first appeared in the New Hampshire Union Leader.