Remembering Cupples Square

October 1, 2026 by DickH Posted in Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Remembering Cupples Square

By Leo Racicot

In spite of my lifelong devotion to The Acre and Saint Patrick’s Parish, I was actually born on Pine Street in The Highlands, baptized at Saint Margaret s Church on Stevens Street. Aunt Marie and Nana lived most of their lives in The Highlands in close proximity to Cupples Square so, in my younger years I spent a lot of time in that square. I liked and still like the name Cupples Square; it sounded European to my young ears, a place out of one of the Sherlock Holmes stories I liked so much. As a kid, I divined its quiet charm, its pretty string of enticing shops. My first encounters with the square were when my father would bring me to his barber for my monthly haircut. Crewcuts were the style of the day. This was the 1950s — lots of dads and their sons looking like Johnny Unitas, Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford. I liked Dick the Barber. He had a pencil-thin mustache like his idol, Errol Flynn. His shop smelled like hair tonics, some fruity, some pungent, some bracing. Papa would never let Dick flatten my hair with Brylcreem. “When you’re older …”

Barbershops in the 1950s weren’t just for getting your hair cut. Men would linger for hours, chatting, trading stories, debating current events. I always looked forward to going there, being with Papa, being one of “the guys”.

I always liked walking past Teddy’s Variety; it tickled me that our mother, as a young teenage girl, worked the soda fountain there. She told us what she liked best about the job was the free ice cream sodas. Oh, and the cute boys who’d come in after school to flirt.

Next door to Teddy’s was Yum Yum Bakery. Nana would take me in on my visits and treat me to a buttercup. A thick slice of checkerboard cake (equal parts vanilla and chocolate fashioned to look like a checkers game board) was a favorite. I went ape for the chocolate squares, messy, luscious fun. Not more than a couple of steps away was Huntley Hardware. Huntley’s had a warm, silvery welcoming feel to it and offered personalized service to its community, some of them customers of long-standing. I don’t remember Nana ever buying or needing anything at Huntley’s (though I do have a clear memory of her buying bobby pins to put up her white, flowing hair.). She liked chatting with Mr. Huntley (Was his name Bob?); the two had known each other for years in the neighborhood. She also let me tag along to visit Mr. Pryor, (known to one and all affectionately as Pryor) at First National Market. Pryor was a long-time manager at this longtime Highlands grocery store, an affable friendly face always eager to help with a grocery order or point the latest bargains out to customers. This is the store Marie and Nana liked to get their green stamps from. Green Stamps was a wide-scale national loyalty program. The way it worked is this: based on how much you’d spent on your weekly groceries, the store would award you, the customer, a certain amount of stamps. Diane and I found it great fun when getting back home to Marie’s to have her make a kitchen project of pasting the stamps into little booklets. When our tongues got tired of licking the things, Marie would put a small glass bowl of warm water on the kitchen table to replace our tired lips and tongues. Booklets of stamps could then be redeemed at local redemption centers in exchange for prizes, big and small. I remember the excitement when Marie took us to Nashua to trade our books of stamps for a brand-new radio. That was on a Saturday and on Sunday, the radio brought the news that Country Western singer, Patsy Cline, had been killed in a tragic plane crash. After that, the green stamps lost their luster for me…

Across the street from First National was Page’s Drug Store. Page’s sat at the sharp, V-shaped intersection of Pine and Westford Streets, a black, almost baroque structure whose appealingly decorated windows filled with women’s make-up, men’s colognes, powdery, colorful, puffy do-dads, vanity mirrors and an astonishing assortment of what used to be known as sundries redeemed the dark facade.

Cupples Square was also home to Terminal Fruit Co, owned and operated by Greek immigrants, George and Angie Malapanis. Terminal Fruit grew out of a fruit-peddling enterprise George and Angie began when they first came to America. Their boys, Costas (Dino) and Jimmy, both around my own age, were often in the store. This popular staple of Highland residents’ fruit and market needs was a beloved Cupples Square institution. The Malapanises later moved their business to Appleton Street under the name Palmer News Palmer News had a magazine collection to rival that of Harvard Square’s International Bookstore. Both stocked local and world periodicals, my idea of heaven. Palmer News became a weekly stop for me in the ’80s where Costas and Jimmy would give customers the shirts off their backs if needed. Good people, like their parents.

The places, the people I knew there are many years gone. Today, Cupples Square is the home base for generations of those Vietnamese boat people and refugees who migrated to Lowell following the failure of the war in Vietnam in the early 1970s. Southeast Asian-owned grocery stores, herb shops, beauty salons, restaurants now populate the still-busy square. It is a different Lowell from the Lowell I came of age in, a different but no less vibrant Lowell, offering culinary, cultural, captivating adventures.

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