On Tuesday, the Lowell City Council voted to borrow $3,373,000 to purchase the Senior Center Property at 276 Broadway. The memo that accompanied the proposed loan order laid out the rationale for the purchase which I’ll summarize below after some historical context for this transaction.

The city long-ago owned this property, purchasing it and the lot across Broadway (now a Market Basket grocery store) in 1869 for $20,000. The Market Basket property was home to the city’s street department while the Senior Center property was home to the “ashes and waste” department in the era before trash pickup was privatized. These uses pre-dated motor vehicles, so wagons and many horses were involved. To house the horses, the building on the Senior Center lot was known as the “city stables” (sometimes, “city barns”) while the smaller brick building closest to Broadway on the same lot was known as the “blacksmith building” (horses need blacksmiths).

That’s how things stood until the late 1990s when the city launched its Acre Urban Revitalization and Development Project. The newly constructed Market Basket on Broadway anchored this plan which included the rehabilitation of 500 units of housing and the construction of 150 new units throughout the neighborhood.

The city also decided that the city stables building would be a good site for a dedicated senior center. Before that, the Lowell Council on Aging had a place in the Smith Baker Center, across from City Hall, but that facility was lacking in space and amenities essential to a modern senior center.

In 2001, the city conveyed the city stables parcel to private developers Nick Sarris and George Behrakis as trustees of City Barns Trust. The developers agreed to rehabilitate the existing buildings and construct a new addition. The city would then lease approximately 60 percent of the building to be used as the senior center with the city paying rent pursuant to a 20 year lease. At the end of the 20 years, it was understood that the developers would “gift” the property back to the city although that reversionary language was omitted from the deed conveying ownership to the developers. The developers would also rent the remainder of the property which constituted two uses: a portion of the senior center building to be used as a drug store which was leased to Walgreen’s Pharmacy and the full blacksmith building used by and rented to a physical therapy business.

The deal was structured this way so that the city could use federal Community Development Block Grant funds to pay the lease rather than paying it from the city’s annual budget or by borrowing money for the rehabilitation and adding to the city’s bond indebtedness.

In recent years, the lease expired on its own terms, but the parties continued as if it was still in effect. (The city did not convey the property to the developers until 2003, and the senior center did not open until 2004, so I assume the 20 years began in one of those years which would mean the lease expired in 2023 or 2024.)

Whenever the lease expired, the city stopped paying rent. Because there was no valid lease in place, the city auditor could not authorize any rental payments, so the city fell in arrears on its rent. For whatever reason, the developer allowed the city to continue using the senior center while the arrearage grew.

To resolve the expired lease and rent arrearage issues, City Manager Tom Golden negotiated a proposed lease extension which he presented to city councilors last year. However, the council rejected the lease proposal on a tie vote which sent Golden back to the negotiating table. The present agreement emerged from that effort.

Notably, in July 2025, the developer “condominiumized” the property by creating three condominium units. Unit 1 was the senior center space. It consisted of 22,193 square feet and accounted for 57.4 percent of the overall building space. Unit 2 was the Walgreen’s Space (the portion of the building once occupied by the Walgreen’s Pharmacy which has since closed). It consisted of 12,283 square feet and accounted for 30.7 percent of the space. Unit 3 was the Blacksmith Building which consisted of a standalone 6,789 square foot building which accounted for 11.9 percent of the space.

The current agreement negotiated by City Manager Golden and ratified by the city council by their vote on Tuesday to borrow the money needed for the deal will pay the developer $3,373,000 to buy out the developer’s ownership interest in the property and to settle any claim for unpaid rent for the senior center space. Essentially (but not expressly) the agreement does “gift” the senior center condominium unit to the city while selling the city the Walgreen’s condominium unit, the Blacksmith’s Building condominium unit, and the parking lot.

City Manager Golden was not at Tuesday’s meeting, however, CFO Conor Baldwin answered fiscal questions raised by councilors. Baldwin explained that the city will bond this new $3.37 million indebtedness over 20 years which will require roughly $250,000 per year in payments by the city for those 20 years, an amount which will come from the city’s operating budget rather than from federal CDBG funds which cannot be used for that purpose. He also explained that while Walgreens Pharmacy closed several years ago, Walgreens continue to pay rent for the space per its lease which runs into 2028. Also, the physical therapy business that occupies the Blacksmith condominium unit rents that space on a month-to-month basis and continues to pay rent.

Presumably, once the city acquires title, which is supposed to occur in December, it will become the landlord and receive rental payments although I’m not sure how that works from a municipal finance perspective. Will the rent received be allocated directly to the bond payment, or will it have to go into the general fund? In any case, I assume that if Walgreens is paying rent for that space, the city will be unable to use that space since if the city did take it over, it would let Walgreen’s off the legal hook created by its lease. (I assume Walgreen’s had a significant operating loss while the pharmacy was open and decided to cut its losses by closing the drug store even though it was obligated to continue paying the lease until it expires.)

The building is also in need of repairs. The city’s current capital spending plan contains $450,000 for repairs to the senior center space, but according to the City Manager’s memo, the overall space, including the senior center, needs immediate repairs that will cost approximately $1,850,000, plus another $5.7 million in repairs during the next five years. CFO Baldwin said that the next proposed capital plan will include at least some of those funds.

I think everyone would agree that the city needs a functioning senior center. Given the history of the current center, the politics – present and past – involved, the legal ambiguities surrounding the rights of the parties and the lack of a feasible, affordable, timely alternative, the city’s acquisition of the property under the terms laid out on Tuesday seems like the best possible outcome.

Still, the willingness of recent city councils to spend money seems out of step with what’s happening in the country today. Economists and national elected officials tell us that the economy is doing great, but most people don’t see that when they pay for housing, gas or groceries.

Four years ago, the city received a fiscal windfall of $75 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. My memory is that that money was spent on social impact programs ($13.4 million); water & sewer infrastructure ($10.6 million); fire department vehicle replacement ($10 million); neighborhood & parks improvements ($9 million); enterprise fund replacement ($8 million); school building upgrades ($7 million); business revitalization ($7 million); non-profit sector support ($4.6 million); premium pay for essential workers ($3 million); and administrative costs ($2.4 million).

Instead of saying, we were fortunate to get all of this unexpected money, we spent it wisely, now let’s hold the line on future increases so we don’t recklessly inflate the cost of government, the council has continued to spend as if ARPA-like cash infusions are a regular occurrence. Anytime you leave your house these days, it seems you encounter some road repair project as part of the city’s so-called “horizontal construction” boom; the fire department seems to blow through its annual overtime budget in the first quarter of the fiscal year; given the spike in fuel prices, I assume there will be a supplemental city budget to pay for higher gasoline and diesel costs; interest rates continue to rise which makes the city’s borrowing of money more expensive; and the city has acquired several major real estate properties (40 Market Street from Align Credit Union in July 2025, the former St. Jenne d’Arc School from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston in May 2025, and now the senior center complex in 2026). All three have acquisition costs and future operations and maintenance costs that are all new to the city budget.

Taken separately, each of these council spending decisions can be rationalized, but collectively they set the city up for a much harsher fall when the economy turns downward as it inevitably will. It’s important that someone in government acts as the chaperone who has the foresight to take away the punchbowl just when the party is really warming up. Presently in Lowell, that role seems to be vacant.

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Thanks to everyone who attended this fall’s Lowell Cemetery tours. Between the two regular tours on October 3rd and 4th, and the Edgar Allen Poe-themed tour on October 17th, we had 445 people participate. I’ll announce the dates of the spring 2027 tours after the first of the year, but for now, if you’d like to get a taste of the cemetery tours, local YouTuber Ratbas (aka Steve Albert) recorded the full 90-minute Poe tour.

Steve also captured on video most of the events on the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac weekend including the incomparable Kurt Phaneuf’s “Kerouac’s Characters” tour of St. Joseph Cemetery in Chelmsford.

One of the graves featured on that tour was the burial place of Louis A. Biron (1861-1947), the longtime editor and proprietor of L’Etoile, a French language newspaper published in Lowell continuously from 1886 until 1957. Biron hired Leo Kerouac to work for the newspaper as a printer. That job opportunity caused Kerouac to move from Nashua to Lowell where his son, the celebrated author Jack Kerouac was born in 1922. Now, Biron’s granddaughter, Louise Peloquin, has published the story of L’Etoile in Lowell complete with examples of the paper’s coverage in French with English translations. L’Etoile: A Star on Prince Street is available for purchase online.

A longtime contributor to my richardhowe.com website, Louise graciously allowed A Star on Prince Street to become Volume 3 of my Encyclopedia of Lowell History series. This is my effort to preserve the city’s print legacy by publishing books on Lowell History.

Volume 1, Lowell: A Concise History, and Volume 2, Regret to Inform You: The Human Cost of World War II in Lowell, Massachusetts, are both available for online purchase and are also for sale at lala books at 189 Market Street in Lowell.

Local attorney Jay Gaffney also has a new history book. Fathers and Sons in Native New England: Massasoit, Passaconaway, Their Sons, and the End of Two Great Algonquian Nations tells the story of early New England, especially of King Philip’s War, a deadly conflict that devastated this region and helped shape the community that would become the city of Lowell. The book is available for purchase online.

Finally, Henri Marchand has written a comprehensive article on the history and closure of the Pawtucketville Social Club. The article was recently published in Résonance, an electronic literary journal published under the Franco American Program of the University of Maine.