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The Underpass

The Underpass

By Susan April

The Underpass was a fearful place. A literal underpass of the Boston & Maine railroad at the foot of Middlesex Street by the Lord Overpass. You had to be brave or crazy to take that shortcut. I was both. I never understood the spaghetti of on- and off-ramps and you-can’t-go-there pedestrian signs that made up the—we called it the Lord’s—Overpass. The City of Lowell built it for some reason and it wasn’t to improve the walkability of my school on Branch Street to anything downtown. So I had to navigate The Underpass to get my nine-year-old self to the Girls Club on Worthen Street after school. I had to keep learning how to cook, bake, knit and sew in a homeplace better than home, where people knew I was alive and cared that I walked through the door. My mother didn’t. She was sleeping. Always sleeping.

The Underpass was a dank, dark, wet ground and favorite hangout of derelicts, winos, and men in patched overalls who leered at me in my parochial school uniform. I carried my books in a green canvas bag slung over my shoulder and practiced how I would swing it to save my life if one of them rushed me. No one ever did. Sometimes I’d stop at the entrance, my eyes adjusting to the dark, and wait for another person, hopefully a well-dressed adult or teenager starting into The Underpass from the opposite side. An ally—just in case. Most times, I braved the trip alone.

The mud topped my shoes and I carried an old dishcloth to wipe them with on the other side. The other side was something else. I can’t form a clear picture, but it seemed to be an obstacle of vile odors from the Old Mother Hubbard pet food place coupled with hundreds of feral cats feasting on waste on the ground thrown for spoilage. I’d walk past with my eyes closed, but couldn’t figure how to close my nose. What was that place? A railroad siding? There’s a lot I’ve forgotten about the other side of The Underpass.

For example, how did I cross Fletcher or Thorndike Streets? Weren’t they part of the Lord’s. Did I dash across with my eyes closed? I seem to remember balancing on a railroad bridge over a canal. And a strong impression of walking under—how could it be under?—the Howdy Beefburger place which jutted out over the Pawtucket Canal. There was an orange metal beam that I’d reach up to and grab, lift my body, and presto—I was on Dutton Street.

From there the route was easy: cross Dutton, walk past the Giant Store, up a short block of Broadway and onto Worthen Street. There was an actual sidewalk made of brick which I would literally run along in a state of joy to push through the tall, black doors of the Girls Club to safety and home, my knitting project patiently waiting for me in a cubby with my name on it. My name.

For a few hours, I had purple and blue yarn. And peace. Then, at six o’clock when the Club would close I’d have to return. This time, no running, only a sad exit out those black doors. A slow foot-dragging harumph past the Whistler House, then falling apart, paint flaking, a window cracked. Past the Giant Store and its smell of popcorn. Past Howdy’s. This time crossing Fletcher Street and its grey granite cobbles. The same stone that made up half the side of a building. I never understood that half-stone building, but enjoyed running my hand along the granite, which held the warmth of the sun. Somewhere nearby, perhaps on Western Avenue, there was a hobby shop with men and boys racing slot cars. I peeked in a window once. There was an odd smell—do slot cars burn rubber?

On the return, I wouldn’t take The Underpass. If it was six going on six-thirty and getting dark, maybe already dark. I’d chicken out and take the long way home, which meant walking the length of Western Ave. over to School Street. Then the long, long climb up School to Westford and Cupples Square and home where mother would be up from her “nap,” attempting to make a dinner.

Refugees and our nation’s soul by Marjorie Arons-Barron

The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

After the Last Border by Jessica Goudreau should be required reading for people who fear or loathe strangers coming to the United States to avoid persecution, war and chaos in their home countries.  The author tells of two such women, weaving between their alternating stories the history of immigration and refugee resettlement in this country. Both of these women – Mu Naw from Myanmar and Hasna al-Salam from Syria (their names are changed to protect them and their loved ones left behind)  – are courageous, hard-working, and long-suffering. They confront insurmountable struggles to reach a place of safety for them and their children.  Eventually they both find that place in Austin, Texas, Mu Naw in 2007 and Hasna in 2016.

Goudreau met Mu Naw while the author and she were watching their young children in an Austin park. Despite a gaping language barrier, they managed to communicate with one another. Their growing friendship led to two years of interviews laying the groundwork for Goudreau’s commitment to tell Mu Naw’s story.

Goudreau had worked for a decade with refugees in Austin and got to know Hasna as well.  In humanizing their narratives, Goudreau captures the angst of having to flee one’s homeland, the dangers of flight and living in tented camps, the bureaucratic impediments and protracted vetting endured in the refugee resettlement process, the disorientation of being dropped in substandard housing, not speaking the language, having to find their ways to grocery stores to feed their children and not recognizing the products on the shelves. How to work the thermostat in an apartment, or even how to turn on the strange-looking stoves on which to cook their dinners?

We also learn about the resettlement workers and volunteers who help them fill out the necessary paperwork to get income assistance, find entry-level jobs, gain access to medical care and find schooling for their little ones. It is a lonely, terrifying existence, sustained largely by being able to communicate with their spouses, siblings and other loved ones back in the refugee camps waiting and hoping for family reunification.

Goudreau recalls the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 limiting an entire group based on their national origins. Later came many decades when people were admitted according to national quotas. She reminds us of our nation’s 1939 rejection of the Jewish-refugee-filled ship St. Louis, which led to the concentration camp deaths of hundreds of passengers seeking refuge in the United States. Years later came Harry Truman’s 1948 Displaced Persons Act. There followed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on Genocide, the creation under Jimmy Carter of a special category of refugees from war and persecution. The liberalization of policy was often followed by more restrictions, and almost always we have shown a preference for educated whites from northern Europe.  There have been seismic debates around issues of  morality and foreign policy. She sees our responses to humanitarian crises as deeply reflective of the soul of our nation.

Goudreau is never so totally immersed in the background history that she wanders from the pathos of the stories of Mu Naw and Hasna el-Salam. If her goal is both to educate and create empathy, she does it smoothly and powerfully. From Cubans to Syrians, from Catholics and Jews to Muslims, from the plight of DACA young people to ending the Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and others for whom return to home countries is perilous, her book is brilliant, deeply moving and slated to become a non-fiction classic. The book was published in 2020, before the terrors and traumas by ICE under Donald Trump.

It’s important to remember that both Mu Naw and Hasna el-Salam came here legally. They had been extensively vetted and processed. Despite their playing by all the rules, they faced daunting new challenges upon their arrival. Trump may rightly decry the small proportion of criminals who have slipped through the system, but he has shown no compassion for law-abiding refugees. Goudreau’s writing evokes deep empathy for the Mu Naws and Hasna el-Salams who were forced to flee their homes and endure endless suffering in refugee camps till they could be transitioned here, part of Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Apparently, the poet’s “golden door” of entry to the United States is the only golden object that has no value for Donald Trump. This book could shine a light for him, if only he read – and was capable of change.

Lowell Politics: August 17, 2025

The Lowell City Council met on Tuesday night and completed a lengthy agenda that covered many topics. In today’s newsletter, I’ll focus on two of them.

One of the council’s first votes was to cancel the next council meeting which was scheduled for August 26, 2025. This will create a substantial gap in meetings due to the council’s summer schedule, which has regular meetings on just the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month from the start of June to the end of September.

Still, the council should not be criticized for this action since a majority of its members will be in Geneva, Switzerland, on city business that day. As reported by the Lowell Sun, Mayor Dan Rourke, some city councilors, City Manager Tom Golden, and other members of the city administration will leave the US on Saturday, August 23, bound for the United Nations Office at Geneva to make a formal presentation to the UN and the Urban Economy Forum on Lowell’s designation as the first Frontrunner City in the United States. The official city delegation will consist of 11 people according to a funding vote approved by the council. Approximately $33,000 in city funds will be spent on airfare and lodging.

Before commenting on the substance of this trip, a few general observations about travel to Europe: Because Geneva is six hours ahead of Lowell, flights from here to there typically leave in the evening, take about seven hours in the air, and, because the traveler has lost six hours and land in Switzerland first thing the next morning local time. I doubt there are direct flights from Boston to Geneva, so the group will have to land somewhere in Europe and catch a connecting flight. If everything goes right, they should reach their hotel in Geneva in time for an evening meal on Sunday. As for the return to Lowell on Wednesday, August 27, that likely will involve an early morning flight to some European airline hub like Zurich or Amsterdam then a seven-hour flight back to Boston, landing early in the afternoon local time due to the time difference.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Assistant City Manager Yovanni Baez-Rose explained that the delegation will attend meetings all day Monday and Tuesday, so there doesn’t appear to be any wasted time in the itinerary. (Members of the delegation can extend the trip if they choose, but they would be responsible for paying any additional costs.)

This being Lowell, I expect that a buzz about “boondoggles” and “wasting city money” is in the air, but that would be unfair and short-sighted. In Post Industrial America, mid-sized cities like Lowell face immense challenges that are incredibly complex to solve. Developing a strategy that allows Lowell to thrive in ways that benefit all its residents must be the goal. Well-paved streets and top-flight Little League fields are nice to have, but things like that are not nearly enough. Nor is there a standardized strategy to be followed that ensures success. Instead, cities must aggressively innovate and experiment, something that is impossible if city leaders simply remain in the Lowell bubble. Discovering what others have tried, what has worked, what lessons have been learned, is crucial to moving the city forward. Admittedly, much of that information can be found in the library, but when a unique opportunity arises – and being designated the first Frontrunner City in the entire country is certainly unique – then paying travel costs seems a wise investment.

Beyond just searching for new ideas in urban planning, an opportunity like the Frontrunner designation and traveling to Switzerland to brief the UN boosts the perception of the city and the morale of those who live here. That is not something to be dismissed. Paul Tsongas understood it. In the 1980s, he led efforts to install sculptures in public places in downtown Lowell because great places are known for great public art, and he was determined to make Lowell a great place.

Napolean Bonaparte said, “In war, the moral is to the physical as three to one” by which he meant that the morale and spirit of an army is far more important than its physical strength or material resources. The same can be said for a city. If people feel proud of the place they live and if outsiders form a positive perception, real world benefits will follow.

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Speaking of challenges faced by mid-sized cities in Post Industrial America, homelessness and vagrancy are high on that list and with the predictability of the changing of the seasons, the issue arose at Tuesday’s council meeting on a joint motion by Councilors Erik Gitschier and Corey Robinson requesting a report from the Lowell Housing Authority on what steps have been taken by the LHA to prevent vagrancy and drug use in common areas at the LHA apartments on Gorham Street, formerly known as the Bishop Markham housing project.

We can all agree that no one, especially tenants in Housing Authority apartments, should find human waste and used needles in elevators and public spaces. Nor should they have to deal with random individuals who are under the influence of illegal drugs, mentally ill, and potentially dangerous. The challenge is how to effectively address those very real problems. Consequently, requesting an update from the Housing Authority on conditions of its facilities is a reasonable area of inquiry for the council since those facilities are inhabited by Lowell residents. But “reasonable inquiry” is not what happened on Tuesday night. Instead, the discussion was more about Councilors Gitschier and Robinson making the Lowell Housing Authority a scapegoat for a city-wide and society-wide problem. Rather than wait for a factual response from the Housing Authority, both councilors launched an immediate rhetorical attack on the agency.

In public policy, it’s important to differentiate homelessness from the behavior plaguing the Housing Authority which, for lack of a better term, I’ll call vagrancy. Homelessness is a lack of a permanent, safe, and adequate place to live. It is caused by a variety of factors, but a lack of affordable housing, poverty, and unemployment are usually involved. Most people who become homeless find space in a shelter and actively seek assistance and try to acquire stable housing.

People experiencing vagrancy also lack permanent housing but have layered on top of that drug addiction, mental illness, or both. Vagrants often are barred from shelters because of an inability to comply with the rules of behavior demanded by shelter operators such as failing to refrain from active drug use or committing violence towards other residents.

With traditional homeless shelters unavailable due to their own choices or, more likely, factors like mental illness or drug abuse that distort free will, vagrants must find other places to live. For many months, that was the South Common which had evolved into a dystopian campground. When it got bad enough, the city and its partners clamped down and those who were camping on the Common were prevented from doing so. However, that tactical victory, if you want to call it that, did not solve the problem and may have made it worse. The vagrants from the South Common didn’t magically disappear; they just went elsewhere and not very far away.

Assuming that the Housing Authority does submit a response to this motion – something that would be completely voluntary since as far as I know the city council has no legal authority over the Lowell Housing Authority – it will be interesting to see if the volume of incidents at the Housing Authority’s complex adjacent to the South Common substantially increased after the city began its crackdown on the South Common. I suspect it did, given the proximity of the two places and the desperation with which vagrants seek to find shelter and to survive.

It is that same desperation that makes it more difficult to keep such people out of any space, including Housing Authority properties. The essence of physical security is that no place can be made impenetrable if someone wants to get inside badly enough, and here we are dealing with desperate individuals made irrational by mental illness or drug usage. Doors to a residential complex cannot be bolted shut. Residents and their legitimate guests must be able to come and go as they please. That creates vulnerabilities that permit determined trespassers to find their way in.

Similarly, Housing Authority staff members and even private security guards have no power of arrest and potentially put themselves in jeopardy by confronting dangerous and irrational individuals. Paying for round-the-clock police details might increase the security threshold, but that is an extremely expensive proposition. I’m not privy to the budget of the Housing Authority but I believe most of its funding comes from the federal government. Like every other entity (other than those dealing with immigration enforcement or national defense), I suspect the Housing Authority’s budget is flat or has been cut. Should diminishing financial resources be used to hire more police details or to make much-needed repairs to the apartments of residents? That’s the kind of complex calculation that is often ignored on the floor of the council chamber.

And even if police were deployed to the Housing Authority properties, how much would that accomplish? The state’s criminal justice system made a cameo appearance Tuesday night with Councilor Corey Belanger amending the Gitschier/Robinson motion to request a meeting with District Attorney Marian Ryan.

A career prosecutor who we are fortunate to have as our District Attorney, Ryan has always cooperated with city agencies while balancing the rights of individuals and the interests of justice. I’m sure she will meet with councilors, but I am less certain of what more she can do to help.

Back in 2018, Ryan was the keynote speaker at the Greater Lowell Community Foundation’s Annual Meeting. That seemed to be the peak of the opioid crisis and Ryan was widely recognized for her leadership in creating innovative programs that addressed all aspects of abuse and addiction, from prosecution to prevention and treatment. That night, Ryan talked mostly about the very successful (and since discontinued, I think), Lowell “drug court” and the infrastructure needed to make it work.

In this context, a “drug court” was a specialized session within the District Court designed to address the underlying issues of substance abuse and mental illness that contribute to criminal behavior. Operated by a team consisting of a judge, a probation officer, clinicians, and attorneys, the drug court included intensive, supervised probation; mandatory substance abuse treatment; frequent and random drug testing; frequent appearances before the same judge for accountability and support; and access to related services like housing and employment.

Ryan explained that the key to success in substance abuse treatment was to do it somewhere distant from the place where the person lived. If the treatment was in the same community, the temptation and opportunity to revert to the problematic behavior that paved the way to criminal charges would be too great to resist. Consequently, a defendant from Lowell under the drug court’s supervision might be placed in a treatment facility in a place like Brockton.

However, that same defendant was unlikely to have their own vehicle and public transportation between Brockton and Lowell would be unfeasible, so how would the defendant get back to Lowell for their frequent court appearances and probation check-ins? That’s where the Community Foundation came in. It and its partners awarded a grant for transportation for such individuals so they would be reliably conveyed from their place of treatment to the Lowell District Court and then back to the treatment center.

I believe the drug court concept and the supporting structure were successful, but they were also expensive to operate and in the competition for scant resources, I think it was discontinued. The existing court structure tries to help, but as you can see from the Ryan story, the best chance of success requires complex and costly systems that society is unwilling to pay for.

At least one councilor on Tuesday seemed to long for the good old days when troublesome individuals could be locked away in secure state-run mental institutions. That nostalgia forgets the inhumane and often abusive conditions that characterized many such facilities which were also understaffed, overcrowded, and offered no effective treatment.

In the 1980s in the United States and especially in Massachusetts, there was a major shift in mental health treatment policy that emphasized “deinstitutionalization” which involved moving mentally ill individuals from secure residential facilities into community-based programs. The plan was to create a network of community mental health centers that would provide emergency psychiatric care, outpatient therapy and counseling, medication management, and job and housing support. As is so often the case, a lack of funding and commitment left whatever community-based resources that existed inadequate to fill the void created when the big institutions closed, making the criminal justice system a stand in for effective mental health treatment.

But the criminal justice system isn’t designed to treat mental health or substance abuse. That’s one of the reasons we hear the believable anecdotes that when a police officer arrests a vagrant for trespassing or some equivalent crime, the offender is often brought to court, arraigned and released from custody before the arresting officer has completed their shift. That’s not a flaw in the courts or a function of lenient judges; it’s further evidence that you can’t incarcerate someone for being poor, homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted. It’s also another example of why we find it easier to search for scapegoats than to acknowledge -and pay for – the great challenge of effectively addressing pervasive social disorder.

City leaders should never ignore the collateral harm to innocent and helpless residents that flows from vagrancy in Lowell but ranting about simple solutions that won’t work only gives people false hope that these problems are easy to solve when they most definitely are not. It’s only by acknowledging how complicated these challenges are and addressing them persistently rather than on random Tuesday nights that we can have any hope of making the situation better for all involved.

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Since there is no council meeting this Tuesday night, I’ll save the rest of the news from last Tuesday’s meeting for next Sunday’s newsletter.

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This week on richardhowe.com

Leo Racicot wrote about experiencing the North Common as a kid in the early 1960s.

Paul Marion announced the publication of the late Tom Sexton’s most recent and final book of poems.

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This coming Wednesday, August 20, 2025, at 6pm, I’ll give a talk at the Pollard Memorial Library’s ground floor community room on the founding of Lowell in honor of the city’s upcoming bicentennial. The event is free and does not require advance registration.

North Common, 1960s

North Common, 1960s

By Leo Racicot

Not every kid can boast that his front yard was a nine-acre park. I can. Our house was right across the street from North Common, a charming expanse of green in summer, white in winter. All my sister and I had to do was cross Fletcher Street and we were there. Nice, too, was having the school and church we attended, Saint Patrick’s, within walking distance. We owed our perfect attendance records to the nearness of both. How could we be late if where we were going was a ten-minute walk away?

In those days, North Common had monkey bars, two swing sets, a large sandbox and an oval-shaped swimming pool. (Actually, it was more of a wading pool but to a child’s eye, it was an ocean). We had to be careful where we stepped; there were times when the bottom of the pool held broken pieces from glass tonic bottles  (soda was called ‘tonic’), cigarette butts, rusty nails. You could cut your feet if you didn’t watch where you were stepping. I loved splashing around in that pool for long hours on hot summer days. The Common also had trees with big holes in them, to be explored, like places out of Tolkien. I remember Joe climbing inside one and crouching there. There was a nice baseball playing field close to the housing projects and usually, a game was going at dusk that was fun to watch, if not to participate in. I never was much for sports. One time, my classmate, Tony Archinski, asked me if I wanted to go ice skating with him at the wintertime rink. I was excited, and my mother even went out and bought me a new pair of ice skates down at Lull and Hartford Sporting Goods Store on Prescott Street. But I’d never done ice skating before, and every time I tried to do what Tony did, down I’d go on my butt. Tony never did ask me to go ice skating again.

As I’ve mentioned before, all-American gal, Margaret Kennedy, she of the ruddy outdoors complexion and th bright emerald eyes ran the North Common Day Camp. We were all a little bit in love with Margaret. She showed us how to make gimp necklaces and bracelets (I was better at weaving the butterfly stitch than I was the square knot), hammer out ash trays, make potholders to bring home to our folks, play Duck Duck Goose and box hockey. The best games ever,

In winter, after the first good snow fell, out would come the sleds and tobbogans. Some kids turned a big piece of cardboard into a coaster.  The long hill leading from the street just across from Quality Donut, run for years by John Apostolos, all the way down to The Morrill School made a perfect “run”. What a blast.

Not every memory of sledding is a good one: when Diane was four, our mother let the two of us take our sleds over to the Common, with our cousin Eddie, who was older. I didn’t realize Eddie and I were to keep an eye on Diane. We were too young to watch her. She climbed on her sled steering it toward a bench, steering it straight into the stone leg of the bench, splitting her head wide open. I’ve never seen so much blood, heard so many blood-curdling cries. Eddie scooped her up and carried her into the house. Papa came home from work and brought her to the hospital where it took 27 stitches to seal the wound. She had the scar that ran up her forehead into her hairline the rest of her life.

Nana took me one time to play on the swings. I stood up on the swing and was pumping too hard, trying to reach for the sky, lost my balance, fell and sprained my ankle. Nana was never allowed to bring me over to The Common by herself again.

I most remember autumn days on The Common, the burnished leaves on trees, the boys playing an impromptu game of football and letting me join in. I was big and good at tackling. Nowadays, when I watch the over-muscled, overpaid professional players, I think back on the simpler days of football games of the ’60s. The game was less complex, less influenced by media, less a steroidal-beasts battlefield. Play was playful, and the uniforms were the colors of the season.

For the boy that I was, The North Common fostered dreams. On its wide acres, I used, in those days, to dream I’d become a football player, or an Olympic swimmer or an acrobat or a knight of The Round Table slaying dragons. Or…a writer!

Papa with Diane and me, North Common in background, 1959

Kid’s sledding on North Common

Leo & Diane, Hampton Beach, 1959

North Common swimming pool in the 1960s

Quality Donut, corner of Butterfield and Fletcher

Ready to take a run down Suicide Hill, 1959

North Common swimming pool (courtesy UMass Lowell archives)

Swings

Vintage monkey bars