Author Archive

Lowell Cemetery virtual tour

Here’s my first attempt at a true “virtual tour” all on video. It’s a 30-minute trip through historic Lowell Cemetery. It’s posted on YouTube and Facebook. I hope it is the first of many: If the above video viewer doesn’t work go directly to YouTube to see the video.

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Covid-19: April 4, 2020 edition

The city of Lowell posted the above graphic on Thursday. It shows 121 diagnosed cases in Lowell with 13 of them hospitalized and 2 deaths. The Highlands has the largest number of cases with 24, followed by Centralville with 15 and Belvidere with 13. With all that is going on,…

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Fred Notes: March 29, 2020

Corona Virus Wedding By Fred Faust This past Friday was spent respecting social distance. But on a sunny afternoon, at the end of a tense week, I decided that it would be a good thing to take a bike ride along the river. My destination was the Boott Mills and…

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Virtual Tour of South Common Part I

The public health-related postponement of recent Lowell Walks led me to post a Virtual Tour of the Acre two weeks ago. Last week, I wrote about the courthouses of Lowell that served as a virtual tour. Today, we visit the South Common. I’ve broken this tour into two parts and…

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A Poem from Kathleen Aponick

Please welcome Kathleen Aponick of Andover to our roster of writers. RPH Postcards from Haggett’s Pond By Kathleen Aponick —after a recurrence of cancer I’m by the water on a path once a railroad bed thinking of trains whizzing by, passengers deep in thought, tense perhaps over work, family problems,…

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Lowell Walks: Virtual Tour of Acre

In response to the public health-related postponement of yesterday’s Lowell Walk on the Irish Acre, here is a virtual tour of a portion of that neighborhood. The text is based on the script I used to lead this tour in April 2016. The tour Dave McKean would have given yesterday…

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Covid-19: March 12 edition

It was 13 years ago this month that I launched this blog. Since then, I have used this site to capture in words the major events of our time (which is why Paul Marion and I called our 2017 best-of-the-blog book History as It Happens). Mindful of that tradition and…

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