Menu
In 1996, I led a creative writing workshop for the Hellenic Culture Society of Lowell. For the first session I asked the participants to do an exercise. Everyone would contribute one line on the theme of his or her mother’s kitchen. When we had all the individual lines, I took…
Read More »If you haven’t visited Western Avenue Studios, mark your calendar with the first Saturday in February (Feb 2) for Open Studios when artists throughout the complex open their spaces and sell their art to visitors. On that day, or on any Wednesday thru Saturday after January 30, pay a visit…
Read More »This is an excerpt from The Big Move: Immigrant Voices from a Mill City (Loom Press, 2011), edited by UMass Lowell history professors Bob Forrant and Christoph Strobel. The book includes nine interviews, selected from the many conducted by the historians and their team for an ethnographic study of Lowell commissioned…
Read More »A very generous anonymous donor saved the famine-era St. Brigid’s Church in New York City’s East Village from the wreakers ball. The Gothic-style church was designed by Patrick Keely – a Tipperary man – who moved to New York as a young man had a long and distinguished career as an architect. The work of…
Read More »Writer and painter Chath PierSath, a former Lowell resident who still lives in the region, crossed the Thai-Cambodian border in 1979 with members of his family on the way to Aranyaprathet Refugee Camp. With the help of his brother and aunt, he and his sister came to America in 1981,…
Read More »Arguably Lowell’s most prominent historical figure, Benjamin F. Butler published his memoirs in 1892 under the title “Butler’s Book.” A. M. Thayer and Co., Printers, Binders, & Book Publishers of Boston, offered the autobiography to subscribers, not an unusual system in that day. The book is 1,154 pages long, counting…
Read More »Edited by Tuyet-Lan Pho, Jeffrey N. Gerson, and Sylvia R. Cowan, “Southeast Asian Refugees and Immigrants to the Mill City: Changing Families, Communities, Institutiions—Thirty Years Afterward” was published by the University Press of New England in 2007. Among the contributors to this collection of essays is Leakhena Nou, a former…
Read More »Before the Lowell Folk Festival, before Winterfest, before the Southeast Asian Water Festival. Click on image to enlarge.
Read More »“A. G. Pollard’s” by Richard Marion (c) 2012 Click on the image to enlarge. See more artwork at www.richardmarion.net
Read More »In 1988, the National Park Service and Center for Archaeological Studies at Boston University were asked by the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission to investigate the grounds of the former Boott Mills boarding houses off French Street (one remains today, known as the Patrick J. Mogan Cultural Center), and the Kirk…
Read More »