Menu
With the Lowell Folk Festival coming this weekend, here is some background on the event. As some of our readers are aware, for the past two years I’ve been writing a book about the origin and impact of Lowell National Historical Park. What follows is an excerpt from a chapter…
Read More »The following is a poem from the early 1980s, which appears in my book “Strong Place” (1984). This poem was also one of four featured in Yankee magazine in 2009. Merrimack Street is the same and different today, with preserved buildings and a new array of businesses for the most part.…
Read More »The following essay by Tooch Van explores his journey from a young child in Cambodia to an adult and father in Lowell today. Guest essays are always welcome here. Send yours to DickHoweJr@gmail.com. From Phnom Penh to Lowell: A Journey of the international student from Cambodia: This I believe I…
Read More »MassMoments reminds us that on this day – July 23, 1846 – Henry David Thoreau after walking from his Walden Pond cabin to do an errand – found himself in the Concord town jail for refusing to pay his back taxes. His was just an over-night stay – as…
Read More »“(We hope) that our transportation crisis will be solved by a bigger plane or a wider road, mental illness with a pill, poverty with a law, slums with a bulldozer, urban conflict with a gas, racism with a goodwill gesture.” – Philip E. Slater “Wisdom demands a new orientation of…
Read More »Kendall Wallace of the Sun kindly mentioned in today’s Saturday Chat column the progress being made by the Greater Lowell Music Theatre, another piece of Lowell’s creative-economy puzzle that has been put in place. There are audience niches yet to fill, as the GLMT experience demonstrates: 1,200 people in two…
Read More »In the past few years at the Lowell Summer Music Series at Boarding House Park, I have been struck by the superlative musicianship of the artists presented by the organizers, Lowell National Historical Park and the Lowell Festival Foundation. Night after night the featured artists and their bands demonstrate the…
Read More »The 54th Regiment was the first military unit consisting of black soldiers to be raised in the North during the Civil War. On this day – July 18, 1863 – the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment launched an attack against Fort Wagner, South Carolina – a highly fortified outpost on…
Read More »The closing was a negative milestone in the business life of Lowell and a disaster for those employed at the Prince Macaroni plant. Ted Kennedy stood with the employees and tried with federal funds to make a deal to save the plant – to no avail. From the blog archive: MassMoments:…
Read More »The media coverage of family friction involving the owners of the Market Basket supermarket empire sent me back in the Time Tunnel to the mid-1960s, maybe 1965, when the Ford Mustang was the sports car of the moment (the model had been unveiled at the 1964 World’s Fair in New…
Read More »