Web image courtesy of amazon.com Get your walking shoes, cowboy boots, sneakers, brogans, flip-flops, loafers, boat shoes, sandals, Doc Martens, slippers, whatever makes your feet happy—get them ready for this Saturday at 10 AM outside the National Park Visitor Center, 246 Market Street. Free parking is available in the…
The Summer 2015 Edition of the Lowell Historic Board Newsletter is out. Of particular interest is the story about one of the most historic of the city’s parks – Tyler Park as designed by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted. Read all about it here…. Lowell Has Style: Tyler Park …
This is a cross-post from Dave McKean’s LowellIrish. Dave tells of more grave site discoveries in St. Patrick’s Cemetery by Walter and Karen Hickey – these are of the Daughters of Charity. Dave notes that nearby, the recently rediscovered and cleared grave stones of some SNDs /Notre Dame nuns are…
Julie Mofford, a former staffer at the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, who currently lives in midcoast Maine where she writes and works as a museum and historical society consultant, recently posted on Amazon.com her review of Mill Power: The Origin and Impact of Lowell National Historical Park, a 2014 book…
I learned this week that my late mother’s brother, Charles J. Roy, passed away after a long illness. He had been living with his wife, Frances, in Menifee, Calif., the state where he had moved in the mid-1950s. His son and daughter, Charles Jr. and Maureen, are in California with…
The Boston Globe today reports on the Peabody-Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Mass., planning to expand its exhibition and curatorial space, a major step forward for the already formidable museum. This is worth noting in Lowell because we must keep our eye on the regional competition in the creative economy.…
Joseph Plumb Martin was born in 1760 in Western Massachusetts and enlisted in the Continental Army as a teenager at the start of the war and served for the duration. In 1830, he anonymously published a memoir of his service called A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier. I picked up…
For the Fourth of July, Independence Day, here’s a poem from the nation’s capital. I wrote this prose poem after a family trip to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2004. There were John Kerry-for-President signs in the windows. GOP posters for “W,” too. Barack Obama was a figure on…
Before Luna Theatre, before the Lowell Film Collaborative, there was FLICKS! (For Lowell Interesting Cinema KaperS!), a local film society that was popular in the early 1980s. The organization screened films, often at the Speare House restaurant on Pawtucket Boulevard (it was near the Dunkin Donuts, opposite the UMass Lowell…
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” —Martin Luther King Jr. Usually I don’t use this space to comment on national issues but I believe that history will record this week to be a momentous one in our nation’s story. That demands comment. Confederate…