Menu
1990 Friday, Jul 27, 1990 – Saturday, July 28, 1990 – Sunday, July 29, 1990 The first Lowell Folk Festival, after three iterations of the National Folk Festival in Lowell, was a great success. The South Common remained the site of the evening performances, but Boarding House Park was added…
Read More »The National Folk Festival was founded in 1934 in St. Louis. Since then, it has been run by the National Council for the Traditional Arts. The Festival moves from place to place, typically spending three consecutive years in one location. That was the case in 1987, when the National Festival…
Read More »Lowell’s Greek Community Featured in Upcoming National Park Exhibit “The University of Massachusetts Lowell, in partnership with Lowell National Historical Park, announces the opening of an exhibit on the Greek community in Lowell, Massachusetts, titled ‘Acropolis of America: The Greek Community in Lowell 1874-2020,’ on August 1. The temporary exhibit…
Read More »Some news from DIY Lowell . . . DIY Lowell’s New Program Director Will Build Community through Partnerships Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Lowell is excited to announce that Alexis Ploss has been selected as the organization’s new Program Director, effective immediately. DIY Lowell’s Program Director manages all aspects of the grassroots group,…
Read More »For nearly 30 years, the approach of the last weekend of July has signaled the arrival of the Lowell Folk Festival. That won’t be the case in this pandemic-fractured year. But here are a couple of reminders of what we’ll be missing . . . 2007 WOW Opening at the…
Read More »Good books retain their newsworthiness, so I’m recycling this review-essay about Patti Smith’s most recent book, Year of the Monkey, which I posted on my website, paulmarion.com, late last year. This piece was written before the coronavirus spread among us, a time that seems six years and not six months…
Read More »John Wooding, professor emeritus of political science at UMass Lowell, is the author of the forthcoming biography Gandhi’s American Friend: Richard Bartlett Gregg (Loom Press, October 2020). He is a past contributor to this blog and president of the board at Mill City Grows in Lowell. ‘Cause I’m on the…
Read More »One of the things that has distinguished Lowell from other similar sized cities in post Industrial America is its willingness to keep moving forward. Some efforts work well, others don’t. But the critical thing is to keep trying. Today, we dipped back in the archives and found four such stories,…
Read More »Paul Hudon: Diary in the Time of Coronavirus (10) Another set of pandemic observations from our riverside correspondent Paul Hudon. We held this post during Baseball Week but the content remains timely. June 21 Something of what we’ll call gallows humor from Mike Nichols and Elaine May, one of the…
Read More »Jay Pendergast: A Singular Man By Steve O’Connor My best guess is 1978. Summer workers for the Neighborhood Youth Corps had painted an Irish-themed mural on the back of a building facing Worthen Street. Naturally, after the dedication, the crowd meandered over to the Old Worthen. It was a beautiful…
Read More »