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Bookstores I Have Known By Leo Racicot College City Book Mart was the first bookstore I discovered and grew to love. It was located in what is now Francis Gatehouse Mills, on Broadway Street. The reason I’d found myself in that neck of the woods is: our Aunt Marie had…

The Underpass By Susan April The Underpass was a fearful place. A literal underpass of the Boston & Maine railroad at the foot of Middlesex Street by the Lord Overpass. You had to be brave or crazy to take that shortcut. I was both. I never understood the spaghetti of…

The Lowell City Council met on Tuesday night and completed a lengthy agenda that covered many topics. In today’s newsletter, I’ll focus on two of them. One of the council’s first votes was to cancel the next council meeting which was scheduled for August 26, 2025. This will create a…

North Common, 1960s By Leo Racicot Not every kid can boast that his front yard was a nine-acre park. I can. Our house was right across the street from North Common, a charming expanse of green in summer, white in winter. All my sister and I had to do was…

This article originally appeared on this site last week, however, due to technical difficulties it was only visible later in the day so it is being reposted today.  Remembering My Father, Robert T. Reilly By Eoin Reilly So my father wrote a lot. He also was from Lowell and ran…

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford is a quickly unspooling, cinematic mystery set in the fictional city of Cahokia, during the 1920’s. (The real Cahokia had vanished by 1200 C.E., leaving behind only mounds of grass-covered dirt in Illinois, near the…

During the summer, the Lowell City Council meets on the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month. That usually translates to a meeting every other week, but this year’s calendar has given us a gap of three weeks between meetings with the next one coming this Tuesday, August 12, 2025.…

Remembering My Father, Robert T. Reilly By Eoin Reilly So my father wrote a lot. He also was from Lowell and ran track with Ed McMahon and Jack Kerouac. Oh…he also had a lot of kids and moved to where he could afford to raise them without crime being involved.…

Remembering 1968 By Leo Racicot Even now, almost sixty years later, when I hear the year 1968 mentioned, my mind instantly goes to April and June of that awful year. In April, the great Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., was gunned down by an assassin, James Earl Ray, on…

The Night I Met the Kinks in Lowell By Charlie Gargiulo One of the greatest memories of my life took place one Saturday night in May 1970 at the Commodore Ballroom, our personal live sixties music shrine, and Lowell’s spiritual counterpart to Liverpool’s old Cavern Club, after serving as our…