Some thoughts on Independence Day

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…

Read More »

South Common Crowd

At the end of the afternoon yesterday, there were more than 100 people enjoying the South Common—dozens of kids swimming in the blue pool, more young people running in races, small children at the playground, basketball players on the court, older health-walkers from Bishop Markham Village, people taking their  big…

Read More »

FLICKS! (1983)

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…

Read More »

Literary Lowell

This past Saturday, eighty people participated in the Literary Lowell edition of Lowell Walks.  Tour guide Sean Thibodeau, the Coordinator of Community Programming at the Pollard Memorial Library, prepared a handout that listed many books about Lowell or written by people from Lowell, and added the names of other notable…

Read More »

Lowell Folk Festival Coming Soon

The following post appears on the Keepers of Tradition blog which is written by Maggie Holtzberg, Ph.D., the Commonweath’s Folklorist at the Massachusetts Cultural Council.  The Lowell Folk Festival is held each year in Lowell during the last weekend of July.  The full schedule for this year is available on…

Read More »

Pirate on South Street

On South Street today, I saw a guy about 25 years old with a shaved head, tattoos, earring, shirt with no collar, pants that were three-quarter length, no socks, and sneakers. He was talking on his phone. Walking toward the South Common. And I realized what I was seeing. The…

Read More »

Lowell Week in Review: June 28, 2015

Two weeks ago saw three different million dollar plus real estate deals in Lowell (Markley Group/Prince Spaghetti; Lowell Community Charter Public School/Mill No. 5; UTEC/Central, Prescott & Warren Streets).  This week there was one deal of that scale: an apartment building at the corner of Stevens Street and Princeton Boulevard…

Read More »

An Amazing Week

“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…

Read More »