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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 »When it comes to clothing choices when traveling overseas, I’ve always thought it best to try to blend in, or at least not to stand out. That means that obvious stuff like Red Sox t-shirts and Lowell National Park ball caps get left at home. But when I got on…
Read More »Saturday night I refereed a debate between two friends, both from a younger generation than me, over the necessity of air conditioning. One combatant maintained that even here in New England, modern home and building design made artificial cooling a necessity; the other maintained that while A/C is certainly pleasant,…
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 »From my vantage point, the real estate recovery is reality and no longer just hype. Here are the Lowell sales for the past week: July 15, 2013 (Monday) 16 Merrimack St Unit 4D for $90,000 29 School St Unit 29 for $174,500 13 Wiltshire Cir for $189,000 356 Wentworth Ave…
Read More »I was disappointed to miss the state Democratic Convention in Lowell last Saturday (although faced with the choice of vacationing in Berlin with my wife or spending a Saturday at the Tsongas Center with a thousand political activists, Berlin wins every time). Thankfully, frequent contributor Jim Peters attended the convention…
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 »It was last Wednesday, our first afternoon in Berlin. Struggling to stay awake against the effects of losing a night’s sleep by flying across the Atlantic, we found a peaceful cafe with outdoor seating along the banks of the Spree River right in the heart of Berlin for a late…
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