While doing historical tours of downtown, I’ve often said that Lowell was the Silicon Valley of 19th century America. Back on September 16 & 17, 2017, I provided some evidence for that assertion during the Creaticity Art and Maker Festival in Downtown Lowell when I joined with Olu Ibrahim, the…
NOT QUITE READY: A BOSTON STORY A short story of youthful dreaming By Jerry Bisantz Copyright 2023 I must start with this confession: I was born and raised in Buffalo, NY. You know Buffalo, right? Butt of a million and a half jokes. Here’s my favorite about my favorite football…
The Guitar By Gregory F. DeLaurier Prologue The Takamine Guitar company was founded in Japan in 1959. While it manufactures a range of guitars, it is best known for its acoustic models, many with a built-in pick-up preamplifier, so you can just plug it in an amp. The price range…
These are my remarks from the 100th anniversary celebration of the Lowell Memorial Auditorium on September 21, 2022. The Origin of the Lowell Memorial Auditorium By Richard P. Howe Jr. September 21, 2022 The idea for a memorial auditorium in Lowell first surfaced within a month of the end of…
The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. I like to think of myself as a glass-half-full sort, looking for reasons to be optimistic even when events in this country seem to be circling the drain and democracy seems more fragile than ever. Realism does…
Since the birth of this website in March 2007, I have posted for each year (except 2010 for some reason) a Year in Review article that tried to capture the most important local events of that year. For the coming week, I will repost each of these annual reports with…
1989 Lowell English-Only Referendum By Charles Gargiulo In 1989, the “English-Only” Referendum was an initiative put on the ballot and championed by George Kouloheras to stoke the same white nativist populism we see fueling Trumpism today. It was in large response to the political gains made by the city’s Latino…
Lowell City Walk Sketch: Lord Overpass By George Chigas My favorite city walk these days is to leave my apartment on Middle Street, walk up Central, turn right on Jackson and cut through the Justice Center to see the current progress on the Lord Overpass project. During the last few…
The Revolving Museum was founded by Jerry Back in the 1980s in Boston. At first, it consisted of outdoor art installations but in 1995 it gained a physical space in a vacant building in the Fort Point neighborhood. But as that decade came to an end, real estate prices in…
Life is all about contingencies. In this story, legendary baseball writer Chaz Scoggins explains how a former major league player, frustrated in his effort to purchase the professional baseball team in Lowell, settled into a scouting job with the Red Sox and helped bring Babe Ruth to Boston. Ruth and…