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…
The Lowell City Council last met on Tuesday, August 11, 2026. I was away that week, so I was unable to write about that meeting on the following Sunday. However, I have since watched a recording of the meeting on YouTube and will write about it here. The council covered…
Recollections of the Irreplaceable David Daniel By Ed DeJesus Deeply saddened by the loss of my dear friend and mentor, Dave Daniel, and mired in Florida commitments that kept me from attending his glorious Celebration of Life (fondly recounted to me in Steve O’Connor’s email, then embellished by others with…
A weekly report on things I’ve read, heard and seen since last Wednesday. Book Review: This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History, by Beverly Gage (2026). A professor of American history at Yale, Gage won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for her biography of J. Edgar…
At Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting, councilors received a comprehensive presentation from a representative of Commonwealth Care Alliance, a 20-year-old Boston-based nonprofit corporation that has contracted with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to operate the family emergency shelter program housed in the former UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center in downtown…
Lowell resident Belinda Juran compiles an incredibly email newsletter that she distributes to subscribers every couple of weeks. The newsletter lists dozens and dozens of events and activites in Lowell and serves as an excellent community calendar. Belinda graciously granted me permission to repost her newsletter here on richardhowe.com to…
Satori in Paris by Jack Kerouac. Grove Atlantic (2023), 120 pages, $16 (softcover) Reviewed by David Daniel Seventy years after it started, the Beat Movement continues to hold considerable cultural fascination. Nurtured by its origin-story of Columbia University friendships followed by the famed Six Gallery Reading and the San Francisco…
The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Lots of time for reading when you’re waiting for broken bones to heal! Fiction to follow. After the Last Border:Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America by Jessica Goudeau tells the often-checkered history of American treatment of refugees,…
Some items left over from last week . . . Lowell Cinema viewing experience At least some of the theaters at the Lowell Cinema (near Industrial Ave and Cross Point) have been reconfigured. The rows of lightly-padded stadium style seats have been replaced by widely-spaced, thickly padded recliners. Because there…
Julie Mofford, a former staffer at the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, who currently lives in midcoast Maine where she writes and works as a museum and historical society consultant, shares her memories of the 1950s . . . “The Un-Fabulous Fifties or How I Became Beat” by Julie Mofford Years…