Lowell’s Greek Community Featured in Upcoming National Park Exhibit “The University of Massachusetts Lowell, in partnership with Lowell National Historical Park, announces the opening of an exhibit on the Greek community in Lowell, Massachusetts, titled ‘Acropolis of America: The Greek Community in Lowell 1874-2020,’ on August 1. The temporary exhibit…
I’m cross-posting this from the blog on my paulmarion.com website. This is a sidebar piece from my book Mill Power: The Origin and Impact of Lowell National Historical Park (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). I worked in Lowell for decades, including many years when I helped to create the national park. Everybody in…
MAJOR GRANT & AWARD FOR WATERWAYS VITALITY PROJECT The Lowell Heritage Partnership’s Waterways Vitality Initiative surged forward this month with several milestone achievements. The initiative’s recent successes include receipt of a $100,000 grant from the Theodore Edson Parker Foundation of Boston; a MassINC Innovation Award to be presented on November…
With all the walking and talking about walking going on in the city, I thought I’d share this poem from 1984, which originally appeared in my book STRONG PLACE: POEMS ’74-’84 and was reprinted in WHAT IS THE CITY? in 2006. In the ’80s, I had a Sunday routine of…
At the New Bedford Whaling Museum yesterday, Rosemary and I found in the gift shop a collectible mug whose design features about 20 memorable first lines of books, including Melville’s “Call me Ishmael.” from MOBY DICK, which is why they had it on sale, but the mug also had “I…
Here’s a throwback thing to the pioneer days of festival-making in Renaissance Lowell. This was “Expo ’79, Art/Music” at Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Lowell CityFair was part of the federal jobs program (imagine that) called C.E.T.A. (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) wherein a dozen or so Lowell artists were hired to…
Lowell Walks/Public Art by Rosemary Noon At the invitation of Dick Howe, my husband, Paul, and I led a group of 110 people on a 90-minute tour of the Lowell Public Art Collection this past Saturday morning. It was the second installment in the Lowell Walks series for the summer.…
The following extracts are from four issues of the “Artifacts” newsletter of the Art Alive! artists cooperative that operated in Lowell in the early 1980s (formed some time before June 1980). I recently found these documents in my files, an incomplete set of Volume 1 of “Artifacts.” The four issues…
The shame of the result in the court case about the future of the Pawtucket Falls Dam is the lack of trade-off and balancing of interests in the court’s decision. Enel is already generating green energy and making money on the hydro-power system, otherwise they would not be operating in…
The article surfaced on the web yesterday, a Boston Globe Travel section report on the vibrant cultural life in Lowell, a city whose historic sector carries the designation of The Canalway Cultural District, thanks to the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Quickly, the news story by writer Patricia Harris and photographer David Lyon…