Lowell, Massachusetts

I had originally assembled the first few pages of pictures and the accompanying narrative for an internet forum. However, due to interest, I've decided to put it up as a website that I would expand upon as I took more photographs. If you have any suggestions or corrections or additional information, please feel free to contact me.

History lesson

First off, I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia and I wrote a lot of the History of Lowell, Massachusetts article. So, if you're really interested, go there.

Lowell, MA (Pop. 106,000) is located 30 miles northwest of Boston at the confluence of the Merrimack and Concord rivers and is the fourth largest city in the state (ahem...Commonwealth). Its namesake is Francis Cabot Lowell, a 19th century Harvard educated New Englander of the bluest blood in the Commonwealth.

While in his mid 30s, Lowell took a trip to Britain, where he memorized the workings of some new textile machinery. He decied to replicate these machines, and build the first cotton-to-cloth textile operation in the United States. Upon his return and with help from others, he founded a public company that designed and built these machines, and produced cloth industrially. His first mill was built at Waltham, Massachusetts, and it was highly successful from the start. However, Lowell died young, leaving the increasingly profitable company to his associates. The capital rich company began looking for ways to make even more money.

While English mills were largely using coal to power their factories, New England had fast enough flowing rivers to provide plenty of water power. Of course, this limited industrial development to very particular locations, and the small Charles River at Waltham wasn't nearly powerful enough to support new operations. In the early 1820s, Lowell's associates headed 30 miles northwest of Boston, up to the farming village of East Chelmsford, where the fast-flowing Merrimack dropped 35 feet over the course of a mile in a series of rapids called the Pawtucket Falls. Here was the ideal site for building their new factory town.

Some of the work here had already been done for them.

In the 1790s, a canal had been built at East Chelmsford to avoid the falls, allowing an all-water route for shipbuilding timber between the forests of New Hampshire and Newburyport, at the mouth of the Merrimack. This canal was obsolete almost as soon as it was built. A few hundred yards upstream, a different group built the Middlesex Canal - connecting the Merrimack with the shipyards of Boston directly. The unprofitable Pawtucket Canal was the Associates' for the taking.

The Associates, now working as the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, hired some disposable Irishmen and went to work in the 1820s building a new kind of city from scratch. Lowell went up virtually overnight. Canals, factories, shops, and housing quickly replaced the small farming community as more and more Boston businessmen opened up operations in Lowell. The grand Lowell Experiment was well underway.

This statue commemorates the Irishmen who built Lowell's 6 miles of power canals between about 1820 and 1850. The Lowell power canal system remains the largest in the world to this day.

Now, all they needed were people who would be willing to work the new factories. Wanting to be unlike England, where poor, uneducated types worked dangerous and crippling jobs for starvation wages, they brought in Yankee mill girls and set them up in company housing, promising good pay and a virtuous life.

One of Lowell's few remaining blocks of company boarding houses.

Soon, the same capitalist forces that lead to the founding of Lowell lead to its first major collapse. Taking advantage of the Irish Potato famine in the 1840s and facing stiff competion from other cities, uneducated Irish men, women, and children were employed, to work insane hours at a dangerous job for starvation wages - just like England. The part of the Lowell Experiment where people get wealthy was working, but they dropped the bit about providing a good life for the workers.

By 1850, Lowell was New England's 2nd largest city and America's largest manufacturing center. Workers from all over the world were flocking to the millyards of the Spindle City. However, realities of the market often strike in boomtowns - and hard. By 1930, Lowell was in a deep depression that lasted for decades. Corporations found that Southerners and 3rd World children were willing to work for far less than New Englanders - and they strike less. Additionally, the Merrimack River as a source of industrial power had been eclipsed by steam and electricity - now cloth could be produced anywhere, including much closer to the raw cotton source. Every major textile company in Lowell either moved South or went bankrupt in the first half of the 20th century; the bottom of Lowell's economy had dropped out almost all at once. Entire mill complexes were demolished and replaced with empty lots. Well-established neighborhoods were leveled in the name of "Urban Renewal", to try to reverse the trends of decaying housing stock, poverty, and crime. Blocks of commercial buildings lay vacant or became parking lots, victims of suburban strip malls and a drop in disposable income. A large percentage of the population was on government relief, and the number of residents in the city declined significantly.

By 1978, the Federal Government decided to make the Lowell, nicknamed the "Cradle of the American Industrial Revolution", the first Urban National Historical Park. The newly honored city beat out other post-industrial slums, namely Troy, New York and Patterson, New Jersey for this unique distinction. Even though Lowell received millions in public and private funds, it wasn't nearly enough to bring Lowell out of it's slump. While many historical buildings were restored, large parts of the city continued to deteriorate.

Today, artist and yuppie populations, in many cases priced out of the Boston area, have been added to the traditional ever-changing immigrant and deep-rooted ethnic-Lowellian mix. Lowell is an actual urban environment, unlike a condo complex behind some mall somewhere. And, it's very close to the Silicon Valley of the East Coast along Route 128, 15 miles to the Southeast. However, Lowell is the rare place where you'll see a doctor's Mercedes parked within gunshot range of a crackhouse. The sterilization and segregation prevalent in suburbia do not exist here, for better or for worse. These communities have helped bring some life back to the city, but they too will not be nearly enough to fully reverse the economic realities Lowell faces. Of course, that isn't to say that Lowell doesn't have a promising future - just that it will never again be the world-famous industrial powerhouse it once was.

In summary, Lowell is an interesting and unique city - although perhaps a dingy one, and it is worth exploring and preserving.

River Walk, March 2006

I decided to run some errands today, and I brought my camera along with me. It was an overcast late winter Sunday morning, the type of day where nothing is open, nobody is on the street, and Lowell's red and gray monotony looks completely and totally uninviting. My story? I'm a 23 year-old software engineer who was raised in suburbia (Tyngsboro) and decided I'd move the one town over to "The City" after graduating from college. My family has been Lowellians as long as they've been Americans - nearly 100 years. My parents moved to the suburbs, and I came right back. Why? Lowell is neither a large nor a prosperous city. It's not as hip as Cambridge nor as crunchy as Northampton nor as safe and sanitized as Nashua - but it's always been what I've considered home. Tyngsboro wasn't the sort of place I could develop an attachment to. Maybe someday I'll want to move back to some indistinct suburb, but for now, I want to live in a place that has a strong sense of place, a respect for its history, and a great sense of Something Cool Is Happening Here. So, I'm a strange cross between the twenty-something mill-dwelling yuppie blow-in with an interest in coffee shops, sushi, and Smart Growth Initiatives, and a standard small-worlded New Englander who lives under 10 miles from everyone else he's related to, and thinks his hometown is God's Own Country. Oh, and I really like history and cities in general. I played a lot of SimCity growing up.

Here's the converted factory I live in, and the ruins of another complex just across a vacant lot and a canal from me. It was partially torn down on purpose, since it's on a peninsula of canals that works more like a moat, making it inaccessible to fire trucks. The lot in the foreground had become vacant only a few weeks before, there used to be a low-lying steel hulk that made nonwoven fabrics there. There's big plans for this part of the city (buzzwords: multi-use new-urban smart-growth gateway economic development) - let's see what happens.

U-Mass Lowell is now considering putting a nanotechnology facility on this site. The upside is that a high-tech research facility would bring recognition and more importantly, people downtown. The downside is that this seems to imply that the condo market, which was a large part of the original plan, has softened greatly, just as quite a few high-end units are about to come online here.I guess this is no longer part of the plan - see the Hamilton Canal District site

The ruins of a coal shed outside my front door. The roof was rumored to have been removed by the owner, since that makes it technically not a building - and reduces his tax bill.

A few months later, the city ordered the tanks of oil that were still stored under this structure emptied and filled with slurry. The list of sites of Lowell containing abandoned industrial materials is quite long. One of the largest is a Superfund site down on Tanner Street - an old heavy industry district about a mile from downtown. That's apparently linked to a project called the Tanner Street Initiative, which reminds me of an experimental 80's synth band.

Shattuck Street. We enjoy cobblestones, since not only are they historic, they ruin your car, jar out your teeth, and twist the delicate ankles of women in heels. Oh - and the ADA hates them. The Episcopal church (Saint Anne's) at the end of this short street is as old as Lowell, when it was still in the command of Protestants. Kirk Boot himself, one of the fathers of Lowell and the Agent of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company, decided on the denomination of this Company church; the first built in the planned manufacturing community that became Lowell. Shattuck Street is one of our many poorly marked one-way streets. "For Lowellians, By Lowellians" seems to be the motto of the highway department around here, no matter what they say otherwise.

Saint Anne's was soon followed by a lot more churches. It turns out that in those days, people used to actually go to church. Being an immigrant city from its earliest days however, Lowell has a lot of non-protestant churches. Here is St. Patrick's, one of the oldest Catholic Churches north of Boston, and a Greek Orthodox church a few blocks away - I think that's the oldest Byzantine-Style church in America. The neighborhood they both stand in is called The Acre, after the size of the plot of land St. Patrick's is on. The land was given to them so they could have a place to set up a parish, probably to try to calm them down. These rowdy and drunk Catholics with the funny accents were not popular in Protestant Lowell, but fortunately for the Irish, the Acre is an island due to the canals. So when the Protestants came to burn down their church, they were able to hold them back by defending the bridges. Lowell has always been and probably always will be a poor immigrant city. Today, Lowell is America's 2nd largest Cambodian city, but I don't know where their temples are. Many of them are Catholic.

The New England Quilt Museum on the left (Lowell has a handful of small museums) and the artist run Ayer Lofts to the right. And Life Alive - a health food/vegan restaurant/store.

City Hall. A massive structure made of local granite (New Hampshire is 5 miles away), the clock tower is said to have been built so tall so that workers at the mills wouldn't get screwed out of wages by wrong clocks in the mills. You can see this tower from just about any millyard. Right behind it (but not visible) is the equally ornate Library. Both of these buildings were built in the 1890s, at Lowell's peak. The low brick building in the right foreground is Cobblestones. A great restaurant and is also one of the last standing buildings from the Merrimack Manufacturing Company. 100 years ago, there were multistory buildings on both sides of City Hall. Fires and "Progress" cleared out much of this area, replaced with gas stations and boulevards.

The JFK Civic Center, to the right of City Hall. It's in Mass, of course it's named after JFK. A fine example of 1960s-1970s thought processes, this disgustingly Brutalist structure took the place of the beginning of Moody Street, a major road through Little Canada, or the French end of the Acre. The other end of Moody Street was replaced with a parking lot, leaving the road cut off at both ends. The classic New England triple decker housing and shops that were formerly in this neighborhood were largely replaced with suburban brick tenements. This is the story of many of Lowell's inner neighborhoods. Wipe out the communities and replace them with projects. In some cases, the city threatened homeowners with condemnation of their property if they wouldn't leave, which would allow the city to take their homes by eminent domain for $1.

I dropped off my books at the library and walked down Arcand Drive to the Merrimack river. These are the remnants of the Lawrence Mills. A massive fire destroyed much of this complex when I was very young - I made my mom drive me here to see the still-smoldering ruins a few days after, and had photographs of the ruins in my room for years. I wish I had never lost them. The remaining buildings are now becoming expensive condos. Note the smoke stack standing where no building is anymore. Really adds to the ambiance of this complex. I've never been able to get over what used to be here, versus the very well designed plaza that is there now (it was still under construction at the time I took this photo). Mr. Lawrence I'm assuming is the guy who went downriver 15 miles and founded the city of Lawrence, which is a far more depressed than Lowell. It's a good third poorer and without the Federal Government or cultural amenities. People who have read history books probably know Lawrence as the place where the Bread and Roses Rebellion took place in the early 20th century, forcing New England factory owners to pay their workers a "fair" wage and not have them work 20 hour days. Of course, in the end all this did was force the mill owners to move their operations to places where they could continue to screw workers - and leave the New England economy in shambles.

Behind the Lawrence Mills, on the Riverwalk. I'm assuming these blocked off tunnels used to channel water from the canals under the Merrimack Mills (which are gone) and drop the water down into the water wheels and turbines which powered these factories until coal became more economical. Of course, the switch to coal made the water-powered mills obsolete, and allowed the mill companies to move away from New England's rivers.

The canals are just about empty right now, since they were doing work on the supports for one of the mills the National Park owns. There's a massive system of locks that allows the water into different canals, or, they can let it run fully in the riverbed if there's work to be done on the canals. The water, the canal walls, and the area over the canals are all owned by different organizations. The hydroelectric company that owns the water rarely cleans them, and promised to prosecute anyone who did it for free. Wonderful tourist attraction here. They do have a good point, there's probably a lot of hazardous stuff like needles down there.

However, the National Park is now looking for regular volunteers to help clean this out, and there is a group called Lowell Canalwaters Cleaners: (link)

Like I said, the canals are just about empty. Combined with the spring thaw, the river is really high right now. We're probably halfway down the rapids (there's an actual dammed up waterfall at the beginning that's probably only 10 feet high and I didn't want to walk that far).

It's hard to appreciate from these pictures how fast this water is going. Some of the rapids in the Concord River, a smaller river that hits the Merrimack at the end of the canal system, are class 4 and 5 I believe. You can white-water them in May.

U-Mass Lowell, North Campus. This is the engineering college. That's a nuclear reactor.

Standing over the Northern Canal. Left to right: housing tower built on site of Lowell's original millyard, Wannalancit and Lawrence Mills (Wannalancits have a great brewery and a meth clinic in them), Northern Canal, City Hall, Housing Projects in Little Canada, and the roof of a closed, beautiful French-Canadian Catholic church. Many of the bridges over the Northern Canal haven't been replaced since they were built in the 1850s. I think I'm standing on one here.

I'm standing on the University Ave Bridge. The tower is a UMass Lowell dorm, Fox Hall. Jack Kerouac, who was from Lowell (and they tell you that every time you come into the city) wrote about standing on this bridge and watching a guy go crazy and fling a watermelon off of it - or maybe he died and dropped the melon. Like most residents, I don't really care for the guy. Back then this was the Moody Street Bridge; we're at the other end of the cut off street from the Civic Center. There's a sign (and some random junk) on the roof of a gatehouse just off frame saying: "Save Kerouac's Bridge!" They want to realign this bridge with a street instead of the parking lot that they put there, tearing down another triple-decker and a 100+ year old social club or something. The concrete thing on the river is Boott Hydroelectric, which owns the canal water. Signs in about 6 languages tell you not to go in the water here. You go out on a rock and they open the locks, you're going to die.

One thing I noticed taking these pictures is how low this railing was, I was afraid I was going to lose my camera. About a year later, a man fooling around with his friends leaned over the edge and tipped himself too far. He fell off and landed on the rocks, dying almost instantly. There is now a chain-link fence here. Reminds me of the guardrails added to the Lowell Connector (most dangerous three miles of expressway in the state) after a woman who was eight months pregnant was killed by a drag-racer who jumped the median.

We're on the other bank now. This is the VFW Highway - pretty quiet right now. They need to do something about this walkway, it's a mess. On the other side of that fence is a hobo-town that looks like something out of the Fallout games.

After crossing over a dead beaver that's been there a few weeks, a dead something, and a dead rat, you can walk down the embankment to another somewhat-overgrown walkway. This might look better in the summer, I don't know. Those VFWs that the road is named after are living down here off to the left in a tent-city, flying the Stars and Stripes. I don't know why this stroller is here, but there's all sorts of junk down here. Including families shooting at trash with BB guns.

"Under the Bridge Downtowwwwwn" The brush clears up to get a good shot of the Lawrence Mills here. Back in Lowell's heyday in the 1880s, from here on was "The Mile of Mills." Many are now gone, but you can still get the idea of huge brick factories and smokestacks with black soot going on for ... a mile. There were 10 major companies in Lowell by 1880, about half had riverfront property.

A few years later, after some pretty serious floods, they cleared out all this brush, which really improves the view.

The Boott Mills through the brush - named after Kirk Boott. Kirk St is also named after him, and not James T. as I thought when I was younger. You can barely see to the left the hole in the retaining wall, this is where the canal water would re-enter the river after powering the mills. Also of note here is the white and green bell tower, by which the factory workers lived their lives.

The Massachusetts Mills from under the creatively named Bridge Street Bridge (now officially the Cox Bridge, the naming jokes in this city never end!) These dilapidated mills next to the river are a source of debate. Zoning laws say that there isn't enough parking to turn them both into condos. Nobody wants to tear down one so the other can remain standing, so I guess they're going to wait to see which one collapses and destroys the renovated $1000+ month apartments in the rest of the complex first.

A year later the plan changed to gutting the waterfront buildings - these were the power plant for this mill complex. The River Walk will go through them, in a "Sculpture Garden." The taller building a row back will have basement parking and apartments on the upper floors.

The end of the Mile of Mills, the Concord River joins the Merrimack. That's 'Kahnkid' to those of you who don't live here. Across the Concord River from the Mass Mills is Saints Memorial Medical Center.

Bridge St, looking to Kearney Square. Lt. Kearney was a military guy. Probably not as famous (infamous?) as Lowell's own General Benjamin Butler from the Civil War - "The Butcher of New Orleans". Mass Mills on the left, then Kerouac Park. The old Lowell Sun building with its famous neon signs is at the end of the square, and then some buildings, a diner, and the Boott mills on the far right. This square is the center of the city. Famous Lowell commercial inventions - CVS, Moxie soda, Market Basket. Much better known for its industrial inventions... The Lowell Sun newspaper hasn't been in its tower for many, many years. Until recently, they were in the building next door, a lower but longer building that used to belong to their competition. A few years ago the printing operations were moved out of Lowell, and now the offices moved across downtown to the American Textile Museum building on Dutton Street.

The Boott Mills, Lowell National Historical Park. These mills are very well maintained... except as I mentioned they almost fell into the canal in front of them a few weeks ago because supports eroded away. Inside this building, you can go into a weaving room and watch how the magic happened when your great-grandma worked here. There are also some offices, condos, and apartments going into the rear buildings.

A very empty wasteway canal.

Lucy Larcom was a famous poet mill-girl in the early days of Lowell. I'm standing on the linear Lucy Larcom Park. In front of me, the empty Merrimack Canal (yummy). Across from that, the National Park trolley. Lowell banned at-grade train crossings years ago, but the city's history with street cars has continued on this one trolley. What changing industrial technology did to Lowell's factories, the car did to Lowell's commerce. The trolley is a nice touch, but I have a love-hate relationship with it as it tends to cross in front of you at the least opportune time. The men get out and wave their little orange flags and the whistles blow and everything, letting you know to not barrel into the oncoming trolley. The building behind that is the new part of Lowell High School. The old part is behind me, across the sky-way. Lowell High is the 2nd largest high school in Massachusetts, graduating 750ish students a year. Considering the dropout rate in this city, for grades 9-12, that makes it HUGE. I believe at one point this area was all boardinghouses. I know that Lucy Larcom Park, way, way, way back, was Anne Street, a very fashionable address in early Lowell.

The Lower Locks. This is where the canal system rejoins the rivers. That yellow building is the gatehouse, and there's a few more like it around the city, controlling the flow of the water for power purposes. The wooden gates with the big red handles are the transportation locks - although a barge probably hasn't used this canal since before 1850. In the distance, you can see the roof of the coal shed I live by. Supposedly for the 2008 season, this lock chamber will be used by the National Park, the first time a boat has crossed from the canal system into the Concord River in over 100 years.

Sun Building's giant neon sign, Apartments at Mass Mills, Middlesex Community College, Lower Locks Gatehouse.

Industrial Canyon, Central St over the Pawtucket Canal. Lower Locks are behind me. This is the backside of my condo complex to the right. Until recently, that big factory on the left was a fabrics company still. Now, it's more Yuppie Barracks. Yes, the close-up picture is older, there's not still snow or water in that one spot.

The stairs back into my place. That beam is huge - and probably worth a fortune. The motivation for tearing down many of these factories is to salvage the wood from when trees big enough for beams like that still existed.