Riverwalk - June 2007
Last June, Jen and I took our camera and took a few pictures along the way. I wrote enough about this walkway last year (Page 1...), so this'll be mostly pictures.
The ducks now have new friends - a Canadian Goose and a big white domestic Goose. See the top.
Looks like students like to come down here when they should be in school. Half these comments are about drinking, drugs, and/or skipping school. One's about skipping to go to the diner on Bridge St. The other half are sexual of course.
I love this part of the river by the Aiken St bridge where the water is fast, wide, and shallow.
The Riverwalk behind the Renaissance on the River condos.
Aiken St (Oulette) bridge. It's a fairly long bridge composed of a series of short arched spans anchored in the shallow riverbed. An earlier memory of mine is this bridge being MassHighway Green.
A quiet moment of bridge traffic, looking to Centralville
To paraphrase: "Built by the Berlin Iron Bridge Co...East Berlin, CT...1883...patents applied and pending." This is the only bridge to have ever stood at this spot. Funny to think even then that bridges were made by companies from pre-engineered, patented designs.
Just some pigeons...look at the amount of riveting.
LeLacheur park, with both the Lowell Spinners and the UMass Lowell baseball teams play.
This is the widest part of the river in Lowell, across from the end of Beaver Brook. I read somewhere that in pre-historic times, before the Merrimack was in its current alignment, this likely used to be a lake.
The Renaissance on the River condos on the left. Still vacant factories on the right (being turned into condos as of 2008). I've talked about this before, but the central buildings of this courtyard burned in the mid-80s. At the time ULowell had ambitious plans for the entire yard. One of the buildings that burned, the T-Shaped Sweeney Building. had two octagonal towers, evoking a castle. The wings of the Sweeney Building dated to the 1820s, and were the oldest mills left standing in Lowell at that time. The elaborate brick courtyard we have today is sensitive to the layout of the original complex. It was created in place of the lost buildings when the condos went in.
The courtyard has a few industrial relics scattered about. My guess is this was a raceway gate lifter...
...The cellar of some non-existant building...
Another view.
The other side of the courtyard hadn't been repurposed yet. While the multistory mill will become condos, the lower buildings, my understanding is they are only being stabilized to prevent further deterioration.
This used to be the main office I guess I love how in those days, all phrases, no matter how short, ended in periods: LAWRENCE.
The nearby canal.
The smokestack at dusk.
Corey Sciuto (e-mail)
2007