What do you do when you write something that is too short to become a book and too much its own thing to patch into a compilation of various works? The material is too long to submit to a literary journal. It could be a printed pamphlet or chapbook, but one in a million people buys such a thing. A Google search yields a number of hits for digital chapbook. The Massachusetts Review has a digital chapbook section for downloading. Poets House in New York digitizes print chapbooks, of which it has thousands of hard copies. There’s a digital chapbook contest at Frontier Press, and Palooka Press and Wet Cement Press sell them. This is the first time we’ve gone this route at Loom Press. With several images included as locational cues, we’ve set the material up in scroll format, not in flip-book style to mimic a printed book. We hope you enjoy the result. — LP
Cover
Walking Around Lowell
Field Notes
Paul Marion
List of works
Also by Paul Marion
Strong Place: Poems ‘74-‘84
Middle Distance
Merrimack: A Poetry Anthology (co-editor)
French Class: French Canadian-American Writings on Identity, Culture, and Place (co-author)
Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings by Jack Kerouac (editor)
What Is the City?
Union River: Poems and Sketches
Mill Power: The Origin and Impact of Lowell National Historical Park
History as It Happens: Citizen Bloggers in Lowell, Mass. (co-editor)
Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell (co-editor)
Haiku Sky
Lockdown Letters & Other Poems
Atlantic Currents II (co-editor)
Title page
Walking Around Lowell
Field Notes
Paul Marion
Loom Press
Amesbury, Massachusetts
2023
Copyright page
Walking Around Lowell: Field Notes
© 2023 by Paul Marion
www.paulmarion.com
ISBN 978-0-931507-37-3
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author and publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition/Digital
Author photograph: Tony Sampas
Text: Garamond
Loom Press
15 Atlantic View, Amesbury, MA 01913
www.loompress.com
info@loompress.com
Many of these compositions first appeared on the RichardHowe.com and PaulMarion.com blogs. “Batman on Highland Street,” “Scenes from a Redevelopment Zone,” and “Grand Street Peace Walk” were reprinted in History as It Happens: Citizen Bloggers in Lowell, Mass. “Watching the Canalway” appears in Mill Power: The Origin and Impact of Lowell National Historical Park. “Merrimack Street” and “Labor Day Eve” were published in Strong Place: Poems ’74-’84. “A Higher Level of Notation,” which first appeared in the poetry collection Middle Distance, was commissioned in 1986 as the Lowell Sesquicentennial Poem for the 150th anniversary of the town of Lowell, Mass. (ten years later the city was incorporated).
Photographs and images embedded in the text are from public domain or open source sites.
epigraph
“The walking man walks.” — James Taylor
Contents page
Contents
Author’s Note
1. Merrimack Street
2. Labor Day Eve
3. Mammoth Road
4. A Higher Level of Notation
5. Crayon Mill
6. Acre Passage
7. Lemieux Park & O’Keefe Circle
8. Centralville of the Universe
9. Watching the Canalway
10. Bangkok Market
11. Hale-Howard Neighbors
12. Batman on Highland Street
13. Scenes from a Redevelopment Zone
14. Garden District
15. “‘I’ve Gone to Look for America”’: On Foot in a National City
16. Murphy
17. Two Hearts Café, Badfinger, & a Raspberry Lime Rickey
18. Grand Street Peace Walk
About the Author
Author’s note
Most of these prose sketches were written soon after I got home after my regular Sunday walks between 2009 and 2011 when my family lived on Highland Street near the train station in Lowell, Mass. Many fresh reports immediately appeared on the popular RichardHowe.com blog in Lowell. Sometimes I had companions, but usually I walked alone, carrying a notebook and pen. A few pieces in this collection, written earlier as free verse poems, are included in prose form to show that walking has long interested me.—PM
Text pages
1.
Merrimack Street
Anyone who’s been here long enough has had an hour like this. Streets about empty, air not hot, not cold. It could be a Sunday morning or a Wednesday evening, or any day after work, but not right after the office closes, maybe you stay to check the headlines.
The place yours for once, or again, you walk down Merrimack, past Jordan’s minimalist window dressing, one black torso filling a yellow sweater, and the CVS, door open, scent of candy and medicine, past Cherry’s, the manikins severe, past Prince’s books, and the shoe store, all those objects behind plate glass creating a museum of the ordinary. The entire street is the Mundane Institute, commerce having surrendered at 5 p.m. as the human push changed direction.
There’s no ambition in things. This is the moment to look. With no merchant presenting it, the shoe is like a flower, a stone. Farther on, the landmark clock in the Square and SUN Building, for years the closest thing to a skyscraper—across the street, Meehan Tours, Christian Science Reading Room, then the murky canal under the bridge and hissing pipe by the railing.
The Auditorium and Massachusetts Mills over there, and to the right, beyond the parking lot, what’s left of the Strand, which featured A Hard Day’s Night almost twenty years ago. At this hour, I know the meaning of familiar, know this is where I am and know some of what was, what is, and where Bridge Street goes, but still know so little, no knowing the other stories.
1983
2.
Labor Day Eve
Began at H & H Paper, ex-boarding house for mill hands, in blueprints as a cultural center, then headed to the Boott Mills yard, the bell tower with shuttle weathervane an exclamation mark on a brick cliff. Near the gate, a Locks & Canals truck.
Crossed French Street to John Street, passing the Trade School and double-deck car lot’s wrap-around mural: the mass production of textiles, from enslaved cotton pickers to modern strike banners to the river that juiced the looms.
Behind the five-and-dime stores, I stopped at an empty lot, once a bar. At times in the ‘50s, when my father was laid-off from work at his mill and was too young for school, we’d drive Mum downtown to the women’s clothing store where she worked. We’d get a booth in the bar, order a beer from him and an orangeade for me, and go back home.
Around the corner, one building rules Kearney Square, named for a World War I soldier. With its ten stories, the SUN dazzled in 1914. The lighted roof signs stayed when the newspaper moved. Electric SUN, each night a contradiction, a message, prayer, torch, fist, business card above Lowell chimneys. From Centralville across the river, it’s blue. From the North Common side SUN glows red.
Turned up Merrimack, looking towards City Hall, civic temple, clean angles backed by sky, spread eagle crowning tip-top gold ball, time hands correct on the tower’s large clock face. Near St. Anne’s, in Lucy Larcom Park, grass strip named for the so-called “mill girl poet,” who was an abolitionist, editor, memoir author, a Kids’ Fair was breaking camp, the clowns, sheep, popcorn vendor, even Santa Claus, all set to leave.
On cobbled Shattuck Street, outside my office, Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, U.S. Department of the Interior, I paused, thinking, “I work at a government desk. The United States of America pays me to remember.” Where I’ve eaten junk, hugged girls, spent money, there, and there, on sidewalks unclaimed by the famous, any number of persons have stood in the weather, answering the clock, the bell.
1984
3.
Mammoth Road
Rusty tin lids, cloth scraps, newspaper pages, a penny,
bits of metal, a kid’s sneaker, gum wrappers, cigarette butts,
a roach clip, a slipper, one black rubber boot, broken pencils,
rain-scarred magazine pages, flat gold aluminum beer cans,
green glass, labels, a blue ballpoint pen, hunks of wood,
weeds, crinkled cigarette packs, empty matchbooks, tinfoil,
torn Rice Krispies box, screw-off caps, twist-off bottle tops,
two creased baseball cards, flat orange juice carton,
red bike reflector, corroded tail pipe, Styrofoam coffee cup,
plastic six-pack holders, brown beer bottles, tonic cans
(Tab, Sprite, 7-Up, Diet Pepsi, Fresca, Mountain Dew), a dog chew,
black electrical tape, a 6.5-ounce Coke bottle from Albany, N.Y.,
red-and-white straws, temperature knob printed Hot Warm Normal.
1985
4.
A Higher Level of Notation
“If astronomy teaches us anything, it teaches that man is but a detail in the evolution of the Universe, and that resemblant though diverse details are inevitably to be expected in the host of orbs around him. He learns that though he will probably never find his double anywhere, he is destined to discover any number of cousins scattered through space.”
—Percival Lowell, astronomer, 1895
On a Sunday morning in Lowell the streets are wider, quiet, like the sky-colored river. There’s a rest in the song, a pause in the working rhythm. And it’s a chance to look hard, to see what can be seen, to find what can be found.
Rolling down Salem and Market streets, listening to Greek melodies on WLLH, I feel the layers of occupation. The matching weights of St. Patrick’s Church and Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church pin down the Acre neighborhood for good. Like another Ellis Island, this parcel bears tracks of those who have carried on. The signs are an Embassy Row: Club Citoyens Americains, Phnom Penh, Olympia. The overlay sticks, links up in a set. The Census list is richer.
The truth hits home when my eye catches gallon cans of olive oil gleaming in the window of an orange store front. A block ahead, Cambodian refugees unload sacks of rice from a truck. An old man crossing Worthen Street walks his dog toward a big brick mill. He stands for all the scarred and decorated survivors, plus their line of makers. From a third-story porch somebody’s aunt could be looking for Marion’s Meat Market, a solid, corner establishment that burned and erased like the wrong price on a grocer’s bill in Little Canada.
At a stop sign, I check the rearview mirror, trying to stitch together in a moment more than a century-and-a-half of life lived under a title, a surname, “That great fact we call Lowell,” a name layered over the original tribal name of the place. I try to recall what I’m told, but the brain is weaker than I’d like it to be. I’m glad that remnants are clues and grateful for discovery through preservation, for the texture of diversity, this stained-glass history.
Looking back and looking at, I see the pattern is a turn, with each turn wheeling in a world of long-gone motions. Our culture, the social protoplasm in which we love, work, dream, stirred by all this turning, animates each frame. We are what we were as much as what we are. What we will become is partly our choice. We can always change, and change again.
1986 (driving, not walking)
5.
Crayon Mill
My brother and I made the rounds downtown this morning to get some fresh air and work out the winter kinks. The sky was a pure powder-blue backdrop behind the brick buildings. We started at Broadway and Dutton. Near the Swamp Locks boat landing of the National Park Service, we were intrigued by what looked like a large rectangular white tent that turned out to be a construction site. Walking around the back side, we saw that the wind had whipped off sections of a plastic tarp, revealing scaffolding around two ancient wooden lock-chamber gates, as best as we could guess. Mounted on frames, the gates appear to be undergoing restoration.
With the fence open at the small canal bridge, we hiked on through the Hamilton Canal District and down Jackson Street. I hadn't noticed until today that someone had chipped off the letters spelling HAMILTON from one of the stone arches, right next to another one with the date of the mill's origin, 1825, still in fine condition. When textile production stopped at the Hamilton, the Megowen-Educator Food Company moved into one of the buildings, baking mountains of Beer Chaser crackers and Girl Scout Cookies. The aroma wafted over that section of downtown, at times sickeningly sweet.
The air was chilly at 9 a.m., so as much as possible we walked on the sun-washed side of the street. The stretch of the Pawtucket Canal leading from the Doubletree Hotel towards the Swamp Locks is informally known as the “Industrial Canyon,” but a walker also gets the sense of being in an industrial canyon when passing through the Hamilton complex and under the remaining elevated “Jackson Properties” walkway. We saw a few people heading somewhere. It was too cold for the seagulls—or too early. My brother noted that the Major’s Pub building was once a painters’ union hall. The structure has character, featuring details such as a metal roof. The same goes for the small out-cropping entryway section of the mill across the street. It looks like a piece of a canal gatehouse. You see it on your left when walking down the driveway toward the “Lofts” apartments, one of the city’s better mill conversions. My brother said the “gatehouse” reminded him of the tiny “crayon mill” that once stood near what is now the Fred C. Church Insurance building off French Street opposite Lucy Larcom Park. He said it housed a manufacturer of crayons and chalk at one time—items used to mark fabric in the mills.
We turned down Central Street, which needs a major retail upgrade on the west side, and slipped through the tunnel off Prescott Street to see where the new cheese-and-wine shop is set to open, facing the canal and hotel. The in-progress interior is impressive with its shelves, furnishings, and raw stone wall. Good luck to “Ricardo” with his venture. Let’s hope the Canalway-front business approach catches on. Our next stop was Kerouac Park, just emerging from the December-January glacier. The Kerouac Commemorative is half-way through its 21st year and holding up well. The steel-and-granite benches need repair, and parts of the plaza that have heaved up in recent winters will require leveling. The sculpture area needs a landscaping overhaul. For an international attraction, the plantings should look as good as Kittredge Park on its best days.
We took a left onto Bridge Street, where Eleni’s dress-and-tailoring shop looks sharp as does the travel agency on the corner, Gomes Travel. Our last long leg was up Merrimack to Shattuck and over the train tracks to the Club Diner for a quick breakfast. By then the sun was high and warm. Sunday customers buzzed, scarfing up French toast and scrambled eggs and slugging down coffee amid the folded newspapers and eager talk.
2-15-09
6.
Acre Passage
I had an old walking partner this morning as we made our way from downtown west up Merrimack Street. The weather was end-of-winter mild, but still cold enough to keep the ice set on sidewalks. Although precipitation was forecast, a mix of snow and rain, the sky held its blank look. We passed City Hall and the public library, which act as civic counterweights to the Auditorium on East Merrimack and mark one edge of the central business district. Watching a TV news report about President Obama’s visit to Ottawa earlier this week, I noticed a resemblance between Lowell City Hall and the central tower of the Parliament building in Canada.
Another observation from TV popped into my head as we passed the small shops, restaurants, and offices of upper Merrimack. I had just seen a program about food in Ireland that lavished attention on the Irish scene. In big cities and small towns owners paint their shops and pubs in bright colors and hang distinctive signs. Lowell's downtown core has some impressive storefronts, restaurant facades, and well-designed signs. We need to spread the look.
For-sale banners draped the fronts of the former St. Jean Baptiste/Nuestra Senora del Carmen church and St. Joseph’s Hall across the street. It was good to see the Father Garin statue in place outside the former church. Other than a couple of 1970s-era murals, the area doesn’t have much public art for uplift. (On the return leg of our walk, we swung past Harmony Park near St. Patrick’s Church. The Revolving Museum team and neighborhood friends have done a lot to reclaim the small park, restoring the tile mosaic and adding elements like a wooden figurative sculpture and the temporary ball wall made of soccer balls, basketballs, tennis balls, footballs, and other balls rescued from the canals.) But back to the church complex—a stark example of the way cities change over time. In 1896, the 19,000-member parish was the largest French Canadian-American parish in the Archdiocese of Boston. With his fellow Oblate priest Lucien Lagier, Andre Marie Garin began his work in Lowell with a mission for French-speaking Catholics in the basement of St. Patrick’s Church in 1868, when the Franco population was less than 1,500 (Thanks to historian Richard Santerre for these facts.)
Fletcher Street coffee shop by Jennifer Myers (used by permission of the artist)
We meandered through to Salem Street via the passageway at the former St. Joseph’s Hospital (later the Holden Center) and tried to get over to Fletcher Street through the old hospital parking lot only to find ourselves fenced in. It did give us a great view of a stand-out mint-green house on the side street that we wound up taking to get to Fletcher. We proceeded along the North Common, passing the small shop with the sign DONUTS STEAMED DOGS, which neither of us had ever entered. Anyone walking around the city will be struck by the number of small businesses and how many of them are untried by a typical resident. There’s a barber shop on Market Street that could be installed in a history or art museum for the quality of its interior design. The obsessively covered walls make a running Americana collage, with a strong Frank Sinatra thread. The images make the place a time machine.
Any northeast city looks gritty by the end of February. We’ve had a harsh winter. Outside some pubs the snow has melted to reveal months of cigarette butts. Shrinking snowbanks are rimmed in black from car exhaust. Plastic bags decorate bare trees. We’re near mud season. Even on a gray day the gold dome of Holy Trinity Orthodox church shines like a hovering sun in the middle of the Acre.
2-22-09
7.
Lemieux Park and O’Keefe Circle
Anticipating snow on Sunday after hearing the excited meteorologists for the past few days, I headed off on my own Saturday morning to see what I would find nearby in the Back Central neighborhood. I’d like to make a motion to change the name from Back Central to the Garden District in recognition of the widespread commitment to cultivating flowers, vegetables, and fruits in the neighborhood. This area has a distinctive character, a cultural texture that should be preserved and promoted. There are three names associated with this section of the city or parts of this section: the Flats, the South End, and Back Central. I don’t think any one of them captures the feeling of the place. I suggested that to the M.I.T. urban planning students whom City planners brought in last fall to collaborate with residents in rethinking the way the neighborhood looks and functions. I hope the idea is still on the table.
A flawless blue sky made a pure dome over the city in the morning. It didn’t feel as if a storm was due in twenty-four hours. On Elm Street a crowd of small brown birds, maybe sparrows, cheeped like crazy in the hedge outside a two-family house. Pigeons wheeled onto the roof of the original portion of the courthouse with its distinctive cupola. I dodged muddy driveway craters and potholes. The general look of the area was one of aftermath. Scattered Santas and reindeer stood off to the side of porches, defrosting trash plastered sidewalks, blizzard-shredded flags hung slack, and frost-killed stalks of plants leaned over. The religious yard art, Sacred Heart shrines and bathtub creche scenes, had weathered the cold months well. The mild air drew neighbors outside for over-the-fence conversations. I wasn’t the only walker. Traffic picked up by the quarter hour.
Whenever I walk in this area, I stop at a vest-pocket park that sits between Mill and Richmond streets, Walter J. Lemieux Park, just off Hosford Square. About ten years ago, Back Central neighborhood activists sparked a number of improvements, from innovative car condos to redesigned intersections to new green spaces. With its neat landscaping, flowering trees, white fence, flagpoles, and stone marker, Lemieux Park adds a deeply personal touch. Here, the community honors its own. The text on the memorial stone reads: “In Memory Of/U.S. Army Medic Walter J. Lemieux, SP4/Killed In The Line Of Duty In Vietnam/A Lifelong Resident Of 21 Mill Street/September 23, 1947-March 9, 1969/Dedicated On September 27, 1998.” He was 21. Flanked by reddish bushes, the granite marker is about three feet high, finished on the sides. The 10 a.m. sun shone on the face of the monument. Mica flecks in the gray, rough-cut top surface gleamed like starry specks in a patch of the universe.
Half a block away, in the center of a mini-park traffic island in the middle of Hosford Square, there’s another memorial marker that can only be appreciated on foot. O’Keefe Circle has an aged bronze plaque set in a large square block of granite. The words on this memorial read: “In Memory Of/John Joseph O’Keefe/Private in U.S. Army/Born August 14, 1883 -/Died September 23, 1932/Enlisted October 13, 1917/Discharged March 28, 1919.” A veteran of “The War to End All Wars.” This monument once included a vintage machine gun on a tripod. As a boy, I noticed every time we drove through the square.
Around these public remembrances community life perks: Alpha Insurance Agency, Angelina’s Moneygrams, Sprint Phone, G & I Latino Market (O Brasil mais perto de voce), Express Tax Services (imposto de reda), LP International Store (specialists in imported and local clothes), Luxu’s Jewelry Repair, Hair Tech (grand opening), Maranatha Church (The Lord Jesus is Coming), General Practice (immigration/criminal/auto accidents/divorce—Falamos Portugues, Hablamos Espanol), P & L Auto Body, and the Language Center (English, Portuguese, Spanish, Computer).
From that busy intersection, I took a side route down to Lawrence Street, past the Whipple Cafe, Bar & Grill at Lawrence and Wamesit streets, and over to the Concord River and Jollene Dubner Park, another community tribute that deserves a longer commentary later. Jollene was an environmental activist in the community when the term “Green” was not as common as it is today. The river filled the channel and flowed steadily to the Merrimack, sun bouncing off the blue-black surface. Northward, around the bend, white foam kicked up over the rocks. In his essay “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau writes: “Half the walk is but retracing our steps.” Heading back, I passed the last of the red holiday bows on windows and looked hard to see any sign of green in the serpentine grapevines all twisted through the pipe-grids of arbors in the yards. I wondered what was on the air at this hour on the micro-radio station broadcasting from a house at the corner of Central and Elm?—1570 AM WKNM, Radio Commercial, 24 Horas Por Dia Lowell. A runner plugged in to his white wires of iTunes breezed by me. A blue-and-red flashing cruiser sped toward downtown. Old Thoreau answered, “I have traveled widely in Concord,” when asked by someone why he had not yet visited Europe.
3-1-09
8.
Centralville of the Universe
My Sunday walking companion this week was a historian from Christian Hill who has embraced the city full-strength since moving here about four years ago. We rendezvoused in front of Vic’s (Breakfast, Subs & Bakery) at Lilley and West Sixth Street. Across the street the Lowell Provision Co. (est. 1915), known for its longhorn steer logo, advertised “Our own corned beef homemade red or gray” next to the leprechauns in the front window. Other signs pushed “Italian Sausage Hot or Sweet,” “Delicious Prepared Meals,” and “Steak and Chicken Marinades.” A couple of doors up on West Sixth, towards the Peter J. Deschene Memorial Fire Station, there are the Soap Box Laundry, Nana’s American Store (African clothing, cosmetics, and handbags), and Sunrise Scrubs Boutique. Opposite is La Reneita Market and Restaurant (Pay your bills here/Paque sus quentas aqui) with “Spanish and American food,” Michelle’s Hair Salon, and Nails by Christina. Peniel Spanish Christian Church welcomes worshippers at the corner of Ennell and W. Sixth.
Across the intersection where Aiken Avenue angles in I saw the red, yellow, and green African continent logo of Auntie Rosie’s Cultural Market (African and West Indian foods, clothes, and jewelry.) The neighborhood branch of Eastern Bank fills a silver cube between these small businesses and others lined along Lakeview Avenue. In the distance stands A. G. (Ace) Hardware. Every neighborhood has these clusters of small and tiny businesses, most of them owned I assume by residents who depend on the local patrons for earnings with which they pay the rent or mortgage, buy supplies and merchandise, make goods to sell, provide services, hire workers, etc. The Great Recession is changing their lives day by day.
This being Jack Kerouac's birthday week, we walked northwest up Lakeview Ave. to make a pilgrimage to his birthplace at 9 Lupine Road, the small two-story brown house close to the corner of Orleans Street, which rises sharply and was a favorite sledding hill when my brothers were young. We lived for a while at 67 Orleans before my father used his G.I. benefits to buy a small ranch in the outer Navy Yard section of Dracut. Many of the French-Canadian Americans from St. Louis de France parish made the leap to suburbia in the 1950’s. Ste. Therese parish up Lakeview Ave. was an ethnic and religious overflow from St. Louis de France. The family names matched in both Sunday Mass bulletins.
St. Louis de France church (web photo courtesy of RichardHowe.com)
The top of Orleans offers a panoramic view of the city, especially when the trees are bare. Down the other side, we took Hildreth Street to the east and stopped at the old cemetery near Aiken Ave. The gate to the main section was open, so we looked around. The adjoining Hildreth family cemetery, which includes the imposing gray monument for Benjamin F. Butler (lawyer, industrialist, general, governor), was locked as usual. The gravestones are like fading photographs. The earliest one I saw was 1810 or so. Many of the names are venerable names from Dracut, which was settled in the mid-1600s and incorporated in 1702. Coburn. Fox. There was an area of Peabody graves, not a name I associate with Greater Lowell. A handful show up in the phonebook. Several markers were broken, but the cemetery was in good shape for its age.
We moved on and took a right that brought us to Homestead Road, which has a few distinctive compact houses that remind me of the small Victorians around a park in, I think, Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. These small houses in Centralville are architectural curiosities as worker housing. We wound our way down Bunker Hill Street with its neat houses in a row and on past the shuttered St. Louis de France church. My companion lamented the loss of the imposing social edifices of such churches whose activities once stabilized and pumped energy into neighborhoods like this one. Today’s Boston Globe article about the decreasing number of Catholics in Massachusetts underscores the changes.
We moved deeper into the side streets and byways of lower Centralville, but that’s for another report. In ninety minutes, we covered a broad patch of a neighborhood that is in transition, a place remaking itself house by home, street by block. If every picture tells a story, in the words of the Rod Stewart song, then every window frames a drama. I think about that when I pass the buildings, each a container packed with history.
3-9-09
9.
Watching the Canalway
We had a pure blue near-spring morning for a Sunday walk that loosely traced the rough cut of a stretch of canal walkway along the mid-section of the Pawtucket Canal. My walking-partner this morning has expert knowledge of the Canalway, the official name of the system of canal-side paths that crisscross the city. We met on Jackson Street and traversed the Hamilton Canal District, where construction may start by early summer. There’s a terrific, mini-industrial canyon vista up the Hamilton Canal with two remaining suspended walkways over the water. The area was quiet at 8 a.m., with the Charter School not in session and the upper-story resident getting a slow start on Sunday. Photographer Jim Higgins calls this area the “last frontier” of Lowell’s mill-scape. Once redevelopment begins, changes will come fast. Thankfully, the plan calls for lots of preservation and adaptive reuse—and even the protection of some of the factory ruins as architectural evidence of the scale of production once seen in this part of the city. These are the early mills: Hamilton Mfg. Co. (1825), Appleton Co. (1828).
We walked over the Lord Overpass and crossed the invisible line between the Acre and the Lower Highlands. The sidewalk overlooks a subterranean section of Middlesex Street that you have to be looking for not to miss. Of note is the Nobis (sustainable) Engineering building, an historic rehab of the former Davis & Sargent Lumber Co.—this is being certified by the U.S. Green Bldg. Council as a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) project and may be the first LEED project in Lowell. Around the back there is a peculiar chimney, and the side closest to the Boys and Girls Club is clad in corrugated metal that complements the cleaned-up brick and stone exterior of the original structure. The property backs up to what will be the Canalway path. Birds sang loudly in the trees. Next door is Kenny’s Cleaners (leather and suede service center) in a brick building with weathered green window bays that jut out and a stone archway above the door. Behind the Boys and Girls Club back lot is a section of jungle-thick brush so dense it makes a wall of twisted thickets and branches. I don't know what is growing there but it could hide any kind of wildlife.
We popped out around the side of the Club, opposite Palin Plaza with its Asian angles and busy business cluster (Angkor Wat Realty, New Palin Jewelry, White Rose Restaurant, H & R Block, etc.). Clemente Park was unusually deserted—it has to be one of the most active parks in the city. Basketball, skateboarding, volleyball, swings. The California poet Tom Clark wrote two memorable poems about the baseball legend Roberto Clemente. One short one goes: “won’t forget/his nervous/habit of/rearing his/head back/on his neck/like a/proud horse.” Another one is about Clemente’s death in a plane crash at sea (near the so-called Bermuda Triangle) while on his way to deliver disaster relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua in 1972. The poem is called “The Great One” and concludes: “No matter how many times/Manny Sanguillen/dove for your body/the sun kept going down/on his inability to find it//I just hope those Martians realize/they are claiming the rights to/far and away the greatest right fielder/of all time.”
At this point, the Pawtucket Canal makes a broad curve around Western Avenue on the other side. In the early days of the National Park, tourists in the canal boats swinging up this way would often get waves from the workers in the Joan Fabrics plant when the windows were open in the summer.
Past the park we slid down a side street (Saunders) that dead-ends at the canal, where there's a big old taxi barn for yellow cabs, and proceeded down Payne, where you begin to think that Lowell is the auto-body-repair-shop capital of the northeast. We've got Le’s and Vo’s and M & R and James Trinity bunched up. At the corner is School Street Light Truck Parts, a compact operation. Cabs and back ends are stacked three high just like the shelves of boats at Hampton Beach marina. There's a green canopy over a row of tires. We noticed a funny juxtaposition of businesses in the building—upstairs are a chiropractor and a sign about accident treatment. We crossed the Korean War Veterans (School St.) Bridge and passed through the National Grid complex behind the Stoklosa School. When I was a kid, my father would drive our family over the previous School Street bridge late on Sunday afternoons to get fresh, warm donuts from Eat-a-Donut farther down on School, and we'd eat them in the car. I liked the marshmallow. I also remember the huge gas tanks right there on School Street. I can’t remember if there were two or three those reddish-brown behemoths, which seemed a little ominous.
We wound our way back up Willie and Franklin streets, where, on Franklin I'm pretty sure, there are two remarkable small stone houses on either side of a wooden house with a strange roof detail that reads “1902.” From there we picked our way back to the recently completed section of the Canalway along the Western Canal at Suffolk Street, behind the American Textile History Museum, and then crossed Dutton to the Swamp Locks area and back to our starting point. The ice had not completely given up its hold on the canals, and we were surprised to see a beat-up blue rowboat trapped in the lower part of the Merrimack Canal. How did it get in there?
3-15-09
10.
Bangkok Market
Last Saturday, I stopped at the Bangkok Market on the corner of Chelmsford and Sheldon streets. It was a little early in the season for their impressive outdoor produce display, a mini-Haymarket in the Highlands, but there were lots of Asian vegetables whose names I don't know, along with cartons of grapefruits shining like yellow softballs and trays of green grapes and limes (3/$1.00).
To the right of the entrance on the Sheldon St. side, the store wall serves as a community bulletin board. Two colorful posters promoted music events on March 21, each one with text in English and Khmer. One poster featured the Shaolin Band and Minnesotan singer Rotana, a beautiful young woman, and a clean-cut young pop music “Super Star from Cambodia, Sen Ranuth. Presented by SAVA, the event took place at Sompao Meas at 450 Chelmsford St. (tickets $20 or $25 at the door). Also performing last Saturday were “two sexy stars from Seattle” at the Pailin Restaurant, 6 Branch St, plus the six alluring members of the H2O Band (tickets $20, food included). A third poster advertised a Khmer New Year party on Saturday, April 11, at the Lowell Elks Lodge, 40 Old Ferry Road. This is a “Charity Fundraiser for Angkor Hospital for Children” (tickets $15 or $20 at the door). The dress code: “Proper attire or your best Khmer outfit.” Other notices or announcements taped on the wall ranged from census information and tax preparation services to apartments available and help wanted in a nails shop.
Customers streamed into the store all the while I was there, filling their plastic baskets with fruits, vegetables, meats, and other groceries. I bought scallions, cilantro, pickling cucumbers, and green grapes. I was reminded of my grandfather’s market in Little Canada and what Saturday mornings must have been like in that ethnic enclave years ago—the special foods and local talk that come with such places. These stores are information clearinghouses, too. It’s the same at the Indian grocery next to University Music off Middlesex Street. It’s Basmati rice and Bollywood film DVDs. In Little Canada in the 1920s, it would have been tourtières (meat pies) and L’Étoile with the news in French.
3-24-09
11.
Hale-Howard Neighbors
Hood’s Sarsaparilla
Comfort Furniture
NMTW
LRTA
Celestica
Viewpoint
The Glory Buddhist Temple
Buddy Elston Plumbing & Heating Supply
Clear Channel
Sunoco
Bangkok Market
Buck’s Bar & Grill
Flanagan Square
Bridal by Bopha
MA-COM Technology Solutions
119 Gallery, Where Art Meets Innovation
Tepthida Khmer Cuisine
Monro Muffler Brake & Service
7=Eleven
Palin Dental
Culligan Water Conditioning
Morning Star Travel
3-25-09
12.
Batman on Highland Street
A movie convoy for the boxing film The Fighter took over the entire front lot of the Rogers School on Highland Street across the street from where I live. The congregation of trailers, trucks, and assorted vehicles looks like a carnival round-up on Regatta Field in Pawtucketville across the river. Security cars buzzed around the long school driveway all day. Two cranes at the courthouse a block away held up dark screens, which from Twitter reports I learned were raised to keep the sun from blasting in the south-facing windows upstairs where scenes were being shot.
On Elm Street earlier a few residents sat on their steps, away from the stifling air inside. I asked one man if he'd seen any movie stars. He said, “I wasn’t home to look—I was working all day.”
At the office today a colleague I’ve known since high school said he can’t believe Hollywood is making a movie based on the experiences of the Lowell boxers. He said they couldn't put the real story on film.
Milling around the court parking area were people from the film crew, the ones whose names scroll up for minutes after the end of the film: drivers, caterers, sound guys and gals, and technicians in motion-picture craft unions.
One man labored up the sidewalk with a pile of bottled-water cases on a hand-truck. The water man is part of the team, alongside the screenwriter, personal assistants, grips, deputy cinematographer, and the woman rolling the wardrobe rack across Gorham Street. The water-guy.
In the ExtraMart gas station-and-convenience store nearby one of the clerks told me firefighters came in to get bottles of water during last week’s house fire on Auburn Street, alongside the store, and at the height of the fire a firefighter hustled down the street with a case of bottled water. There are now two blackened buildings close together on Auburn.
The water-guy for the movie. He pushed the hand-truck up the sidewalk from Linden Street to Elm Street, where he stopped to light a cigarette and take a few drags before pushing the hand-truck into the parking lot toward the tent-covered food station.
There wasn’t anything more to see, so I walked home and turned on the TV. Surfing through the channels I caught a glimpse of Mark Wahlberg making a guest appearance on the latest episode of the HBO series Entourage about a young and cocky Hollywood foursome, which he produces, and then in the movie channels came upon the Western 3:10 to Yuma, starring Christian Bale—the two actors who today ate lunch across the street in one of the catering stations at the Rogers School. Batman was in the gym.
4-12-09
13.
Scenes from a Redevelopment Zone
This morning I went walking and looking in the area once referred to as “Uptown,” but which has been recast by the city planners as the JAM (Jackson-Appleton-Middlesex) area, and the adjacent in-progress Hamilton Canal District.
1. From the high ground of the Lord Overpass near Durkin’s Carpeting and Interiors you see to the north the Textile Museum's white-suited astronaut reaching for a big ball of woolen yarn floating in space on that huge banner over Dutton Street. We ought to have that spaceman banner on every parking garage for a couple of months while the Museum rolls out its new permanent exhibition—Textile Revolution: An Exploration Through Space and Time. In a single image, the Museum pushed the mill story into the 21st century.
2. The rocking blue graffiti’d letters on Sun Electric in that subterranean area off shore of the Lord Overpass, the agitated letters on the fully painted side of the building set against a night cityscape backdrop. Electric Motors & Pumps. The left side of the mural done in peach, lavender, and greens, picking up the early spring colors, new-leafed trees, and weeds springing into shape. In the grassy path on the safe side of the guard rail the man-hole cover is in synch with the theme: “Lowell Electric Light Corporation.”
3. King St. Revere St. Garnet St. Middlesex St. Pearl St. Freddy’s Auto Repair, Domestic and Foreign (under new management—old sign). Ocean State Nails & Hair Salon and across the way the closed Best Buy Sea Foods (a connection?). The massive warehouse reminiscent of the former Curran-Morton behemoth on Bridge Street that was demolished to make way for Kerouac Park, an almost indestructible bunker of concrete and re-bar. U.S. Dry Cleaners. KWG PC, Computer Repairs & Sales. La Tijera de Oro Barbershop (spelling?) with its poster of artfully cut hair/shaved heads featuring tattoo-type designs, a real body-art shop. La Differencia Restaurant promises “The Best Caribbean Flavors.” The Law Offices of George P. Jeffreys. An iron front grate pulled down tight to the sidewalk. Court House Deli by the Livingstone family—door propped open. Two guys eating breakfast. Construction underway at Garcia-Brogans, the Mex-Celtic eatery “getting in on the ground floor” of the Early Garage.
4. Garrity’s Antiques (Always Buying Estates). Sailboat-cover sheet music of “Bobbin’ Up and Down” on a wooden table. An amateur painting of JFK in a blue polo shirt, holding sunglasses, looking at the ocean from his Cape Cod compound. A poster from the Metropolitan Opera’s 1981 production of Parade in NY. Framed Monet maritime scene print and a City of Medford Fire Department Certificate. Lamps. A wooden sled. Trunks and chairs. Mirrors and out-of-state plates and dishes and white figure skates. 1950s model cars. A gold metal troubadour, slightly damaged like a broken Aphrodite.
5. At the Lowell Transitional Living Center small clusters of people waking to the day, talking excitedly under the blooming dogwood trees. The sidewalk is a trail of pink petals. A Black man steps up and sweeps a blonde woman off her feet and into his arms with a loud “Good Morning,” and everyone laughs.
6. Ever notice that the WCAP radio sign is between two signs for Cappy’s Copper Kettle? WCAPPY?
7. Major's Pub. Loft 27. The Lowell Gallery. Ray Robinson's Sandwich Shoppe. Mr. Al sitting in a chair reading the paper when a Saturday morning customer steps in for a haircut. A block away at the Majestic Barbershop there's one guy in the chair and two young guys waiting. Washington Bank. Sim's Driving School. Electrical Distribution. The Club.
8. Garnick’s Music Center. Classic used album sleeves pinned up on the side wall: Songs by Ricky, The Buddy Holly Story, The Beatles Yesterday and Today, Orpheus Ascending, Glad All Over by the Dave Clark Five, Elvis’s Blue Hawaii, The Beatles’ Something New, and Surf City by Jan & Dean. In the 1960s, Record Lane on Central Street and Garnick’s on Middlesex were the hotspots for the latest music. Bins and bins of albums. Aisles of music in between Garnick’s television sets and phonograph consoles (hi-fi and stereo). What’s left is an echo of its heyday. There was a straight line to Garnick’s from J. C.’s Golden Oldies on WLLH radio and TV’s American Bandstand, Shindig, and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.
9. Romeo and Juliet Cafe. Allied Retail Systems, Specialists in Service, Sales, and Supplies since 1959. The closed Elliot’s Famous Hot Dogs stand. Cars and trucks nosed in against the Owl Diner, advertising Haddock and at least one job available. Favor Street and the Eliot Church (Could they sell hot dogs on Sundays and call them Eliot’s with one “l”?)
10. All the other scenes I missed.
5-9-09
14.
Garden District
Up and down the narrow hilly streets that run between the Concord River and Central Street the green of spring is taking form in young vegetable plants, fruit tree crowns, and flower leaves. Mehmed Ali is back in the city for a short break from his work with the State Department in Iraq, and we spent some time this morning perambulating a section of the neighborhood with many names: Chapel Hill, Back Central, Wamesit Hill, the Flats, the South End.
We checked on the progress of the grass from Father Grillo Park to Walter (Silva) Lemieux Park. We checked on the waters, from Hale Brook running swiftly through the mill cluster off Lawrence Street to the rain-fattened Concord just below Jollene Dubner Park. Two big ducks with colorful necks paddled around the bend. Ali said the Tigris River is not much wider than the Merrimack. We checked on the spiraling grapevine shoots in backyards and breezeways from New Street to North Street.
We bought cool water and imported chocolate from a Brazilian woman running a small market. She said, “The big companies are closing, but my store stays open.”
Ali spoke to residents whom he knew from his days as a letter carrier and working for a social service agency. We talked about the defiance and hopefulness and confidence and commitment that come with planting each seed and seedling, with trimming each vine and peach tree, with turning over the soil for another season of expected good outcomes.
We tried to notice all the handmade improvements, embellishments, and home-ly inventions that make a distinctive place—that give a particular area its special sense of place. Early in the morning people were doing yard work or cleaning the sidewalk outside their home or spraying potted plants with a hose. Regular customers bought fresh fish from the back of “John’s” fish truck. We walked down social club alley (Portuguese, Lithuanian, and the Pulaski—now closed), and then cut through on a tiny street behind the courthouse to get back to our starting point. Ali headed off to New Hampshire for an outing with family and friends.
5-16-09
15.
“‘I’ve Gone to Look for America’”: On Foot in a National City
In October 2009, the New England American Studies Association convened its annual meeting in Lowell. The three-day gathering included talks and panel discussions, as well as business meetings of the Association. I was invited to be part of a panel discussion on Friday, Oct. 16. Following is an excerpt from the essay I presented as part of the panel session.
New England American Studies Association Annual Meeting; “The Post-American City,” October 16-18, 2009; Lowell, Mass., Friday, Oct. 16, 10:30 a.m., Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Lowell National Historical Park; “Contemporary Urban Engagements”: A Panel Discussion with John Wooding and Paul Marion (UMass Lowell) and Peter Taylor (UMass Boston), moderated by Michael Millner (UMass Lowell)
In her book The Lure of the Local, cultural analyst Lucy Lippard writes: “The intersection of nature, culture, history, and ideology form the ground on which we stand—our land, our place, the local. The lure of the local is the pull of the place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation.”
Lowell keeps surprising me. Last month Lowell in the form of Lowell National Historical Park was selected to represent Massachusetts in a new 50-state series of 25 cent coins, quarters, to be issued by the U.S. mint over the next many years, four states per year. The Lowell quarter is due in 2019. Nonetheless, it’s a striking piece of news. In a public poll, Lowell National Historical Park came in second to Gloucester and its bronze Fisherman as the people’s choice to represent the state. Gloucester was disqualified by the U.S. mint because it does not have a federal historical site—national park, forest, or recreation area—which is required for the coin set. We’re 30 years into the national park in Lowell and some folks still don’t grasp that we are on the same list as Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Gettysburg, and the Statue of Liberty.
Lowell is an American icon. Any decent U.S. History textbook mentions Lowell. And because of the National Park the city has been elevated for easier viewing and examination. Since 1957, when Jack Kerouac exploded like his fireworks in the literary sky, Lowell has been pulled into public view by Kerouac’s trajectory—an arc across the U.S. and around the world, and across generations now.
Some people still say Lowell is the first “urban” national park, but that’s not true. For example, Boston National Historical Park (1974) and Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco (1972) pre-date Lowell, established in 1978. But Lowell is distinct in that in concept the whole city and its entire history (and pre-history) are the province of the Park, rather than specific heritage sites or open spaces. Although the federal government owns only five buildings in Lowell and is active in the larger Preservation District (roughly, Downtown and the canal system), the Park Service is expected to tell the whole story of the city as a microcosm of urbanization and industrialization. I sometimes describe it as a cube of economic, social, and cultural history bounded by the city’s geographic limits but unbounded in a sense at the bottom and top. At the bottom is the natural history that gives us the river that gives us the human settlement; at the top it’s open-ended: post-industrial, maybe post-urban, maybe post-American in the words of this gathering.
This is my place, and I’m more conscious of the National Park and city as a whole because of my work and writing. I keep looking for the “big” America that Lowell contains. I continue to be fascinated by the fact that this is my city and that it holds the place it does. And like a good practical New England ethnic Yankee, I can’t help thinking about what that means and what good it does and can do. The environmental magazine Orion this fall published a special feature about “walks” written by people from around the world. The editor says, “The walk is a universal narrative device for exploring a diverse sampling of cultures and places, ideas and environments . . . it features the movement of one or more persons on foot through a particular place and some manner of dialogue that unfolds either between characters or in the narrator’s own head.” I walk to try to understand the city.
Our long-ago neighbor Henry David Thoreau made much of his walking, but like a lot of other aspects of Thoreau his walking turns me off a little because he seems so intent on one-upping the next person. He boasts, “I have met but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had the genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who moved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land . . . .”
“There goes Hank again,” the neighbors might have said. “He thinks he’s smarter than us.” Thoreau wants to engage Nature with a capital N. I want to engage the urban organism in all its parts: natural, built, and human. Thoreau seems to want to go so far into Nature that he escapes society and ultimately achieves a cosmic blend with joy-flavored, atomized plasma. Is that his transcendence? He’s there, and not there. I don’t want to lose touch with everything in my peripheral vision. I don’t think my work here is done.
Lowell is an urban laboratory, and I’m doing things that I hope will help me understand what’s really going on and what this place has to offer its inhabitants and people beyond. I’ve been blogging this year in an experiment in community writing. Four main contributors to a local blog, RichardHowe.com, are trying to capture “history as it happens” in a project called Lowell 2009. I’ve posted several times after taking walks in the city. But I’ve been writing about walking almost since I began writing poems in the mid-1970s.
I had an unexpected response to one of my walks last April, when my wife, Rosemary Noon, and I led a guided walk around Lowell’s public sculpture collection. I hope you get to see a few of the ten pieces of contemporary sculpture around Downtown. One of our band of walkers was Greg Page, who writes a blog called The New Englander (appropriate for this annual meeting). He’s a civil affairs officer in the National Guard due to be deployed to Afghanistan next year. He lives downtown and embraces city life. He remarked on the impact the sculpture walk had made on him—allowing him to see things he’d missed, making “the too familiar visible,” as Archibald MacLeish said Robert Frost’s poetry did for us. And Greg connected the experience to his recent reading of Thomas Ricks’ book about the Iraq War, The Gamble, in which Ricks describes the shift in policy from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s strategy to Gen. David Petraeus’ approach in 2007, summed up like this: “If you want to get to know an area and its ‘human geography,’ you have to get out of your vehicle and you have to walk the streets.”
Greg titled his post that day, “Petraeus-Odierno Meets Marion-Noon.” When we met at the National Park Visitor Center for the walk, Greg wrote that “we were getting ready for a dismounted patrol on our all-weather personnel carriers—we were going on foot.” I look for America when I’m out on the Lowell streets. (I’ll read one of my “walking posts” from last February.)
In his song “America,” Paul Simon sings: “So we bought a pack of cigarettes,/And Mrs. Wagner’s pies,/And walked off to look for America.” It’s the way it has happened so many times before. Native peoples wore out footpaths in the Eastern woodlands. Jack Kerouac walked off to look for America before he got in a car. Thoreau “traveled widely in Concord,” on foot. The pioneering families often walked behind their wagons going west. Lowell millworkers walked or promenaded along the new canals on Sunday afternoons. Sustainability advocates now talk about walkability and Active-Living cities. A quick online search brought me to neighborhood walking sites in Chicago, Fort Wayne, Albuquerque, Rochester, Valparaiso, Brooklyn, Dayton, Omaha, New Orleans, and others. With a community organizer as President, the time seems right to find where we fit on foot, to “dismount” as the soldier Greg Page writes. Maybe the Post-American city is right underfoot all the time
10-16-09
16.
Murphy
I’m titling my latest walking report “Murphy” because in the Highlands this morning I saw several of the blue Murphy signs hanging around post-election, and Patrick Murphy was on the front page of the Sun this morning, along with councilors-elect Franky Descoteaux and Joe Mendonca. I don’t know what someone would call the area where I walked with my brother early this morning, maybe the “Middle” Highlands, as opposed to the Lower Highlands or Upper Highlands. It’s a neighborhood that I don’t know very well. We were in the area of Penniman Circle, the new Morey School (which looks suburban), and the back side of the Wilder Street Historic District with its many well-kept Victorian-style houses.
Even in a dense residential section like this one there are institutional presences tucked between houses, including Calvary Baptist Church, Montefiore Synagogue, St. George Greek Orthodox Church, Willow Manor Nursing Home, and the school mentioned above. All within a few blocks.
We stopped at the Glacier Oval, an oddity for monuments in the city. I had not seen it up close. It’s an ovoid section of ledge about twenty feet long and ten feet wide. At first, I thought a huge boulder had been sliced off, leaving a rugged layer of ancient rock. From Google, I got a passage from a publication of the Old Residents Historical Assoc., predecessor to the Lowell Historical Society of today, which says it’s a ledge behind the Highland Church “deeply furrowed” by the legendary “glacier.”
I was eager to walk this morning because of the mild weather on a November Sunday. Up and down the streets flowers bloomed, including lots of healthy-looking red, pink, and white roses. Some trees were leafless while others held onto their full golden crowns. A small grove of bamboo filled the corner of one yard; nearby was a large Chinese dog made of concrete. Christmas and Halloween decorations overlapped on one block. Part of the writing impulse is the urge to name things and describe experiences, and I was thinking of that when I kicked through leaves on the sidewalk. A writer-friend of mine says the colors are exceptional this year. I’ve been looking at the leaves up close and far away and trying to come up with words to paint the colors. From a distance, the leaves under the trees look like pencil shavings.
The neighborhood was waking up between 7:45 and 8:45 a.m. At the Donut Shack on Westford Street a man wearing pajama bottoms and a jacket walked out with a coffee and a small bag. Most of the political signs were gone. A black-and-pink Mercier sign leaned into the shrubs in one yard. You almost wouldn’t know from the streetscape there had been an election last Tuesday. Opara signs hung in windows of a few shops. Candidates and supporters had cleaned up quickly. I asked my brother to guess how many leaves were on the ground across the city. Millions, hundreds of millions? Billions and billions, as Carl Sagan says about stars? Could you count the leaves on one block and project the total number? It’s a lot of biomass.
11-08-09
17.
Two Hearts Café, Badfinger, & a Raspberry Lime Rickey
I hiked in the immediate neighborhood this afternoon, from the JAM district (Jackson-Appleton-Middlesex streets) to the edge of Back Central and back to the South Common Historic District. I’d been meaning to go to the Brazilian “bakery & eatery” on Appleton Street in the former New York Nails shop across from Store 24. The miniature brick building houses Two Hearts Café, which offers cakes, coffee, catering, specialty Brazilian pastries, and breads. I’m going back tomorrow morning to pick up a few fresh items to take to a breakfast with friends. Everything looks good. The place is open long hours—weekdays as early as 5:30 a.m.
My next stop was Garnick’s Music emporium at 54 Middlesex Street, which is practically an institution for its longevity. Owner Bob Garnick has watched the music industry rocket to the moon in the ‘60s, fall to Earth with the coming of the Internet, and now transform itself so that he is selling more albums on the ‘net these days than product out of the store. He says the young customers want the original vinyl recordings of The Beatles, Dylan, Rolling Stones, Hendrix, and other classic artists. The store today has bins and bins of compact discs (new and used) and albums of hundreds of artists. The place is like an archive of musical history. Thanks to Bob’s heavy ordering hand back in the day, he has a massive inventory of just what new consumers and collector-types want. Someone said if you stay in one place long enough the whole world comes to you.
I’ve been humming the 1970 hit “No Matter What” ever since Marc Cohn played his version of the song at Boarding House Park downtown a few weeks ago. I asked Bob what he had in stock for Badfinger CDs. In a minute he had in his hand two from the “new” section: No Dice (1970), which includes “No Matter What,” features on the cover the alluring fashion model Kathy, one name only, in silver tones gesturing come-hither; and Straight Up (1972), has the now golden oldies “Baby Blue” and “Day After Day.” George Harrison discovered Badfinger for Apple Records and produced several tracks on Straight Up, including “Day After Day,” on which he plays slide guitar. I would’ve preferred a “best of” collection that included Badfinger’s other giant bubblegum pop hit, “Come and Get It,” but Bob made me a nice offer for the two CDs, plus today is a sales-tax-free day.
At Danas’s Luncheonette, 62 Gorham Street, at the corner where Central, Gorham, Appleton, and Church streets converge, Peter Danas recently completed repairs to the front of the store caved in by a crashing car. I hadn’t seen Peter for a while and don’t stop in often enough, so I was glad to find the door still open after 5 p.m. He was wrapping up but insisted that I have one of the famous raspberry lime rickey drinks whose mixture he has perfected over the years. I was refreshed. Peter’s a writer, too. His poem about St. Peter’s Church, which stood up the street before being closed and then demolished by the bishop, is printed on a large poster on the back wall. Danas Fruit and Confectionery—the full name—sells sandwiches, homemade candies, and old-fashioned ice cream counter specials. Peter’s famous for the abundant fruit baskets that the family assembles and ships around the country. Piles of green apples, bananas, oranges, pears, and cookies, crackers, and cheese stuck in between. The building drips character, which was not missed by location scouts for the film School Ties in 1992. Scenes were shot in the store and the alley on the side with a cast of emerging stars: Brendan Fraser, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Amy Locane, Chris O’Donnell, and others. Familiar locals made it to the final cut as extras and glided over a red carpet for the hometown opening.
8-14-10
18.
Grand Street Peace Walk
Standing on the old Armory site on Westford Street just beyond the Lord Overpass with about sixty people at 2:00 p.m., I couldn’t help thinking that Armory Park was being used for another kind of conflict, even war in the broadest sense—a war against violence like the war against poverty championed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom we’ll be remembering and honoring in two weeks.
Taya Dixon Mullane of the Lower Highlands Neighborhood Group (LHNG) called everyone into a loose circle and said a few words, offering condolences to the families of Corinna Ouer, the young woman who was killed yesterday on Grand Street, and the other young people who were shot and wounded in an attack at a house party nearby. Captain Kevin Sullivan, commander of the district’s police activities, spoke about the senselessness of the shootings and the daily efforts of City police to keep the peace. He praised neighborhood leaders and encouraged everyone to increase their involvement in neighborhood issues. He noted the diversity of the group, people from all backgrounds and heritages, a good sign.
Mayor Jim Milinazzo offered sympathy to the families and friends of the victims on behalf of the residents of Lowell and his colleagues on the City Council. Greg Croteau of the United Teen Equality Center spoke briefly about UTEC’s effort to prevent violence and engage youth in positive ways. Walter and Marianne of 119 Gallery at the corner of Chelmsford Street and Grand stood up with their neighbors. I saw other familiar faces in the crowd.
Neighborhood leaders distributed strips of long wide purple ribbon for people to tie to utility poles and street posts up and down Grand Street, a symbol of respect and remembrance. A police car with whirling blue lights crawled ahead of the procession and stopped in front of the house where shots had been fired. Several young people who know the victims tied ribbons on the iron railings on both sides of the front stairs of the white duplex. A man wearing a white dust mask kept up his work, carrying plastic bags of something out of the basement of the house. People watched from porches and windows in homes up and down the street. When we passed the Bethel AME Church, everyone heard the live music inside. Somebody was playing drums. A light rain fell on the marchers, adding to the grim gray mood.
1-2-11
About the Author
Paul Marion (b. 1954) is the author of several collections of poetry, including Union River and Lockdown Letters & Other Poems, and editor of the early writing of Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood, which is also available in French and Italian editions. His book Mill Power tells the story of Lowell’s national park and the city’s modern comeback. His work has appeared in magazines, journals, and anthologies around the country and beyond. He lives in Amesbury, Mass., with his wife, Rosemary Noon.
BACK COVER
Paul Marion is the author of several collections of poetry, including Union River and Lockdown Letters & Other Poems, and editor of the early writing of Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood. His book Mill Power tells the story of Lowell’s national park and the city’s modern comeback. He lives in Amesbury, Mass., with his wife, Rosemary Noon.
He says, “Most of these prose sketches were written soon after I got home after my regular Sunday walks between 2009 and 2011 when my family lived on Highland Street near the train station in Lowell, Mass. Many fresh reports immediately appeared on the popular RichardHowe.com blog in Lowell. Sometimes I had companions, but usually I walked alone, carrying a notebook and pen. A few pieces in this collection, written earlier as free verse poems, are included to show that walking has long interested me.”
Loom Press
15 Atlantic View
Amesbury, MA 01913
ISBN 978-0-931507-37-3