Mogan's solution: To help the people of the city, from all nationalities, recognize "they had a proud and positive background," to advertise Lowell as "a living exhibit of the process and consequences of the American industrial revolution." Much of Lowell's culutral-historical-ethnic revival is the handiwork of one committed man, educator Patrick Mogan, a charming Irishman who perceived that Lowellians were accepting negative judgements outisiders made about them and their city. (D-Mass.) is likely to approve in 1978.ĭistinguished old buildings in downtown Lowell are being protected, refurbished and recycled paving is being stripped off old cobblestone streets a pedestrian mall has been constructed.įinaly, in a city with ethnic groups - it has large numbers of Greek, of Irish, of French Canadians, with scatterings of 14 other nationality groups - the new mood is to celebrate ethnicity, not to deny it. They form the mainstay of a proposed National Cultural Park - "an industrial Williamsburg that still breaths" - which Congress, prodded by House Speaker Thomas P. The 5.6-mile network of stone-walled canals that lace the city and once earned Lowell the label of "the Venice of America," together with the gate-house and locks of the water system that powered the textile mills, and now being recognized as priceless assets. One international electronics firm has even moved its headquarters into the city. In contrast to the factory desertions Lowell suffered after the textile industry began its southward migration in the 1920s, the last 18 months have brought 30 industrial expansions. They're being recycled as apartment houses for the elderly, as museums, as sites for selected industries. The old textile mills, once despised as grimy relics, are now seen as the architectural gems they are. Lowell's comback formula is deceptively simple: to take each of its supposedly negative characteristics and turn them into assets. But with a little luck, it could provide a model for urban revival. There are still stumbling blocks on the road to recovery, and Lowell will surely never again be what it was in the decades before the Civil War: the premier industrial city of the United States. A rebirth of proportions rarely recorded in American history is building in this aged mill city.Ī town widely depicted a few years ago as a blighted remnant of the Industrial Revolution, plagued by outmigration and high unemployment, has quite suddenly turned a corner.
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