Driving Directions for a Friend Visiting Lowell, Massachusetts – 9-14-10
Copyright: Paul E Bolduc
You can get to Lowell from Boston either by taking Route 3 from Route 128 or from
Interstate 93 in Boston. Details will follow soon. Here are some historic highlights about
that city with a “Mile of Mills along the Merrimack River”.
- A) Consider your main point of reference as Kearney Square, which is the commercial
center of the city. This is where Merrimack Street and Bridge Street come together.
Prescott Street also flows into this intersection.
- B) If you go along Bridge Street away from Kearney Square, you will pass several short
blocks of commercial buildings – three stories high – on your left. The large, redbrick
structure to your right is now a set of condos but was once part of a textile mill. To your
left, the U.S. Department of the Interior runs a museum with working, wooden-based
weaving machines and an excellent history of the men, women and children, who spent
60 to 80 hours per week (no paid vacations) to make this mechanical marvel possible.
- C) There is another museum of the Department of the Interior with theater presentations
and machinery within easy walking distance from the place described in B above. Also,
the boarding house quarters where young farmwomen from Vermont and Maine, the Mill
Girls, were housed are nearby and well worth seeing. They had their own periodical
called “The Lowell Offering” that described life for women working in the mills.
- D) Again from Kearney Square, going away from Bridge and Prescott Streets and up
Merrimack, you will pass Central St. on your left (another commercial avenue of local
retail importance) and proceed past the old “Bon Marche” and “Pollard’s Department
Store”. As you continue past Kirk Street (there is a worthwhile canal and locks station at
this location) you will be facing the magnificent, gray, granite edifice of governmental
importance to “our fair city”. This is City Hall and the Lowell Public Library – now called
the Pollard Memorial Library. Look for much historical material worthy of an expert’s
interest in this building.
- E) Merrimack Street continues to the left of this medieval castle past a few tasty
restaurants frequented by the working stiffs in the region. If you go directly to the left at
this point, you will find yourself in the Greek section of town dotted by two very
impressive golden dome churches of that orthodox religion. Lowell was and is an
authentic city of poor, hard-working immigrants looking to leave poverty and its
accompanying despair behind in the “Old Country”.
Going to my house and the Centralville neighborhood
- F) If you continue up Merrimack Street, you go past several short blocks of tenement
buildings marked by retail stores at street level and small tenements above. Soon, on
your right, you will encounter a second, Gothic, granite structure of European elegance.
This near-basilica was formerly a Franco-American church called Saint-Jean Baptiste. At
this intersection, you come upon the start of Aiken Street. This inauspicious street
continues, in a wending fashion, for a couple of miles crossing the Merrimack River at
the Ouellette Bridge (formerly, the Aiken St. Bridge). Here, you have reached a locale
worthy of special attention for anyone wishing to understand the lives of those thousands
of mill workers over the years. Before crossing the river, however, note on your right, the
massive, multi-story, redbrick, set of empty, decaying industrial buildings, a sprawling
albatross of granite, brick, splintered timber and mortar. This mighty colossus once was
famous nation-wide for its industrial productivity before owners found more lucrative,
business conditions (cheaper labor rates and lower taxes) in North and South Carolina.
Success in human enterprise is but a fleeting memory, it seems.
[Note to the reader:
this structure may have been mechanically morphed into another massive set of
condos since the author’s self exile from the city in the 1960s.]
- G) If you have ventured this far, you are about one mile away from my favorite, shabby
clapboard domicile at Ludlam and Dana – a most historic landmark hopefully to be
recognized worldwide after my untimely departure from this world of brief encounters.
- H) Again after crossing the Aiken St. Bridge, you stay on Aiken and cross the VFW
Highway AKA Route 110, I believe, and pass Lakeview Avenue. My Dad had four jobs
when I was a kid. One of them was working nights and on Sunday at the East End Taxi
stand on the right at Aiken and Lakeview. There is a popular barroom around the
corner. Often, you can inhale its powerful fumes simply by walking past the front door.
Excuse me; I digress into the realities of the 1950s.
- I) Next, you suddenly find yourself crossing West Sixth Street, AKA West 6
Street, anda driving challenge vexes your normally cool skills behind the wheel. There is a fork inthe road! Not a kitchen fork, you understand! Veer left a bit and don’t take the fork to theright. This second choice would be Lilly Avenue where, up the road, many of my newspaper customers lived. Stay on Aiken for one block and cross Dalton where
another fork suddenly appears. Lowell’s venerable street designers were certainly not of
the Cartesian school of urban design. To the right is Ludlam Street where you wish to
- Carefully veer right at this point.
- J) Ludlam St. was named in honor of one of the textile mill superintendents. Why? I have
no idea! It climbs gently toward Cumberland Road, which you cross after looking in both
directions, of course. As you continue up Ludlam, you first pass on your left the home of
one of my 8th grade, girl friends, Beatrice Guilbeault, who never realized the trance she
left me in. Then, again on the left facing the variety store across the street, there is a
two-story, clapboard house with a separate garage in the back. Two Greek families (in
the 1950s and 1960s, families were often designated by their ethnic background) lived
there when saber-tooth tigers roamed the environs. Sometimes, I stood and balanced
myself on their fence separating our two yards. Somehow, I got the impression they,
sometimes, thought I was a hemorrhoid or some other undesirable tumor-like growth.
These impressions are hard to put aside. Today, however, I better understand and,
even, appreciate their less than cheerful composure when they spotted my cousin
Richard and me approaching, with our usual, carefree abandon their well-kept Victorian
home with all its grassy terrain.
- K) If you go a little bit further, on your left you will encounter a multi-family house that
offers shelter to three, hopefully well deserving families, who probably see daily survival
as living proof of the vitality of the human spirit. You have, like an archaeologist working
the dank tombs of Egypt, discovered the crossing of Dana and Ludlam. You are there!
Do not be deceived, however. There are no historic markers or awesome statues to
greet you. There is nothing to brighten the local environment. What you see is what you
get – life in the Big City with all its joys, secrets and gritty disappointments, too.
- L) This end of Dana Street in the 1950s was a cobblestone, lumpy paradise for scruffy
neighborhood kids playing baseball in the days when cars were still quite unusual in our
daily life. Also, Dana St. was our secret avenue to excitement and real American history
– cemetery history, the very best kind! The back end of the historic Hildreth Street
Cemetery once faced Dana Street. Now, an apartment building covers the sacred,
mountainous terrain or playground of our youth. Philosophically speaking, in life, it
seems, that the crass and utilitarian replace the holy and the joyful as one generation
displaces another.
- M) This Hildreth Street Cemetery is quite famous with some of Lowell’s former
dignitaries now happily residing six feet under and within its New England manicured
gardens and foreboding, wrought iron fence and granite walls. As youngsters, all my
siblings and I delighted in successfully climbing over the treacherous, six-foot high, iron
mesh to enjoy our felonious forays in that forbidden territory. Of course, the very best
was roaming about the back portion of that bone-yard to spend a few, precious moments
with our personal, favorite, departed authority – the scurrilous remains of General
Benjamin Franklin Butler – the Union military man famous for giving Southern ladies,
during the last days of the Civil War, something concrete to fiercely dislike about his,
otherwise, charming personality. Apparently, these belles disliked being called
streetwalkers and, later, treated as just plain whores. This unfortunate
miscommunication between the brave general and the courtly ladies was never entirely
resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. It’s hard, even today, to find any Southern damsel to
say anything nice or remotely affectionate about that high-ranking, Union guy from
Lowell that we, Lowellians, still proudly admire. Apparently, in the latter part of the
1860s, he was unceremoniously referred to as “Beast Butler” by those same ladies, who
chose to ‘not forgive and forget’ the man’s all-too-human foibles and societal
shortcomings.
- N) More than once, I secretly entered those hallowed grounds to personally feel close to
history’s existential message buried in that earth. My sister, Denise, enjoyed the
General’s company also, it seems. Although she would never tell my Mom about this
indelicate rendezvous, in the warm months of the year, she liked to eat her peanut-butter
and jelly sandwich sitting on the General’s rather imposing granite slab tomb and
contemplate the meaning of life – the life of little girls in any case. My Mom, Claire, would
have been horrified thinking that the national hero’s germs and microbes might infect the
sandwich. Fortunately, it takes more than those residual germs from a notorious national
figure to discourage the eating habits of a cute and curious sister like Denise. I believe
that my other attractive and fun-seeking sister, Michelle, also reported similar exploits
but I don’t recall if brother Bob routinely broke the “No Entry” rules as we three did
regularly. I suspect that he did, however.
- O) There are many more places of interest to describe (Lakeview itself, Canney’s Ice
Cream Parlor, Richardson’s Park, the old Sun Building, the Masonic Lodge, the home of
Jack Kerouac, etc.) but you have a limited amount of time best reserved, I believe, for
other upper New England and Canadian ventures. We, self-professed Lowell historians,
cannot possibly compete with those other tempting attractions.
Take care,
Paul
