Corey Sciuto

Tanner Street Economic Development Plan

2012-01-07T11:21:00.001-05:00

Got an email about an interesting community workshop coming up in a few weeks:

The first Community Workshop for the Tanner Street District Economic Development Plan is scheduled for Monday, January 23, 2012 at 6:00PM at the LRTA Building - 100 Hale Street. Click here for the meeting flyer. All are welcome!!

More information here: http://www.lowellma.gov/depts/dpd/TannerStreet/TSEDP

The Tanner Street corridor is a great opportunity for Lowell to do some very interesting work; hope to see you there!

Lowell Cultural Resources Inventory

2011-12-23T11:33:00.000-05:00

A crosspost from the Lowell Historical Society blog at http://www.lowellhistoricalsociety.org/blog/2011/12/23/lowell-cultural-resources-inventory/:

From Lowell Historical Society board member and Director of UMass Lowell’s Center for Lowell History Martha Mayo:

The first batch of Lowell Cultural Inventory Reports of Buildings in Downtown Lowell [369] are available on the UML Digital Commons site. They can be viewed here. They can be viewed here –http://digitalscholarship.uml.edu/cri.

Please share this effort was part of an Mass Bureau of Library Council Grant for digital preservation. Please share with others interested in Lowell History through email, blogs, facebook, and other social media.

Update on Lowell's Master Planning Process

2011-12-14T00:19:00.001-05:00

I received the following email today from Allegra Williams, Lowell's Neighborhood Planner, today:

As a follow up to your participation in the Master Planning process this past Summer, we wanted to let you know that a Public Opinion Report (http://www.lowellma.gov/depts/dpd/master_plan/complete_masterplan/master-plan-update/reports) had been completed and was now available online. For those who are interested, the report provides an overview and analysis of the data that was collected through the telephone survey, visioning sessions, and online participatory planning tool. From here, you can also access the 2011 Existing Conditions Report, which provides a snapshot of Lowell today and highlights data trends over time.

For those who have not yet had a chance to view the award winning photographs from the Sustainability Snapshots Contest (http://www.lowellma.gov/depts/dpd/master_plan/complete_masterplan/master-plan-update/Sustainability_Snapshots), those are up on the website and will be showcased in the finalized Master Plan document.

Again, we truly appreciate your involvement throughout this planning process and we hope you will continue to work alongside us in shaping a vision for Lowell's future, as there will be opportunities to provide comment on a draft document in the coming months. We will continue to keep you apprised of our progress moving forward.

As always, feel free to be in touch with questions or concerns.

There are about 300 pages here total - I haven't finished reading over all of it myself, yet. I have finished reading the Public Opinion Report, and generally speaking, I didn't find any huge surprises. Some highlights from the Highlights section:

Slightly more than half of the survey participants (55%) rated Lowell highly as a place to live (8, 9 or 10 on a 10 point scale), and 75% rated Lowell a 7 or higher. Survey results in 2002 were nearly identical. On average, as the age of participants increased, so did the participants’ rating of the city. Caucasian and Latino residents rated the city more favorably than Africans, African-Americans, and Asians. Those earning between $30,000 and $74,999 rated the city better than residents with either lower or higher incomes.

Understandably, given the recent reductions in State and Federal aid and consequent cuts to local government operations, there has been an increased importance placed on maintaining city services, as noted by survey participants. However, the simultaneously high prioritization of city services and property tax reduction poses a challenge for Lowell at a time when municipal resources are diminishing, as it is difficult to deliver public services of a high caliber without sufficient tax revenue, particularly as costs of service delivery continue to increase.

The last point worries me a bit. Following last week's announcement in The Sun that the council voted to shift as much of the tax burden from the Residential to Business sector as state law allows, and in a city with a comparatively low tax rate, I do wonder how we are supposed to maintain services, attract businesses, and keep taxes low. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Do that many people really feel they're overtaxed and don't get what they pay for? This isn't simply about income, because households making over $100k a year were actually the most likely to complain property taxes were too high. These people would be paying considerably more in the suburbs...

Looking for writers and photographers for blog.culturehive.com

2011-12-13T10:58:00.002-05:00

Getting the word out for a friend at culturehive.com. I'm also adding blog.culturehive.com to my blogroll:

Are you a creative person looking for more publicity? If so,
recommend someone as a contributor to blog.culturehive.com. Are you a
supporter of the creative community? Then, contribute to
blog.culturehive.com.

culturehive.com is a site about bringing together creative people and
their supporters. That’s why culturehive.com has just launched
blog.culturehive.com - to do just that.

culturehive.com is looking to bring together writers and photographers
to contribute to blog.culturehive.com. Writers will contribute
articles about events in the Lowell/Boston area, profiles on
interesting people and other topics which relate to the cultural
scene. Photographers will contribute photos of events in the area,
take photos to support writers’ articles and photograph creative and
cultural scenes. Contributors can choose to cover a topic from a list
of suggested topics or feel free to submit content based on original
ideas.

Contributors of accepted articles or photos will be paid $5 per post
in which the content is used to cover expenses incurred while creating
the content.

If you or someone you know are interested in being a content
contributor, please email justin@culturehive.com.

WCAP and Salvation Army Radiothon

2011-12-09T00:24:00.001-05:00

Per Gerry at http://gerrynutterslowell.com/:

On this Saturday Morning, December 10th, WCAP will be holding a Radiothon to benefit the Salvation Army. If you would like to participate, please call 978-454-4980 to make a donation. LTC channel 8 will be broadcasting and live streaming the items available for people to call and make a bid. http://ltc.org/content/ltc-8.

Downtown fire - 1904

2011-12-05T19:37:00.001-05:00

Thanks for Lowell Firefighting and Michelle for linking to this excellent post on a fire at
the O’Donnell and Gilbride Department Store one January night over 100 years ago:

http://forgottennewengland.com/2011/12/04/the-grand-fires-of-1904-lowell-massachusetts-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-odonnell-and-gilbride-department-store/

It appears that Forgotten New England is doing a series of posts on fires here in Lowell.

Jevons Paradox

2011-12-03T00:20:00.001-05:00

I post with some frequency about Peak Oil, walkable neighborhoods, etc. However, I'm living in a contradiction because I drive a car that averages in the low 20 MPGs for fuel efficiency. I also drive a fairly typical 15,000 miles a year or so. Not exactly eco-friendly.

One point I like to bring up when justifying this to myself is the concept of the Jevons Paradox, or the Jevons Effect. Deferring to Wikipedia:

In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes Jevons effect) is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological improvements could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.

The idea is fairly simple: let's assume we can bring coal to the market for $1/lb. We can use that coal to make $2 worth of widgets. Now, let's say we can use that same amount of coal sold at the same price, through technological advancement, to produce $4 worth of widgets instead. Assuming the demand for the widgets is there at that price, we haven't actually used any less coal. In fact, profits are now way up. We might even want to buy even more coal for a higher cost (if we need so much it can no longer be sold as low as $1/lb) to make yet more widgets. On the other hand, maybe we start producing widgets for the discount market worth $1 per pound of coal, which would've been unprofitable with our older, inefficient system. We just created a whole new market segment that didn't exist before! Either way, we are using more coal than we used before the improvements, and we've enlarged the total size of the economy.

Of course, not everyone thinks this is sound economics and I would tend to agree that it's probably too simplistic to be a general law for a variety of reasons. It's still an interesting concept. To my original point about cars, you can argue that people will only drive a certain number of miles a year because of the cost of gas. In this case, I think it's fair to say that if fuel economy goes up, people will drive somewhat more. I don't think it's fair to say somebody changing to a more efficient car is going to strive to keep their gas budget the same by driving more. If it was that simple, we could mandate 1970s Cadillacs for all to control sprawl.

Downtown Summit Presentation

2011-11-23T01:31:00.001-05:00

Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling well during the Downtown Summit last week and missed most of the presentation and all of the breakout groups. However, the slides are available here:

http://www.lowell.org/Pages/DowntownSummit.aspx

Dick Howe wrote at a bit more length here:

http://www.richardhowe.com/2011/11/17/city-of-lowell-downtown-summit/

Neighborhood Innovation Grant Program

2011-11-15T22:20:00.001-05:00

What could your neighborhood do for itself with $1,500?

DPD is looking for grant applicants in neighborhoods that meet certain income criteria (and it looks like Downtown, where I live, does!). I'm going to give this some thought, seems like a great idea.

Lowell’s residents and neighborhoods are some of the city’s greatest assets. The Lowell Neighborhood Innovation Grant Program, administered by the Department of Planning and Development, provides small-scale funds of up to $1,500 per project to help resident and community leaders improve the quality of life in the places where they live and work.

Full details here:

http://www.lowellma.gov/depts/dpd/services/planning/neighborhoodinnovationgrant

Lowell wins "Leading by Example" award

2011-11-13T23:51:00.001-05:00

On a roll with posts tonight! That's ok I guess because I haven't posted much at all in the last month or two.

I came across this item while cleaning out my inbox and thought it was interesting:

The City of Lowell was one of four municipalities recognized by Governor Deval Patrick’s 5th Annual “Leading by Example Program” for successfully reducing energy use, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and taking other steps to improve overall environmental quality at public facilities at a ceremony at the State House on Wednesday.

Full article here:

http://lowellma.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/city-of-lowell-garners-recognition-for-leading-by-example/

Is This What Happened to Cities?

2011-11-13T21:58:00.001-05:00

Back in August in did a post on the historical populations of cities in Massachusetts. The data showed that after World War II, cities in the Commonwealth faced heavy declines in population as people moved to the new automobile suburbs. Last December I had done a few posts on the future - and past - of the "Gateway Cities" in the state. That is, Massachusetts' traditional manufacturing cities that still take in a large proportion of our immigrant population. The articles linked, in addition to discussing the effects of the automobile, also talked about public policy that has hurt our cities.

Tonight, I was reading up on Alaska as I have a friend who might be moving there soon. Anchorage contains 40% of the population of the state, which is the second most-concentrated population in America. What is number one? New York City. 42% of the people in New York State live in New York City. At one point, this number was over 50%! For comparison, Boston has never contained over 20% of Bay Staters, and today, contains under 10%.

In a democracy, and one where governments allocate funds and other resources based on what will get them the most votes, there must be political consequences to figures like these. It would stand that only in a state with a large urban population, are urban issues foremost in people's minds, and governments. While even New York City, (population eight million), had a few bad decades, losing the equivalent of the populations of eight Lowells just between 1970 and 1980 for example, its continued success stands in stark contrast to basically every other city in the Empire State and certainly against many cities in our state. There have been discussions for many, many years of splitting New York into two states for this reason. When 40% of your citizens care largely about what happens in one tiny area, how would you allocate resources? Add in the NYC commuter suburbs, and if I lived in very much struggling Buffalo, I'd feel I wasn't being heard, too.

How bad is the situation in Massachusetts? I made this graph off of the populations of all the cities in my August post, and took them as a percentage of the population of the entire state at the time. While this is clearly not *every* urban area in the state, and contains a few suburban areas that happen to be in incorporated cities as well, I would guess a more carefully constructed graph would look similar:

Click for a larger version

As you can see, from the first U.S. Government census up until 1890, urban population grew rapidly, especially as the Industrial Revolution got underway. I would guess streetcars were responsible for the modest drop from 1890 to 1930. The sharp decline really begins in 1950, and the automobile and related policies can be blamed there. Note the drop accelerated again in the past 10 years. Is this a sign of the current (horribly burst) housing bubble?

It gets worse: there is certainly a chicken-and-the-egg question about if people fled cities because suburbs were intrinsically much more attractive, or if broad policies and subsequent financial and communal disinvestment made cities bad enough to make suburbs more attractive. Either way, it's certainly a feedback loop at this point and has been for a long time.

Combine the snob-zoning regulations in many home-rule Massachusetts suburbs (that still like to think they're quaint, rural, New England towns) with the low education levels and financial resources our policies have concentrated in our urban municipalities, and the 25% of potential urban votes we still carry are worth even less than their gross numbers would imply. Don't forget: poorer, less educated people tend to vote less and contribute less to campaigns as well.

The end result is policies that continue to reinforce the patterns we've been seeing for the past 50+ years. In a period of energy uncertainty, an aging population, shrinking family sizes, growing financial disparities, etc, etc, etc, are we wise to continue to turn our backs on sustainable, denser, more integrated, lower-energy communities? Are our politicians failing to support cities because that's what is best for everyone in the long term and what people truly want, or ... is it all about a vicious cycle of votes and money?

This is clearly a very non-scientific post, but something to think about...

Downtown Summit this Wednesday

2011-11-13T18:33:00.001-05:00

This Wednesday, the city is hosting a Downtown Summit at the Auditorium from 8-10 AM this Wednesday, November 16th. I plan to go, but I need to get myself out of bed that early first!

The description of the event is:

Please join the city for the Downtown Summit. This will be an open discussion between city officials and downtown residents, business owners, employees, and commercial property owners. It is open to the general public.

The event is free, but registration is required in event. Go here to sign up, and see you there!

http://downtownsummit.eventbrite.com/

Press Release: City of Lowell, Partnership to End Homelessness

2011-10-26T22:39:00.000-04:00

Homelessness in Lowell is a serious and visible problem. The following press release is regarding a conference, the fifth in a series, that aims to address the challenges the homeless face.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Contact: Linda King

Title: Community Development Specialist

Phone: 978-674-4252

Email: lking@lowellma.gov

City of Lowell, Partnership to End Homelessness

Keys to Ending Homelessness ConferenceSeries - Conference 5: Criminal Justice Reentry Strategies

October 28, 2011 – Holiday Inn, Tewksbury, MA

Lowell, MA,October 28, 2011— The City of Lowell will holdthe fifth conference of its Keys to Ending Homeless Conference Serieson October 28, 2011 from 8:00 am to 2:00 pm at the Holiday Inn in Tewksbury, MA.

Conference 5: Criminal JusticeReentry Strategies is being held in partnership with theMiddlesex Sheriff’s Office, Lowell Police Department, University of Massachusetts Lowell, MassachusettsHousing and Shelter Alliance and the Paul and Phyllis Fireman Foundation. TheMA Department of Corrections and the Hampden, Norfolk and Suffolk County Sheriffs'Offices are also participating. PhilipMangano, President and CEO of the American Round Table to Abolish Homelessnessand the former executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council onHomelessness is the keynote speaker.

Background:

The City of Lowell'sKeysto Ending Homelessness Conference Series is a product of the City'sPartnership for Change Initiative to End Homelessness in 10 Years. Partners for the Series have includedUniversity of Massachusetts Lowell, U.S. Department of Housing and CommunityDevelopment, MA Departments of Housing and Community Development and PublicHealth, U.S. Social Security Administration, Massachusetts Housing and ShelterAlliance, MA Executive Office of Community Colleges, Paul and Phyllis FiremanFoundation and many others.

Its mission is to engage the community, partners, homeless housingand services managers and front-line staff in a discussion of innovativeprograms and key funding opportunities that may be available to addresshomelessness; provide overviews of comprehensive local and national strategies,and offer workshops and follow-up onsite training programs for local agencies onthe issues discussed at each of the 8 conferences.

Conferences in the Series include: Social Security, October 2009; Education, Employment & Business Incentives, March 2010; Housing,June 2010; Behavioral Health & Trauma Informed Care, October 2010;Criminal Justice October 28, 2011; Seniors, Veterans and Food Security (2012 TBD)

Saints to be acquired by LGH

2011-10-06T21:25:00.000-04:00

Saint's plan to be acquired by Steward is dead - they are now (again) looking at being bought by Lowell General Hospital.

This is great news from my point of view. Keeping Lowell institutions run locally is something we should work towards. If we are to remain a separate and proud entity from Boston or wherever, we need things like this to happen. In a day and age where healthcare is a big part of our economy, this is huge.

See Marie Sweeney's take for more, and the Lowell Sun from there:

http://www.richardhowe.com/2011/10/06/a-shocker-saints-medical-center-agrees-to-lowell-general-acquisition/

University Ave Bridge

2011-09-25T23:41:00.001-04:00

I've known for years that the University Ave Bridge is coming down. In fact, I wrote about it when I started this bloggy thing back in 2006. I also knew the replacement bridge would be built at the foot of Merrimack Street, taking a few buildings with it.

I didn't know that demolition happened yesterday. I'm a good week behind on the local news!

I learnt about that from Michelle, who also linked to an excellent article about the CMAC building that was one of two structures demolished for this.

As for the current bridge, I've photographed the underside of it in the past, and, well, we all know it is in really rough shape. To the point that it's not safe for cars anymore. Besides, the bizarre double-light intersection it creates at Pawtucket St to the jog at Merrimack Street (being that its original route down Moody St is now a dead end) is not good for cars. A direct connection to Merrimack Street, our main street, and becoming even more important now that UML owns the old St. Joseph's Hospital (now University Crossing) is desirable. Let's put a light at the foot of Fletcher Street - the most direct route to the interstates - while we're at it. With the current configuration, three lights for three T-intersections in a row would be plain crazy. But a T and a four-way? Let's do it!

This leaves one question: what to do with the old bridge? Many Lowellians want to save "Kerouac's Bridge" ... I don't. To understand why, we need to look at the preservation movement as a whole: The goal should be to preserve the character of an area, and preserve the history. Lowell, it has often been said, does pretty well for itself because it cares about local history. However, Lowell is a still-functioning city of over 100,000 residents - it is not a museum. History is made here every day. Things change. Would the loss of this fairly ordinary bridge, with a one paragraph tie to a writer, no matter how great he was, really, truly change the character of Lowell for the worse? Would that outweigh the potential gains we could have by not keeping two bridges there? Can the money we'd be spending to maintain both give us a better single bridge?

I feel that the Lowellian fear of demolition has far more to do with the way we've "renewed" our city in the past, be it individual buildings, or entire neighborhoods. It's been the exception rather than the rule that we've put up something as distinguished as what we tore down...never mind something that was truly an improvement. I read a great piece on the Greek Acre demolition today. Nobody looks kindly on that. Maybe if we hadn't torn down those old flats and there had been large, fatal fires...we'd feel differently. But still, what was built there instead wasn't just safer: it robbed a neighborhood of its feel and its character. Right idea...horrible execution. The city lost something quite tangible. Conversely, nobody would say the new Jeanne D'arc headquarters isn't an improvement over what was there before...that being the charred remnants of an ancient textile mill. And, in that case, we did save the historic turbine pits underneath the new building...like something excavated in ancient Rome.

I guess my overall rule is: if it's going to be a parking lot, or a boulevard, or some So Cal style suburban development...no. If there's a chance for us to improve the built environment in Lowell for future generations, at the expense of something that is no longer working for the modern city...let it go. There are even a few buildings right downtown that I wouldn't weep about if they were replaced with something truly better.

Keeping both bridges would create a very strange, massive-expanse-of-pavement intersection at the University end. Having both bridges would certainly prevent us from building any sort of park, or buildings to replace the ones we just tore down, where the old bridge was. It would also destroy the view from either bridge to the rapids below - because you'd now be looking at just another bridge a few feet away. A bridge that's not too visually captivating at that! Just look at what the temporary Tyngsboro Bridge has done to the feel of the paved-over remnants of Tyngsboro Center.

Instead, let's build something impressive, and built to last. This, after-all, is supposed to be the Textile Memorial Bridge. I've always said, if I do something truly awful in my life, name an overpass after me or something equally mundane. The current University Ave Bridge is frankly, quite dull. Especially given the amount of pedestrian traffic over it the University is generating, with more to come, we should make it a pleasant and informative walk. Where is the information on who or what it is a memorial to?!

We have a chance to maybe put aside a piece of the modular old bridge on dry land as some sort of monument to Kerouac if we so choose, or some other art installation purpose...or maybe put part of it over a brook or something. The underside of it is kinda cool. The new bridge could have an impressive superstructure and broad sidewalks and bike lanes on both sides. I'm thinking something like the beautiful lampposts on the French King Bridge and/or the interesting carvings on the Calvin Coolidge Bridge - both Massachusetts bridges from the Depression over the Connecticut River. We could have plaques at different lengths along it talking about the history of the University, that being the North Campus, as Lowell Textile Institute. We could talk about Pawtucketville, and Little Canada...and why French-Canadian Kerouac was there to see that man with the watermelon in the first place.

We can't - and shouldn't try - to save everything. Sometimes, doing so can get in the way of us moving forward.

Where do we go from here?

2011-09-22T20:34:00.001-04:00

Things are not OK in the world right now.

The economy is in shambles. Governments at all levels are cutting back services. Vast numbers of people are out of work, and industries are dying. Energy prices are rising; investments and retirements are going sour. Credit is hard to come by. The income gap is widening and the population is aging rapidly. The housing market collapse is causing people to lose their homes, or preventing them from selling, and speculative development is at a near-halt. Young people are graduating college - the price of which is rising far faster than any inflation we might be seeing - with crippling loan debt and poor job prospects. There are major concerns about the environment.

And these are national or even international problems. What does a small "Gateway City" like Lowell, where many people are socioeconomically quite vulnerable, do to keep moving forward?

I've been meeting up with quite a few people over the past few months, trading ideas and identifying problems here at home. How do these huge questions affect our small corner of the world? I've been asked a few times, "what is it I think we should do"?

Well...I don't know. Too open-ended; that's not how I think. I read a book, Being Geek, about a year ago, which is subtitled "The Software Developer's Career Handbook". While it's a trove of interesting anecdotes and all-around good ideas, one section stuck with me: Engineers love puzzles and games. They'll go after a challenge when they understand the rules - that is, when they can define a space around a problem. So, before I can offer any Big Ideas on how to keep the momentum here in Lowell going, I need to understand the problem. It's been said that cities are the most complex machines man builds, and I'd tend to agree.

So, let's break it down:

Good:

There has been a lot of momentum with residential and retail development downtown. Even today, new places to live and new retail/restaurant establishments are opening with reasonable regularity.
Today's youth is more environmentally conscious and interested in urban areas than at any time in decades.
We have a University and a Community College looking to expand, especially in directions that seem to be part of the "New Economy".
We have a huge chunk of the regional cultural institutions, and quite a few people who are part of the related (but larger than just arts) "Creative Economy".
Lowell's classical strength in well-connected, concerned, and engaged residents is still there. Our strong neighborhoods are reasonably stable.

Bad:

Demographically, we're in a position where economic challenges will be strongly felt. Foreclosure, unemployment, crime, etc are bigger concerns here than in many suburban communities.
Our educational system has a lot of room for improvement. Again, this is a demographic-based reality. However, a major reason for people to move to a community is the quality of the school system.
What is the New Economy, and what will it mean in a time of prolonged economic retraction? Lowell's traditional manufacturing base is still long gone. I would argue the service and retail industries are not good bets right now. Large, private industries in Lowell are not nearly as common as they once were.
We lose a lot of our best and brightest to the cultural and employment magnet that is Boston, or places outside of New England that often have a much lower cost of living.
Even after decades of investment and re-invigoration, we still have a stigma to overcome in the eyes of many.

Well, that's ten bullets. It'd be fairly trivial to come up with quite a few more or subdivide and elaborate on these. That doesn't answer the fundamental question: what does it mean and how do we act?

Tanner Street Urban Renewal

2011-09-13T22:42:00.002-04:00

The City Manager's blog put up a post about the planning process for Tanner Street today. This is a great opportunity to increase our share of the regional (automotive-based) economy while leaving much of the "old" Lowell intact:

http://lowellma.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/urban-renewal-next-stop-tanner-street/

Irene's Aftermath

2011-08-28T17:12:00.001-04:00

As I had mentioned the predictions were yesterday in my last post, Irene came through as a tropical storm and not a hurricane. A few trees are down around town, and my ceiling collapsed a bit from water damage due to a bad window seal. Power stayed on. All-in-all, more or less what I've been expecting to happen since yesterday. Here are some pictures of a tree down on Market Street. I had just been thinking, were these planted in the 1980s? How big were they then? Sad either way. Green is good. Shade is good.

2011-08-28

I watch almost no TV, so I didn't catch too many of the incessant discussions about this storm. I watched the weather maps online and read the direct National Weather Service bulletins. Facts and spin are different. Part of me, like many people, is a bit angry at the media for blowing this up so big. While it's pretty hard to over-prepare, I bet a lot of people are feeling kind of silly right now, hence the anger.

The other part of me says that although it was rapidly becoming clear this was not going to be the storm of the century, trees are down, power lines are down, water isn't running for people, and at least one person in Connecticut is dead. Is simply saying: "Bring your stuff inside, stay safe in your home, have food and water for your family for a day or so, and stay away from any downed lines if you must go out" scary enough to get your average American to not harm themselves? Considering people are dead in Virginia from deciding to go swimming...and it was a much larger storm down there...I'm not so sure. Here in New England, we know what to do about a Nor-Easter, we are much less used to hurricanes.

The other part I wonder about is how do you convey different messages to different people in an era of global media? I live in a massive brick building that survived the '38 hurricane, Carol, Gloria, and Bob. There is nothing nearby not made of brick to come flying through my windows. Irene was going to be a relative breeze no matter what (no pun intended), after the predictions changed through Friday and Saturday morning. If I lived in Rhode Island near the coast, or way up in the woods somewhere, I would've taken "Tropical Storm Warning" very, very differently.

As it stands, there was a Nor-Easter in April 2007 - the last time it rained sideways -which blew water in through my window seals. Therefore, I was prepared to handle that today. The Weather Channel isn't going to inform you about that stupid, localized risk, due to the construction of this building and the wind tunnel caused by the ones around it. On the other hand, if downtown Lowell is without electricity for more than a few hours and nobody can get in and out to somewhere that does have electricity...something really, really bad happened. I just don't have the same set of concerns that the media is screaming at us to have. Yet, people left cars parked under trees around here, and now they're crushed. You'll never get everybody to react appropriately.

Mainstream media aside, how has social media changed how we look at this? Does a few people freaking out - often appropriately - cause everybody to freak out - sometimes illogically? Do circulating half-truths online spur the mainstream media to quicken the drumbeat to continue whipping people into a frenzy? While it was interesting to watch - in real time - my friends up and down the Atlantic coast post how the storm was treating them (and in the age of smart phones that don't need electricity to post to Facebook, that's pretty incredible), it was also interesting to watch arguments begin over how people were reacting to the storm...and bizarrely, splitting down political lines.

Hurricane Irene

2011-08-25T02:56:00.001-04:00

We all know we're getting a hurricane this weekend. My first reaction was "what do I care, I live in a sturdy building with nothing nearby that could fall on me." Then, I remembered the stories of the Hurricane of '38, which killed hundreds of New Englanders.

While most deaths were in Rhode Island, nearly 100 died in Massachusetts. The Merrimack River at Lowell suffered one of its worst floods in history - worse than 2006 or 2007. The storm passed over on September 21st, with the Merrimack cresting on the 23rd. At the time however, something protected the center of the city (where I live) from the flooding: The Francis Gate.

According to http://www.nps.gov/lowe/historyculture/upload/JB%20Francis_%20Lowell%20Notes.pdf

Eighty-four years after the gate first plunged it was dropped again in the year 1936. The gate remained down in the canal for fourteen years before being raised again in 1950. During this time the gate protected the city during the flood of 1936 and the hurricane of 1938.

The gate is currently not down.

To be fair however, the '38 Hurricane was a Category 3 whereas Irene is supposed to be a 2. This is sounding a bit more like Hurricane Bob, which didn't even make the top 58 flood events for Lowell.

Letters of Note

2011-08-20T01:41:00.000-04:00

Back in June I decided to give a full page of text in longhand a go. Today, I stumbled upon a blog via Facebook that is composed of letters to and from famous people. It's really cool - check it out!

http://www.lettersofnote.com

Historical Populations of Massachusetts Cities

2011-08-19T23:43:00.000-04:00

I was discussing with someone recently the rankings in population of various cities in Massachusetts. This is fun for me. I recalled that a few years ago, when Lowell fell behind Cambridge for a bit, I had graphed the populations of the top 10 cities in the state, and a few other interesting ones (the data came from Wikipedia, which took it from the US Census). Having not kept the graph, I decided to recreate it. I actually needed two, because Massachusetts has a few different classes of city sizes and I don't know how to play with axes in Excel well enough to get them all on one graph. Besides, the second one is ridiculously crowded as it is:

The first graph is on a scale Boston can dominate. It was, at its peak, a magnitude larger than many of the other cities in the top 10, so it requires a separate scale. Starting at the first US Census in 1790, this graphs the population of Boston against Worcester and Springfield, then starting with its first appearance in the Census in 1830 (founded 1826), is Lowell.

Lowell spent from almost its founding until the Civil War as the second city in Massachusetts, but by a small margin. However, starting around 1870, the second wave of industrialization in Massachusetts, that tied to coal as an industrial fuel and industries outside of textiles, quickly eclipsed Lowell. In fact, Lowell ceased growing by 1920 and has had an essentially stagnant population ever since.

Worcester and Springfield - both physically large regional cities (Central and Western Massachusetts respectively) with diverse economies - were essentially lockstep in growth, although slowing in 1920, until after World War II. At that point, their populations drop a little, with Worcester's beginning to reverse the trend about 1980.

Boston hit a population stagnation around 1920 as well, followed by a dive after World War II and a resurgence in the 1980s.

The post World War II decline seen in the three largest cities is likely due to deindustrialization, urban strife, and the automobile. The resurgence in Worcester, Boston, and to an extent Lowell, is timed with the Massachusetts Miracle. Lowell's early stagnation is a clear byproduct of it being essentially a single-industry, company town. Had Lowell's borders contained only the built-on areas in 1920, and the introduction of the interstates hadn't made it convenient to other industries out of town, it would be a much smaller city today. This is probably true of Worcester and Springfield as well, whereas I would bet (but don't know for sure) that highly urbanized Boston didn't have any more land to allow suburbanization in.

Again, I apologize for how busy this graph is! It begins with Lowell, ranks the next largest cities in the top 10 (Cambridge, New Bedford, Brockton, Quincy, Lynn, Fall River), and then adds in Lawrence, Haverhill, Salem, Fitchburg, and Holyoke for some perspective.

Little Salem is included because until the dawn of the industrial era, Salem's maritime industry made it Massachusetts' second city. In fact, it was the second municipality in the state granted a city charter in 1835, about a decade after Boston, and mere months before Lowell's explosive growth granted it the third city charter in the state. However, while Salem was a boom town itself, the shallowness of its harbor reduced its rate of population growth early. While it eventually diversified its economy and continued growing, the same industrial slowdown that hit every other city in the state right before the depression froze its growth rate again. Its location probably saved it from deep decline.

Holyoke and Lawrence are the next logical grouping of cities here. Like Lowell, they are first-generation textile cities, beginning explosive growth rates shortly after their foundings around 1845. Their growth rates match Lowell until 1920, when they both experienced stagnation and deep decline after World War II, like the cities in graph one. There is a brighter spot for Lawrence, as part of that decline was reversed, again, around 1980, probably due to the same Massachusetts Miracle that saved the rest. Holyoke, much, much further from Boston than Lawrence, even with an abundance of open land Lawrence has never had, never recovered.

The third grouping is Fall River, New Bedford, and Lynn. All three are coastal cities with traditional maritime economies, especially ancient New Bedford. However, the strong textile economy after the Civil War and these cities' location on deep water, made coal-powered factories extremely attractive, after the absence of the rivers driving growth in the grouping above stopped being a retardant. Both New Bedford and Fall River passed Lowell in size by 1920 (being physically larger and more successful), but their distance from Boston (about as far as Worcester is), as we've seen repeatedly, could not reverse the post-war population declines. Lynn was not as unlucky: it actually very closely resembles Lawrence. This is sort of expected with its heavy industrial history, but for some reason, perhaps proximity to Boston, never quite was hit as hard. In fact, during the "dark" years for Lowell, Lynn actually had slightly more people.

Cambridge and Quincy are all very close to Boston and should be the next group. Being commuter suburbs of Boston well before the automobile, they are sort of an odd-man out grouping here, perhaps more resembling Newton and Somerville, which would be in the top 15 cities. Cambridge is very close to downtown Boston, and therefore was almost always a fairly large community. Mid 19th-century urban expansion and the streetcar made it urbanize quickly. The same post-war trends we saw in all cities is here as well. Quincy is a little further out, and its growth seems to have happened after 1900, with the same growth drivers as Cambridge, but on a smaller scale. It too saw a post-war slowdown.

Brockton and Haverhill form a group as they are both very physically large cities without good rivers for power, but are reasonably close to Boston. Both have history in the shoe-making industry, which held on longer than textiles (I believe this was Lynn as well...). Brockton, it is obvious is much closer to Boston, as after the standard 1920s slowdown, grew by an atypically large amount after World War II. In exchange, Haverhill's old history as being located on a navigable part of the Merrimack for early ships, was (hard to see at this scale) but a large town very early on, beginning its industrial growth around the Civil War, a few decades before Brockton.

That leaves Fitchburg. I actually expected Fitchburg to resemble Holyoke due to its distance from large cities and poor location in general, but instead we see late 19th-century industrial growth, and the typical stagnation without a drop. It is also geographically large. Perhaps the location isn't as bad as I'd like to think!

There are a couple of easy trends I've mentioned repeatedly: The oceanside cities grew first. Then the powerful river cities, then the coal-based cities. Growth stopped abruptly right around 1920, beating the Great Depression by 10 years (a relation would be nice). Nothing much good happened during the Depression or World War II. After World War II the dense industrial cities suffered tremendously, whereas the commutable-to-Boston group saw a resurgence with the Massachusetts Miracle. Of course, I'm basing all of this off of a single demographic trend. It would be interesting to get income and population age in here as well, but I'm not up for that.

Well, I hope that was fun!

The Oil Drum

2011-08-17T15:52:00.000-04:00

When researching my last post on the Bakken Formation, I pulled some information from The Oil Drum (http://www.theoildrum.com). According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oil_Drum),

The Oil Drum is a web-based, interactive energy, peak oil and sustainability think tank and community devoted to the discussion of energy issues and their impact on society.

It then goes on to say British band Radiohead are a fan, so why not follow it as well?

I've been reading off and on for a few years, and today's article, about the potential consequences of trying to run an economy based on endless growth in a finite world, was a good one: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8268. Check it out.

The Bakken Formation

2011-08-09T01:40:00.000-04:00

There was a letter to the editor to The Sun on Saturday that essentially reproduced a chain letter that has been going around for a few years, discussing how the US Government is working to leave us dependent on foreign oil when we are just sitting on trillions of barrels of oil. This isn't exactly true so I couldn't let it lay. However, since they really want letters to be under 250 words and mine hit 500, I'll post it here as well:

An August 6^th letter to the editor asked why, on the basis of an article in Forbes, the US is not exploiting oil in the Bakken Formation for $16 a barrel. Unfortunately, no such Forbes article exists – its origin is a chain letter (http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/bakken.asp). Like many email chains, this one is only partially true.

The Bakken and the Green River formations are real, and they hold an incredible amount of fossil fuel. The first factual error is that what we actually have in these places is not what you’d call oil, but oil shale. This is rock that will generate less than a barrel of oil per ton of rock. Like the Canadian Oil Sands, it is very difficult to extract and refine, and it is located in a remote area. It takes an incredible amount of water, infrastructure, and heat to produce. This heat must come from other non-renewables like natural gas. Furthermore, the 500 billion barrels cited is oil shale in place. This is different from technically recoverable oil (oil we can get at any cost) and oil that can be recovered at a reasonable price. According to a 2008 USGS report (http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911), fewer than 4 billion barrels of that oil is even technically recoverable.

Since the US uses 20 million barrels of oil each day, we would use all the oil in the Bakken in under a year, if we could produce it that fast. While the Green River formation is in fact orders of magnitude larger (800 billion barrels of recoverable oil, or 100 years’ worth), not even the most optimistic reports (http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2005/RAND_MG414.pdf) suggest that we could be covering even a quarter of our today’s energy demands from this source within 30 years, and not for less than $30/barrel, and likely more. Unlike the Bakken, no commercial exploration of these fields has taken place, so there are quite a few unknowns.

Essentially, shale oil is not a magic bullet. We have known about these oil formations for decades, and they weren’t considered economically worth looking at until now. The fact remains that oil is getting harder to find and refine every year as more of the “easy” oil runs dry. Yet, world oil demand, especially in China and India, keeps growing. Eventually, the cost of oil will become prohibitive and demand will reverse and begin to fall. This is Peak Oil, and it will take the world economy down with it as modern life depends on huge quantities of energy.
The real question should be not why aren’t we developing our domestic oil sources – because we should be and are – but what can we do as a nation to reduce our demand while still maintaining a high standard of living? In Europe, where gas prices are much higher than here, people are much more reliant on mass transit. Perhaps instead of driving a private electric car from Chelmsford to Cambridge for work, one should be able to take transit from Chelmsford to new commercial developments in Lowell, or mixed-use village centers in Chelmsford.

You Know You're From Lowell When...

2011-08-08T00:45:00.000-04:00

Over the past week or so, the changes in Facebook Groups has caused a flurry of activity in an old group "You Know You're From Lowell When..." There is a wonderful series of photos here, old postcards, etc. You might even recognize many of the photos from another site ;-) Check it out!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/242361685323/

Life at 3.5 MPH

2011-08-07T20:14:00.002-04:00

I did something I've wanted to do for a while on Saturday: I walked from my house in downtown Lowell to my family's house on the far end of Tyngsboro. Considering I've done the 20-mile Walk for Hunger a few times, this 10 mile "suburban hike" was a time sink without too clear of a purpose, but not a particularly challenging exercise physically. I had also considered walking to Lowell from Boston one day to mimic the path of Lowell's original Irish canal workers, but that'll have to wait...until likely never.

It took me about three hours and 15 minutes on a fairly good day weather wise, and I only stopped to sit down once for lunch (and another stop for coffee to go of course!) I figure then I actually walked for 2 hours and 45 minutes, or, I made a bit better than 3.5 MPH on average. Google's walking directions seem to estimate time based on a pace of 3 MPH, so, it is true: us New Englanders walk fast!

However, I did it, aside from "just because", because I wanted to look at a few things. Primarily, I wanted to see how safe the route was on foot, how bikeable it'd be (I just got a bike!), and how many of these places I'd never been on foot looked at 1/10 the normal speed. I also wanted to check out the time/space compression caused by the automobile: how far apart are things *really*?

Jump...

I only took a few pictures, but because my Google Pedometer came up with some completely crazy numbers for how far the walk was (15 miles, or 50% off...), and elevation gained and lost (I somehow went 150 feet below sea level and ended up at over 1,000 feet above, with a total elevation gained of a good mile! I'm blaming solar flares on the GPS failure), I'm going to use my photos and Google Maps as timestamps for the trip. I started about 10:30 and was done by 1:45.

End of hour 1: North Chelmsford, a Live Smart Community

Southwell Woolen Mill: From when companies cared enough about their communities to put their names in stone (literally).

I had read in the past that people used to walk from North Chelmsford into Lowell for movies, etc. It seems to be an often-forgotten fact that streetcars were not exactly affordable to many in the working class, or, in this case, adolescents and young adults. It took me an hour, including a stop at Dunks, to make the three miles from downtown to North Chelmsford. Vinal Square of course is over 3/4 of a mile beyond this. So, people were sinking more time than a movie actually plays for walking to and from the movies. Things you can do in an hour by car: Drive from Lowell to Portsmouth, NH. This stretch of road, around the Lowell line, presented me with the first missing sidewalk. However, the very wide shoulders made it a reasonably pleasant walk. It was also fairly flat and had good sight lines and reasonably-speeded traffic, so I bet it's an easy bike ride as well.

Welcome to Tyngsboro! You'll be back in Chelmsford shortly, don't worry. Then Tyngsboro, then Westford, then Chelmsford...

End of Hour 2: This is the overpass separating Wesford from Tyngsboro. It's actually more of a haunted pigeon dungeon. Of course, there are no signs along this road ever mentioning you are in Westford.

The second hour (another three miles) was a long walk from Vinal Square and into Tyngsboro's Flint's Corner. Here was the least pedestrian friendly part of my trip, and with a horrible excuse: There is no crosswalk across Middlesex Rd (3A) in Vinal Square, so I decided to walk up it a bit until I got to a cut-through I know over to Dunstable Road, which connects Vinal Square and Flint's Corner. 3A is a 40 MPH road with a decent concentration of businesses and little stores. I even passed a big condo community yard sale. There are no sidewalks (except a few appendages seemingly installed at random [I hate Letter of the Law construction]), no shoulder, and, in fact, there are often bushes growing out into the roadway. Since the proper way to walk on a street with no sidewalks is facing traffic, this means all of a sudden you are staring at a bush that's hiding cars. You need to step out further into the roadway to see around said bush...not smart. Additionally, all the concrete and few mature trees plus the high speed of traffic make this a very unpleasant place to be. This all makes this a bad place for bicycles as well, and it's as simple as a little maintenance on the Chelmsford Highway Department's part to clear out the brush and maybe plant a few trees. Then again, this is a state highway, so it's not Chelmsford's job to maintain it. Once I found my way back to Dunstable Road, except for what appeared to be poison ivy in some spots, this was a nice enough place to be on foot. Lower traffic counts at lower speeds, well shaded, good sight lines, etc. At the end of this section, I stopped at Flint's Corner Pizza for a sub and a Gatorade, and made the last 1/3 of the trip.

A Tyngsboro architectural landmark: The "I ♥" stone house. Corner of Westford Rd and Chestnut Street. Note the letters in the porch-thing on the left. The story is something about it never being finished, what it was supposed to say. In fact, it is said the whole building should've been stone, but the money ran out, and the wooden house we have today was built instead.

From here, continuing up Westford Road, I passed the last traffic light on the trip at the intersection of Swan Rd. This intersection was reconfigured within the last ten years or so with the construction of the new Tyngsboro Elementary School. If it hadn't been for this improvement, sidewalks, and a lighted crosswalk, this intersection might've been one of the worst parts of the trip. Instead, things were pretty easy up through where the sidewalk ends. From here on in, up Chestnut Road and onto Scribner, the road narrows considerably, large trees, cliffs, and old stone walls are right against the road, and sight lines fall to a few seconds at best at 30 MPH (posted, never mind what people actually do!). Fortunately, the majority of the traffic was going the same direction as me, so, the opposite side of the road. There are certainly places here where I was praying a car wouldn't come flying around a corner, because I'd have no way to get out of the road. Tyngsboro should do something about this. At the same time, it amazed me how far you could go between seeing cars, whereas they seem to be everywhere when driving. Part of that, again, was probably just luck with the time of the day.

It was at this last mile or two that I started to get tired and decided that this wouldn't be a pleasant bike ride. Aside from the sight line issues, lack of a shoulder, and the poor condition of the edges of the road which could easily throw you from a bike, something occurred to me that I never thought about before: Lowell is at 30 meters above sea level. Vinal Square is at about 40 meters. Flint's Corner, at 50. That's 20 meters, or about 80 feet, elevation gained over six and a half miles or so. Another 10 meters is gained in the next mile by the beginning of Chestnut road, and another 50(!) in the next mile and a half over the length of Chestnut road and up Scribner to near the intersection of Groton Rd where I turned off. No wonder it was such a tiring stretch!

Suddenly, it was clear to me why there were so few old houses out here, and why the automobile, to which these changes in elevation are insignificant, was required to populate this part of town. The old Connell farmhouse on Groton Road is the only "old" house I can think of after the farmhouse on Westford Road about halfway between Swan and Chestnut. Biking up these grades would be slow-going and dangerous with cars unable to see you around corners. Trying to hump this road 100 years ago, before it was paved, with something to bring to market or something to bring home would've been incredibly daunting. In the winter, it'd probably be nearly impossible, even with a horse and cart.

Kind of makes you understand why they say before the Model T, few people ever traveled more than five miles from home. As I finished up the trip, it occurred to me that I had walked many times from downtown all the way out to Middlesex Village, and I had been in Vinal Square on foot before as well. However, until I got to within a mile of my family's house, I had never set foot on the roads. They aren't exactly pleasant or safe to walk on much of the day, and there is also nowhere to walk to unless it is for pleasure. The entire western part of Tyngsboro is given over to private houses, save a fire station. I guess in the end, Tyngsboro should zone for a small corner store and maybe a small playground somewhere along Scribner Road. People need to get out of their houses and use their legs, which means they need attractive and safe roads to walk along and destinations to walk to. It's nice to be out there, see all the greenery, the well-maintained colonial-revivals, the people doing yard work, etc. It shouldn't involve being afraid of cars.

All in all, it was good physical exercise and a decent mental exercise, but I won't be doing that again! Just think: On a modern interstate, I could drive all the way from Lowell to Albany, NY in the time it took to walk to just shy of Groton, and I could do the drive in much more harrowing weather conditions, and be a lot less tired at the end!

ComeToLowell.com

2011-08-05T22:31:00.000-04:00

George DeLuca used to have a blog at ComeToLowell.com which has since been cancelled. However, it remains an excellent source for information otherwise. Recently, I caught up on his WCAP segments "The Lowell Connection", which are, fantastically, available on his site at http://www.cometolowell.com/980WCAP.htm. I haven't listened to WCAP since my dad co-hosted The Computer Report back in the 1990s!

One great bit of information I learnt from these segments is that the train from New Hampshire to Lowell is planned to continue to Boston, express. It's possible that that ride might take what, 30 minutes?

Update 9/13: The blog is back! http://cometolowell.blogspot.com/

Master Plan Update Vision Sessions and a crazy idea...

2011-07-27T21:20:00.001-04:00

First off, if you've been missing the Vision Sessions at the Senior Center, you're missing out on a great opportunity to help shape Lowell's Master Plan. Details are here: (http://www.lowellma.gov/depts/dpd/master_plan/complete_masterplan/master-plan-update/Meetings). Don't miss that the past presentations are posted, along with images of how the community has voted!

So, the last session was on economic development. I personally feel nothing is more important to a city's very existence than its economy, as I discussed here (http://coreysciuto.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-is-city.html) and here (http://coreysciuto.blogspot.com/2010/04/smart-growth.html) and here (http://coreysciuto.blogspot.com/2010/10/lowell-downtown-evolution-plan-full.html). Lowell, as I mentioned in those past posts, is often blessed and cursed by its proximity to Boston. While it provides a regional economy, it robs us of many of our jobs. While it makes us an attractive cheaper alternative to Boston while still being city living, it robs us of many of our younger best-and-brightest. Like many city issues, feedback loops abound. People want to live and work where the action is...which causes the action to be there.

I've been thinking: what can we do to actively improve our economic situation, when so many issues seem to be regional and national in scope? I seem to end up on the unpopular side of this one a lot, but as I mentioned in the Downtown Evolution Plan post above (and at the transit Vision Session), I think our parking rate structures, especially on weekends when perversely the streets are full and the garages are empty, are completely crazy and outside of the norm for similar sized cities in the region. But that's probably small potatoes.

As one of those Peak Oil people (I discussed this here: http://coreysciuto.blogspot.com/2010/11/long-emergency.html), I believe that sustainability - the underlying topic of the Vision Sessions, is intimately tied to, amongst other things, the ability to live with less oil. One great way to do this is to improve mass transit. Even without the sustainability angle, the current reality is gas prices are rising, and many demographic groups, young and old, are more into mass transit than at any time in the past 50 years for various reasons.

I've written before that I'm no fan of the LRTA's service, and I'm just going to let that lay. It's too complex to talk about now and pretty hopeless. I'm more interested in the train. It's often mentioned that the MBTA transit hub is a great asset to Lowell; however, it's undeniable that the station's location well outside of downtown Lowell, away from Merrimack Street, away from the Tsongas Center and the ballpark, is holding us back. Many other cities, like Haverhill, do quite well having their station right downtown. Lowell is discussing an expensive trolley system through the Hamilton Canal District to help alleviate this, as well as re-invigorated plans to help out the Hale/Howard and especially the Tanner Street areas by rebuilding around Transit-Oriented Development (as they basically abut the train station).

To this, people often say, "can Lowell really handle that much pull away from downtown?" I think it's a great question. We need history here. Why is Lowell's main station so far out? Well, I can't find a picture, but Lowell's original station was on the corner of Dutton and Merrimack Streets, dead downtown Lowell. Today, there is only that brick archway that echoes the old building on that site. I can only imagine that as one of the first locomotive lines in America, that the fact that a train that stopped at that depot could be no longer than the distance from Merrimack to Market Street without closing a major street down wasn't an issue. It didn't take long for the "main" station to locate essentially to where the current station is, while the older station did remain open. Also, a competing line with a long barn opened to Central Street, in the building that is slated to be MCC's dance studio. My crazy suggestion is bring the train back to Merrimack Street.

Here is a picture of the train in Wilmington:

And here is that same train superimposed in front of Lowell High School, along the existing old tracks:

Totally fits.

This wouldn't be the only place on the line where gates have to go down across roads temporarily to let a train pass, we'd live. Now, obviously the high school isn't the best location for a train station. However, some people have suggested that the massive Lowell High School be split in two. While I don't think it's the best idea, maybe with something like this added in, it'd become more palatable. The new building to the school would make a great office building. The old building could be turned into almost an indoor mall with an atrium and small shops as well as offices. Maybe residential goes in somewhere as well. There already is a parking garage right there. It's right next to the arena and right on Merrimack Street. Now, ideally, we'd keep the old station open as well because it's far more convenient for car commuters. Maybe only every other train comes all the way downtown or something, especially if the line ever gets extended to Nashua as downtown is no longer "on the way". Maybe in that case, the downtown station gets built in the parking lot of the office building next door and the high school stays put, I don't know.

Just an overly expensive idea that probably makes no real sense. I'd like it, though.

Also, if you missed the news, the little post office on the corner of Central and Market may be closing due to lack of business and the Postal Service's budgetary issues.

Appleton Mill, July 2011

2011-07-25T23:01:00.001-04:00

People are really starting to move into the Appleton Mill project now. It looks like much of the major work is done, so here are a few new pictures, then all the series I've taken:

Rest:

Appleton Mills - July 2011

And the whole series from

to:

Appleton Mill, November '09-January '10

Appleton Mill, February-March '10

Appleton Mill, April-August 2010

Appleton Mill, September 2010 - December 2010

Appleton Mill, Jan-May 2011

I have some even older ones buried on my old site, for example at http://home.comcast.net/~corey.sciuto/lowell2.htm.

Google+

2011-07-15T01:12:00.004-04:00

So, earlier in the week I got my invitation to Google+. Always a fan of the mantra "don't fix what isn't broken" I was far from convinced that it had any chance to make any real inroads against Facebook. My impressions so far:

Good

Integration with existing Google technologies.

I already use PicasaWeb because I use Blogger. I use Blogger and GChat because I use Gmail. It's easy to see integration with Google Calendar and Blogger itself in the pipeline.
Google+ also integrates iGoogle's +1 search functionality, but I don't find it all that interesting.
The iGoogle user bar at the top of the page now directly lists your Google+ updates, etc and has a "share" button that feels half-implemented as you can paste a link into it, but not directly click on a link and share it.
Google Maps is at least somewhat integrated as when you upload a photo via an Android, it tags it with your current location. However, this too, is only half-implemented. If you leave your Android GPS off (as many do since it's a huge battery drain) the photo is tagged based off of cell-tower triangulation. Trying this out tonight, I found that standing on the East Campus end of the University Ave bridge, I was assumed to be somewhere I had never heard of in Dracut. Good rule of thumb: wrong information is worse than no information!

Easier security. The lack of a "Wall" allows you to control exactly what people who can see your profile see. The straightforward "Circles" friend-grouping concept makes it easy to limit who gets to see what. This is a must for public, semi-public, teenage, and alcoholic social networking users.
No ads. Yet. Very little requests for personal information for your profile.
New.

It's generating buzz. No pun intended.
The years of Facebook "technical debt" doesn't exist in a product that has been just started from scratch. For example, the Facebook Wall concept is outdated. It has become a place for people to post stuff to your profile you don't want your other friends reading (from inappropriate personal information to stupid requests to run chores). However, since Facebook started as a college networking tool well before the Newsfeed was born, the "Wall" concept grew directly out of those whiteboards those of us in the collegiate world had physically hung to our dorm-room doors. Oh, and networks like MySpace worked that way, too. The Newsfeed, in hindsight, was one of the killer apps in Facebook that killed MySpace.

Don't be Evil is Google's Mantra. In addition to being a product from a company we already know a lot about and are interested in, Facebook's repeated (and they aren't dumb, this is on purpose) failures to protect our personal information has turned a lot of people off.

The best way to protect your own data is to forsake the Cloud and use something like Diaspora.
For those people who are not technically inclined and interested in running their own server (or dealing with the TOS violations and addressing complexities in running a webserver out of the home), or for those of us who want to talk to people not so inclined, we have to come to accept the Cloud...with as little evil tied in as possible.

Bad

Nobody is on it. This will likely change, but, for example, I only have a few connections on Google+ that I don't already have on Facebook. Therefore, it is rare that I'll want to go through the trouble of posting something twice for the benefit of a few. Facebook is already one-stop for my photo uploads, link-sharing, etc. So far, my Google+ posts have mostly been about...Google+. Without a mass-migration for reasons I don't see yet, I will still be spending far more time on Facebook than Google+
It's in Beta. There are important functions, like event invitations, that Google+ doesn't seem to have yet, even though other Google technologies already support this. The lack of an ability to search Google+ posts from an interface fails to fix a chief complaint I have with Facebook and Google's search is their core business!
As nice as it is to have all my Google technologies tied together, there is a downside to this. Like the failure that was Google Buzz, sometimes unexpected things happen. I posted a new PicasaWeb album to "Everyone" for my last post on Wamesit Canal, and the photos went straight to Google+! I don't remember seeing an option to not do that.

How-To

Since a chief complaint of Facebook is the lack of ability to control data via Circles, here is how to do it in Facebook. Yes, it's far more complex.

Go to your Friend List.

Click Create a List.

Give it a name, select the relevant people, and save it.

The list will now show up in the left-hand pane of your Edit Friends page where it can be edited. Whenever you add new friends, you can add that person to one or many lists, directly from the accept friend request interface.

Now, back on the main page, we'll post some content. Note the pad-lock button.

You'll see you can make posts visible to friends, friends of friends, the obsolete "Networks" concept from the college-only days, and "customize." Click that.

You'll get the following page, where in addition to excluding certain people or lists of people, you can include certain people or groups:

This concept extends beyond the newsfeed, once you have your friends lists set up. Let's do our profile. Click "Privacy Settings":

Click "Custom"

From here, you can do things like prevent anybody (not people or lists) from posting on your wall or from Friends or Friend Lists being able to see photos others tagged you in:

Finally, when you add photo albums, you can include and exclude certain groups from seeing it.

So yeah, more work, but doable!

I guess in closing, I don't dislike Google+, but I also don't see it taking off without some sort of "killer app" Facebook doesn't have. Facebook tends to move quickly with features, which in this case, may be a good thing. It's often a bad thing because over the years, it's required people to learn how to use an increasingly complex system piece-by-piece as new features come out and old ones get deprecated.

Wamesit Canal / River Meadow Brook

2011-07-12T23:26:00.000-04:00

I've been delaying finishing this one for months, so here it goes...

During Doors Open Lowell weekend, I went with fellow Lowell Historical Society board member Gray Fitzsimons down to the Wamesit Canal / River Meadow Brook area. He has been doing research on the district, in part with Lowell Parks and Conservation Trust due to its association with the Concord River Greenway. History of industrial operations along the Concord River are here: http://lowelllandtrust.org/greenwayclassroom/history/industrialization.htm/. One of the reasons it took me so long to get this post up is I needed to take time to research the history of this area, which is as old as the rest of Lowell, although it is in some ways it is only tangentially connected to downtown's history.

I have a hard time knowing what to call this section of the city, honestly. The Wamesit canal runs from a dam on the Concord River just below Lawrence Street in South Lowell to the end of River Meadow Brook in a section of town that may be partially in either or all of South Lowell, or Sacred Heart, or the Bleachery, or The Flats, or even the beginnings of Back Central - depending on who you ask, where they grew up, and when they lived there. I would love to know what people consider what down here. All I know is the street patterns around this final stretch of River Meadow Brook (beyond where it turns away from where it is channelized along the Connector), the various waterways themselves, and the huge industrial complexes (I'd imagine other than downtown, this is Lowell's largest single concentration of red brick) divide this area into a series of subsections that seem hardly related and frequently off the beaten path.

I guess the real answer is this section of town is everywhere and nowhere all at once. It's a border, not a center. For that reason, and the historical value this part of town contains, an extension along the greenway, linking these little pockets by the waterways they owe their existences to, would be pretty cool.

Before we go any further, here is an areal screenshot, courtesy of maps.bing.com, and a map from 1924. If you're a Google Maps user and haven't checked out the 3/4 view areals that Microsoft has put up on Bing, you're really missing out. Without this, I would've never been able to re-associate the photos I took with here I took them!

Area today

Same area, 1924. Note that the canal, and the number of factories along it, used to be far more extensive.

History (Briefly)

In the 1790s, the same decade that the Pawtucket Canal was dug and 30 years before the first large textile mills went up downtown, Moses Hale bought land and water rights to River Meadow Brook. For this reason, it is alternatively known as Hale's Brook. On this stream, he built a fulling and carding mill. Depending on the source, he later built a sawmill, and/or then, where the old Prince Spaghetti plant now stands, he built a grist mill. The 1897 Illustrated History of Lowell also credits him with building the cartridge factory usually credited to its later owner, his son-in-law, Oliver Whipple. Charles Cowley places Hale's fulling mill along the brook, near Gorham Street.

Over the years, many other operations were built near here, leasing power from the Wamesit Power Company. The Lowell Bleachery, US Bunting Company, the Sterling Mills, etc. Generally speaking, these were people not connected to the Boston-based manufactories running off the canal system owned by Locks and Canals. Even today, there are generally many small, seemingly local operations running out of these buildings, as opposed to the condo developments downtown.

Cop-out

Well...overall, I was unhappy with the photographs I took, and I don't know as much as I would like to about the area, so I'm going to defer back to the Lowell Parks and Conservation Trust website link I posted earlier. There is a great series of PDFs about these buildings, but the link can be hard to find, so I'll supply it directly here: http://lowelllandtrust.org/greenwayclassroom/history/industrialization-casestudies.htm.

My photos:

Wamesit Canal

An experiment

2011-06-22T00:41:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about the side-effects of technology lately - what we've lost for what we've gained. I'm having trouble sleeping, so could I still write a single-sided letter in cursive? Has my handwriting atrophied to the point where nobody but me can read it?

New Blog in Blogroll

2011-06-21T21:46:00.000-04:00

Marc Belanger, a prolific and talented photographer from the South Coast mill city of Fall River has a blog at http://viewfromboglehill.blogspot.com/. Marc and I have bumped into each other a few timess over the years online, especially on Wikipedia. In addition to his photography skills, he is very well versed in the history of the mill towns he photographs. Also, amazingly, he has nearly completed something I toyed with over a decade ago: Visit every town in the Bay State and take a picture there.

Make sure to check out Marc's blog and his Flickr and Picasa accounts that are linked from there as well.

Cape Ann Fresh Catch and Lowell Sustainability Week

2011-06-12T23:37:00.002-04:00

Back in May, the as-of-recently wonderfully active City Manager's blog mentioned that a sustainable fishing CSA out of Cape Ann was looking to distribute in Lowell if interest was high enough. The original post was here.

Well, I emailed them to complain that the hours were very unfortunate for those of us who work outside of the city (a weekday, 4-6), and the automated email system considered that an "interested" vote. So...the good news is I got an email today saying it's on!

Hi there,
First and foremost, thank you for expressing interest in a Cape Ann Fresh Catch (www.capeannfreshcatch.org) distribution site in Lowell.
We're psyched to say your feedback has been great and the Lowell CAFC CSF distribution site is on!
Starting on Friday July 8th, we'll have our first delivery at the Lowell Farmer's Market at City Hall Plaza, 375 Merrimack St.
Depending on the share type you select, there will be either eight weekly or four bi-weekly deliveries starting on Friday July 8th from 4–6pm for the remainder of our Summer 2011 season. We hope to continue delivering to Lowell with our Fall 2011 season starting in September.
Our delivery calendar (www.capeannfreshcatch.org/calendar.html) is a great resource to track what was distributed and as a timetable for current and future seasons.
So, curious in supporting our local fishermen through our Community Supported Fishery?
Please visit our website (www.capeannfreshcatch.org/join.html) to learn how to join CAFC.
And please, take some time to explore our website further. There's a "boatload" of info on our website that will hopefully answer any questions you may have about Cape Ann Fresh Catch. If not, please feel free to contact us at info@capeannfreshcatch.org
Also, please forward this email to anyone you know who may also be interested in supporting our local fishermen by receiving a weekly or bi-weekly share of "day boat" fresh fish delivered to Lowell through CAFC.
Again, thank you for your interest in keeping your food dollars local through your support of the Cape Ann Fresh Catch Community Supported Fishery.
All the best,
Your CAFC CSF Staff
www.capeannfreshcatch.org

So... while we are on the topic of sustainability and we're working off of news on the City Manager's blog, just a reminder that Lowell Sustainability Week begins June 20th. I'm looking forward to the presentation on the Monday the most, which, again, got a separate write-up on the Manager's blog. The presentation, "Envisioning a Sustainable Lowell", is to discuss updates to the city's Master Plan based on sustainable development. This is a topic that should interest everyone - Lowell has some unique benefits and challenges with regard to sustainability that we need to fully explore.

That House on Livingston...

2011-06-06T02:28:00.001-04:00

Anybody who reads The Sun is well aware of the stink being raised about a house being "shoehorned" in on Livingston Ave. Essentially, under the state's Approval Not Required (ANR) permitting under the Subdivision Control Law, it is legal to subdivide a lot without the municipality needing to approve it as long as the new lots meet the town's zoning requirements and the homes will be on an existing public way. What is happening is that a large home with a large side-lot was bought by a developer, who is using ANR to cut the small side lot out and is squeezing in a small house. This is allowable because the zoning for Livingston Ave is Traditional Single-Family (TSF), allowing a house on a lot of the size in question. It just happens that the lots that exist on this stretch of the street tend to be far larger than TSF calls for. It's worth noting that a more restrictive zoning type exists, that being Suburban Single Family (SSF), which is what much of the Tyler Park neighborhood and essentially all of Belvidere east of Rogers/Nesmith is zoned as. This subdivided lot would be too small, was the neighborhood SSF.

To understand some of the issues, a little history is called for. This section of the Highlands was part of Lowell's original 1826 grant and part of Lowell's 1874 annexation of Chelmsford's Middlesex Village section. By 1879, we see that streets were being laid out in and around the estate of William E. Livingston. Improvements to transportation, namely street railways, were making the Outer Highlands/Middlesex Village a suburb of the smoky city a mile and change away.

By 1896, we see that street railways (black and white blocked lines) ran down Middlesex Street and Westford Street. In this period, contemporary to the new Lowell City Hall and Library (a very good economic time, as the architecture attests), the Victorians on the Princeton Boulevard end of Livingston and Harvard Streets had been constructed on large lots. The subdivision in question today is happening on the lot labeled as belonging to W.H. Bent and against the Swan house.

By 1924, we see something interesting happen: Many of the lots in the Livingston plan had been subdivided further, some new streets have been put in, and the denser middle-income Highlands neighborhood that we know today has leapfrogged over this area and marched straight towards Black Brook, bringing some industrial concerns with it. In fact, the new lot in question, part of property belonging to a Dixon in 1924, will be of a fairly typical size for the neighborhood. This period just before the Depression was approximately the apex of Lowell's 100-year population and industrial growth, and this small enclave of stately Victorian mansions was already becoming boxed in by a decidedly middle-class neighborhood. The trend must've continued up to and through World War II as the empty lots labelled as belonging to the U.S. Housing Corp are built on today (of course) with everything from fairly modest pre-war homes to post-war ranches (which, I feel, in an old city like Lowell, are an eyesore due to their lack of verticality).

This pattern of trendy neighborhoods being eclipsed by other neighborhoods is not unusual in Lowell or anywhere. Development pressure and changing economics ensures that - just look at some of the beautiful homes along Pawtucket Street and its side streets or along North and South Common. It's very easy to look through the three atlases I presented and watch the city march right into and through neighborhoods that were originally for the city's elite.

That said, of course this issue is more complex than I just made it sound. If it were easy to come down on one side of the debate or the other, I would've posted on this last week or ignored it completely. I'm going to jump here so I don't run over the front page.

Against this historical backdrop, I guess we have a few questions:

Where does one's rights to do what they want with their property end, and their neighbor's rights to maintain the value of their property begin?
What is the difference between snob-zoning and maintaining a neighborhood's integrity?
Is this a continuation of an old story, as I implied above, or is this fundamentally different?
Should this subdivision been stopped? Is it even really wrong or is it, as some are claiming, a mountain being made out of a mole-hill by the very connected in the neighborhood?

The first point is easy to talk about and hard to decide on. I have a personal anecdote (this is elaborated from me brain-dumping on Facebook):

My family, starting with my Great Grandfather, owned a house on three lots in South Lowell - on the very outskirts of the city. Essentially, the neighborhood feels uncompleted as it was built just as Lowell's fortunes began to change. My uncle almost sold it out to a developer who could've demolished the 100-year old house and put up probably six units of housing (the three lots are each zoned traditional two-family). Otherwise, duplexes were probably being built on either side of the existing house. In the end, a neighbor bought the house and her family did the necessary renovations. I was thinking - I'm not huge on gigantic yards. Had I wanted to buy the house, I don't have family contractors who could've done the interior work that needed to be done - and it NEEDED to be done. Might I have sold one of the side yards to afford the work needed? I certainly would've liked to have had the option. Without the ANR laws, would it have gotten through the zoning board? What would the neighbors think? Living next door, I'd have to consider that.

I guess the key differences here are that Livingston Ave, while zoned TSF, does have a certain character (big Victorians namely...for that one stretch in question) that this new house won't match. Like the otherwise nice homes that were built in various infill projects in Belvidere over the past few decades (Mansur Street immediately comes to mind), homes that don't fit in are not good for neighborhoods - or land values. My family's home was a very typical Lowell single-family. Anything that can be built in TTF would fit in there just fine. Also, unlike facing my neighbors had I moved to South Lowell, the developer on Livingston Street is absentee, living up on Christian Hill. He won't have to deal with irate neighbors - the family that buys this "postage stamp" house will. Conversely, it surprises me that even in a city the size of Lowell, that someone can do one unpopular project after another and not become a pariah.

So, like I said, I'm stuck on this point, as I believe are many people. This isn't a Lowell question or an urbanism question: it's an American question: individual rights versus collective good.

As for my second point on snob-zoning, that one is easier for me: I don't believe in exclusive communities because I believe a community should be as self-contained as possible. It should have its own jobs and its own workforce. It should be able to deal with the issues it generates. It should be cohesive and identifiable and proud of itself. One should be able to live their entire life in a single, strongly self-identifying community.

This is one of my favorite things about Lowell: Diversity. It's something that nearly entirely homogeneous cities like Lawrence and towns like Westford lack. That said, I'm less certain about exclusive neighborhoods. None of Lowell's neighborhoods (if we only say there are the eight or so major ones) are truly exclusive, and I consider that a good thing. Belvidere, from the triple-deckers down by the Concord River to the mansions on the hill, houses just about everyone. That said, "Lower" and "Upper" Belvidere are talked about for a reason: I am completely for exclusive sub-neighborhoods. Like likes like, and that's OK. Tenements on Andover Street make no sense, and ranches in the working-class parts of the Acre don't work, either. Again, the beauty of a city like Lowell is that the streets are well connected and almost all public. There are public buildings and parks and stores just about everywhere: I can go anywhere I like, as can anybody else, and feel mostly welcome. That allows us to appreciate the city's diversity while being able to simultaneously appreciate the somewhat homogeneous character of our individual blocks and neighbors.

The third point - is this growth of the city or something else, I feel has a disturbing but clear answer: This is in fact fundamentally different. In 1896, Lowell was a great center of manufacturing, annexing sections of neighboring communities at a good pace and growing very quickly. Building dense near less-dense areas caused new exclusive sections to be built further out. At the same time, it also put upwards pressure on the values of existing properties as their closeness to the inner city while having a lot of land became a greater and greater asset. In other words, if you now wanted out of your neighborhood because you had too many neighbors, you could do that, turn a profit, and still remain in Lowell. In 2011, Lowell is a largely residential community well past its economic prime, hemmed in by suburbs that we don't own and often want very little to do with us, look very different from us demographically, and have built suburban-style developments, many of them containing the shopping and jobs people want to be near, right up to our borders. Therefore, character and history, not location, are the greatest assets of Lowell's neighborhoods today. The Highlands, or even Belvidere, are not Cambridge's Brattle Street area, though the houses may look similar. Owning a house that size on that much land that close to Boston is far more valuable than living in a huge, expensive-to-heat house near downtown Lowell.

Therefore, continuing to increase density in historically less-dense neighborhoods in Lowell is highly counter-productive because it adds nothing of value; in fact it does quite the opposite. It's causing Lowell to become a homogeneous city, and destroying the full-service city character we need to remain interesting (and a place with reasonable property values). I would argue that re-upping density (and restoring mixed-use zoning) in Lowell's historically denser sections would be far more beneficial. In fact, people seem to pan the suburban-style de-densification, de-mixed-use projects Lowell's inner neighborhoods were plagued with for the entire second half of the last century because they sucked vitality out of neighborhoods. We've since come to our senses and have done a great job adding urban-style housing and stores in the Acre to keep it interesting: let's keep the dense housing out of the Upper Highlands because it will make it decidedly un-interesting.

Look at it this way: I live downtown. I would *love* more neighbors. The added density would translate into more customers for more stores, entertainment options, maybe even places to find work. They don't have to even be at my income level. Above or below, within limits and in the right proportions, is fine as well. This is NOT true for a neighborhood like Livingston Ave. It's been a suburb, and a somewhat exclusive one, since it was built. Jane Jacobs astutely pointed out that the problem with suburbs is they are not diverse enough to function as urban areas without serious re-working...trying to do it anyway just causes blight. I don't think that suburbs (in the pre-war neighborhood sense) are inherently a problem because of this fact, but a fact it remains. Just be glad that it is within our city limits, that these people are proud and active Lowellians, and keep it as it is. If Lowell's economics change and there is a lot of economic pressure to increase density there and not in places that are currently asking for more density, then consider more houses. And when they are built, as anywhere, build them well, keep them architecturally sensitive to the neighborhood, and people should be happy enough.

I guess that brings me to the final point. There isn't really a lot to say: the rules are the rules. This home is allowed under current zoning code, ANR isn't entirely bad, and it won't be the end of the neighborhood. The neighbors could very well turn around and buy this lot before it's built on and nip the whole thing in the bud. Put up a gazebo or an orchard or something. Meanwhile, Lowellians should read their zoning maps, find out what can be built in their neighborhood, and take it to city hall if they don't like it. This could've been stopped long ago if the neighborhood had been put into a historic district and re-zoned SSF. There are certainly, as Adam Baacke claimed and Rita Mercier seemed to disagree with (she proposed getting rid of TSF entirely and re-zoning it all SSF), plenty of nice neighborhoods that look and function like TSF...that short stretch of Livingston Ave and Havard Streets just aren't among them.

Doors Open Lowell 2011

2011-05-21T17:53:00.001-04:00

I, of course, made it to Doors Open Lowell last weekend. It was fairly overcast all weekend, but the weather generally held, which was nice.

There were quite a few new buildings this year, and a few that were not new that I haven't seen the inside of before. I didn't get to all the buildings I would've liked to have seen, nor did I ask all the questions I would've liked to were this a longer event, but I did pick up some interesting stories. Sometimes, you need to put down the camera, take out a notepad, and talk to people. I hope to do a better job next year...

Photos after the jump

Please note that these links seem to work in Internet Explorer, but not Chrome. The links in the photo captions are typically to the Doors Open Lowell website for that building.

View of Market Street from the Old Lowell National Bank, ca 1920.

A new sculpture outside Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, built 1906.

Window inside Holy Trinity.

A view of part of the dome inside Holy Trinity. Unlike most Catholic churches , which have floor plans of a Latin Cross (longer in one direction than the other), Greek churches tend to be shaped like - surprise - Greek crosses, which are made of equal length arms. I wish I had been less busy with my camera here and more attentive to our guide, because she knew quite a bit about the place which I neglected to memorize.

From the choir loft. The sanctuary and altar are behind the Iconostasis.

Interior of St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church. The original church on this site dated to 1831, with this one built just a few decades later in 1854 (it's a Patrick Keely church). A large fire in 1904 lead to a re-construction of much of the church, completed in 1906.

The murals date from the 1900s re-building

A mural over the transept.

A window from the 1900s re-building.

The nave and the pipe organ in the choir loft. If you look real close by the door, you can see the statue of Saint Patrick, which I was told not to photograph as it's such a cheesy plaster statue. Patrick is my middle, baptismal, name (there is no Saint Corey), so I know what he looks like anyhow!

The entrance to the newly-renovated Appleton Mills. These buildings all date from the first decades after 1900.

A view from the restored footbridge at the Appleton Mills to the Hamilton Mills. Hamilton Canal underneath us.

Atrium inside the re-built Appleton Mills.

The wooden beams are from North Carolina. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they are pressed-together planks, and not monolithic. The posts are original - they were removed one by one, cleaned, painted, and re-installed.

Wicket gates at Lower Locks. They drain the water from a higher chamber to a lower one, then, the main gates that they seat inside are opened. These gates are still manually controlled.

Inside the Lower Locks gatehouse.

Restored lobby in the Window in the Federal Building, now part of Middlesex Community College. Originally built as a post office in the WPA days, this building served many purposes. Our tour guide told us this lobby looks like a smaller copy of a famous one in New York City. Today this building is named for F. Bradford Morse, a former congressman from Lowell.

Restored bronze entryway for the Federal Building.

And, the rest of the photos:

Doors Open Lowell 2011

Other pictures:

If you have any photos from the event you'd like to share, please do so in the comments! Like I said, I missed so much of the event...

Jan's photos: http://sentosa-wind-photo.blogspot.com/2011/05/doors-open-lowell-2011.html
Michelle's photos: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2060975807847.126879.1348247965&l=671a55eacd

Tyngsboro(ugh) builds riverfront park; vows to keep out outsiders

2011-05-19T23:08:00.003-04:00

I'm about to vent, but I'm going somewhere with this, promise.

Growing up in the fair metropolis of Tyngsboro, I learned early on what it meant to be part of a regional economy. If you want to go shopping, you can't do that in town because there's very little land zoned for it. If you want a job, you need to leave town because they won't zone for it. The school system is decent but is by no means excellent, so I never went to it (although Notre Dame was in town, and I did go there). If we wanted to go to the library, we left to either Westford or occasionally Lowell where they had more than two rooms worth of books. If we wanted public recreation, well... T-Burro didn't really believe in that, either. Once or twice we went to the beach at Lake Mascuppic, I guess...to be fair. However, I certainly went sledding at Shedd Park more often than that, or down to Wyman's Beach in Westford to swim or skate.

In other words, people tend to move to Tyngsboro because it's a nice, safe, conveniently located, cheaper place to throw up a home and populate it with beds, not because it has what you would call the amenities on which a community is built. It's not a bad town for kids. I had fun in youth soccer and Boy Scouts was one of the most valuable experiences of my life - which I spent with kids who are now current and former selectmen as well as others who have remained active in the town. However, I never caught the Tyngsboro bug, and now, I'm even less likely to ever do so (I'm getting there!)

Enter the 21st century, and those of us who recall when Tyngsboro Center had a town hall, a library, a small grocer, a church, and a school are now laughing hysterically at the Master Plan, which claims to want Tyngsboro to have a center. Too bad they spent the last 25 years demolishing the one they had! It's almost like they realized people are drawn to towns like Westford or Groton over Tyngsboro because they have character! Tyngsboro, on the other hand, had two strip clubs and a dirt road townies lovingly call "bum road". Today's Tyngsboro Center has enough abandoned buildings clustered along both banks of the river such that any superiority complex they might hold over the Mill City should be long gone. They are chanting the bike lane mantra without realizing that the entire western half of the town has the same number of neighborhood stores as it has sidewalks: zero. There is no safe place to walk, and nowhere to bike to. I swear, it's safer to walk through the worst parts of Lowell at midnight with a $100 bill hanging out of your cap than it would be to try to walk down a street in Tyngsboro at the same time. In the former, you're likely to get mugged. In the latter, you're guaranteed to get run over. In the former, it's likely there is somewhere for you to go, in the latter, it'll be miles before you hit something other than another house. Lowell has street lights, Tyngsboro decided that if people wanted them, they'd have to "adopt" them because a town with so little billable property per length of street frontage finds it hard to afford infrastructure.

So, what am I on about? Tyngsboro, a few years ago, decided to attempt to upclass the "bad" or "Dracut" side of the river by replacing a trailer park - where people were living - with a passive recreation park with access to the Merrimack River. Hundreds of thousands of CPA dollars later, they have what I bet is a nice park along a nice little bend in the river. Recently, it opened. However, as the link says, the town is threatening to tow or fine out-of-towners for visiting.

Excuse me. I spent 20 years in town. My family paid very high taxes for not a whole lot of services that whole time. I was in town Scouts and helped with the Eagle project to clean up the area around Wannalancit's Rock...a newer cleanup of which just hit the paper last week. I am an upstanding, active citizen. And because my driver's license says that oh-so-unwelcome city of Lowell on it, I'm not allowed? As I said, most things you would consider "public" goods, Tyngsboro fails to provide. It is one of the biggest reasons I decided to make Lowell my adopted home: it's actually a place. This decision on Tyngsborough's part clearly angered many people who replied to The Sun article as well on the same grounds. Tyngsboro is not nearly special enough to have a Resident's Only access point to the river. This doesn't call for Civil Disobedience, but it does call for anger...and pity.

It just continues to enforce that they just don't get it up there. They don't get what it means to be a community, what it means to be a proud municipality. That is part of why they will continue to be one of the least respected towns in the region, and why they'll never catch up to (pinkies out) Westford and Groton on the prestige scale.

Ok, done! Thank you.

WPI's alternative commencement speech focuses on Peak Oil

2011-05-18T18:19:00.001-04:00

I know, I know...I still have to get the Doors Open stuff up. The pictures are up on my Picasa, but they need to be captioned, tagged, etc. I just haven't had the energy.

When I graduated from RPI, our commencement speaker was then-Senator Hillary Clinton. That caused enough problems, especially being a college with what seems like an unusually large right-leaning student body, and an election year for her. We were warned that anyone who disrupted her speech would not be allowed to graduate. Only one kid dared. I don't know if he got in trouble or not, but abruptly standing up in an area full of Secret Service didn't seem too bright to me either way.

Anyway, a little closer to home, WPI's commencement speaker this year was ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson. A small group of students refused to listen to his speech (with university approval!) and instead brought along Richard Heinberg, who I am familiar with from his appearance in the documentary End of Suburbia. The contents of the speech are here:

http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/peak-oil-a-chance-to-change-the-world

"A chance to change the world", huh? ... RPI's slogan is "Why not change the world?" I wonder how much they're talking about this stuff out at the 'Tute these days...

Lowell's Emergent Generation

2011-05-15T22:38:00.002-04:00

I've had a busy weekend with Doors Open Lowell and related activities, and I plan to post photos on that in the near future. However, an interesting survey was done recently, and as low-hanging fruit, I figured I'd tackle that first.

A few months back, I learned (I believe via Young Professionals of Greater Lowell) of a working session over dinner targeting "Lowell's Emergent Generation" - That is, those of us who are post-college and under 35. Being a little shy regarding this type of thing, by the time I decided I in fact did want to participate, it was filled. However, an online survey was available, and I completed that.

The survey, which was conducted by UMass Lowell master's student Derek Mitchell with help from John Wooding, has been compiled and the results are available here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/55146238/Report-on-Lowell-s-Emergent-Generation-2011

All in all, I don't think any of the results should be surprising. Us "emergent" Lowellians feel that our city has a rough reputation it doesn't totally deserve. The most common word we used to describe the perception of Lowell is "Dangerous." The word we most frequently use to describe how we like to see it is "Diverse" (yet the majority of responders were white). Beyond that, we question the quality of the school system (a concern seen in urban areas with sizable young populations everywhere - Cambridge anyone?), cleanliness (broken windows theory...) and the big concerns on our list include public safety, walkability, affordability, and the availability of jobs. Changes we'd like to see range from the crunchy (there is a lot in here about local, organic food) to the intensely practical (safe places for children to play). We spend a lot of time downtown, and we'd be willing to support a lot more down here. To that end, we'd be very interested in doing something I've been babbling about for years: we need to sell the city to our age group, outside of the city. We are also looking for better, stronger connections between various organizations, and better ways to spread ideas.

To that point, it's interesting to note that only 120 people answered the online survey. Considering the population of the city that falls within the target age group, that should be a cause for alarm. Either we are an extremely indifferent generation, or we are proving to be very hard to engage. I'm honestly not sure which one I think it is - perhaps a bad combination of both.

Devastating Technologies

2011-05-14T01:39:00.005-04:00

Yesterday and today, Blogger went down for hours. This is a reminder to us all that you get what you pay for. In the case of free cloud-based services, that is sometimes exactly... nothing. Don't forget, you are not Google's customer: their advertisers are. Ditto Facebook. Ditto Twitter. How often is Twitter over capacity? How often does Facebook leak your personal data? They owe you nothing. I've talked about issues with digital data before. However, while the amateur historian, computing professional, and worrywart in me concerns myself with the problem of losing data that is either not in your control, is in proprietary formats, or is simply on easily ruined media, everything else in me loves the ability to just post my thoughts to the world, and to access massive amounts of knowledge and thought from my desk, and in just the past few years, my smartphone.

In many ways, aside from its flaws, the Information Revolution has been one of the most exciting things humanity has ever seen. However, as I explored in one of those earlier links, it also has created generations of people who can't live without new technologies, and perhaps worse, can't live with them. Mankind has a history of technological changes that have completely upset the way the world works and often take ages to adjust to. This is just the latest of many, and contrary to what people seem to think, I'm optimistic we'll adjust.

Take the crossbow: the Medieval knight and his expensive custom armor and extensive training all of a sudden could be taken out by a peasant with a simple, easy to produce weapon. The Pope was asked to ban the thing to keep the status quo. It didn't happen, and the world adjusted. Not long afterwards, gunpowder revolutionized warfare, making walled cities obsolete and finally making traditional armor obsolete. Entire battle tactics that had been used since the Classical Era became obsolete. After centuries of being a bastion of civilization, Constantinople fell to Turkish cannon and guns helped end feudalism, and the world was never the same...and we adjusted for the better.

The printing press was a great communication tool, often considered one of the most important inventions of all time, but it was blamed for many things, including the death of many traditional memory techniques and travelling storytellers. The Industrial Revolution changed a rural world into an urbanized one. It took years of poor working and living conditions for that to settle down, and it left the world far wealthier and educated than ever before. In some countries, this process continues into today. Mechanized warfare in World War I turned the fields of Europe into disease-filled trenches as defensive weaponry grossly outpaced offensive weaponry, and continuing a disastrous trend first seen in the American Civil War, injuries and sanitation issues outpaced medicine. Finally, further advances in mechanization lead to the battle tank, the stalemates ended, and the very injuries lead to much improved medicine, and the world improved.

More recently, the locomotive, the automobile, and the airplane allowed ordinary people to travel great distances with ease. It was truly a great democratiser, but it was not without downsides. After years of urban shakeup caused as a side-effect of mass motoring, we are learning to live with the car and not for the car. The Age of Speed is winding down. My parents' generation often got from A to B faster than I can. I've never seen anybody go to the moon, and without a renewed interest in space, soon we may never see humans leave Earth's gravity. But, they couldn't talk to people on the other side of the world for virtually nothing like I can.

And now, the Information Age. Cell phones have empowered people in the Third World in ways that Americans can't fully appreciate. We have the whole world's knowledge at our fingertips. Despots struggle to control ideas in a connected world. Conversely, these changes have allowed Americans to be rude, unfocused, self-important, and has taken away our ability to plan. Much about the computer age has taken away our ability to be patient and enjoy simple things. As Arcade Fire put it, "I used to sleep at night, before the flashing light settled deep in my brain ... we used to wait for letters to arrive. Though stranger still, how something so small can keep you alive". We all know exactly what they're talking about.

So, point being...give it another 20 years or so. This shakeup will all come to pass. Changes in information technology will slow, and some other "can't live with it, can't live without it" technology will take its place. What will it be? Androids? Virtual immortality? Virtual reality? Whatever it will, most likely, it won't destroy us, but enrich us...once it redefines normalcy.

How fast news travels!

2011-05-07T22:37:00.001-04:00

Many bloggers wrote about bin Laden and I didn't, so I've decided to join the club. I found out he died after writing a blog post and returning to iGoogle, where I have a news ticker. I went to post the news on Facebook, and saw I had already been beaten by at least two friends. A few minutes later, there were scores of people reporting the news. There were a huge number of people who got the news via Twitter, etc instead of cable news. Just think - it wasn't that long ago that people might not find out about major events until the morning paper showed up. The pace today is a matter of minutes. It's no surprise it's hard to satiate people's appetites for headlines with the printed word today.

Case in point, I thought this was amusing. On April 30, the Osama bin Laden article had been very slow to update.

Suddenly, at 21:37 on May 1, somebody had seen that bin Laden was dead. Within 10 minutes, there were over 10 edits. Over the next handful of minutes, the editing pace hit a fever pitch - the wiki-admins and diligent regular editors trying to keep up. By May 2nd, thousands of changes had been made. A screenshot of a mere 20 minutes of edits:

DaveWrites.com

2011-05-07T14:21:00.000-04:00

Reading and responding to a post on All About Cities, I searched through the author's links and found a Boston-based blog about urbanism, sustainable development, and technology (amongst other things): Dave Writes. Labelled as "about technology, life and an imperative to create something better," he has many interesting, informed posts about the issues that face us today - from our built environment through unemployment and raising a family. Check it out.

As for the post on All About Cities, the topic was that the urban/suburban dichotomy is no longer sufficient. I wondered aloud, what kind of place is Lowell? By her definitions, it's too small and close to Boston to be a satellite city, which is what I've always considered it. It's also too small to be a region into itself - which I think is impossible to disagree with - but, is it really Urban/Suburban? This label, by her definition and by reality, seems the most fair, but yet the word "suburban" being associated with a city as old and proud as Lowell seems completely wrong...thoughts?

Pawtucket Falls

2011-05-01T23:10:00.001-04:00

This weekend, I went over to the presentation at the new Spalding House Park on Pawtucket Street. The Sun wrote an article about it here. Of course, while the topic was supposed to be about the new park behind the Spalding House and the planned overlook/connection to the Esplanade on the opposite bank, much attention was paid to the announcement that came down shortly before that FERC had sided with Enel, the owner of the Boott Hydroelectric plant, in arguing that the proposed bladder dam would not alter the historic integrity of the current flashboard dam. Their argument essentially boiled down to things like:

After the fish ladder and elevator were installed on the north end of the dam in the 1980s, its character was already compromised.
The dam, although in a Historic District, was not individually listed
The dam's historical significance is as a piece of engineering, not as an architectural landmark.

I've found myself conflicted on this issue since it first surfaced. There are certainly downsides and benefits to keeping the existing dam or replacing it. While I feel it's often critical, especially in a city like Lowell, to maintain historical integrity, we cannot completely reverse course after the mistakes we've made in the past and ban all progress just for the sake of banning it. In an age of escalating energy prices, if Enel is right and their changes will not further endanger houses in Pawtucketville (an argument many residents feel is completely ludicrous, and their points are worthy of very serious consideration), increasing the amount of renewable energy we produce is a noble goal and worthy of consideration. Also, Enel has every right to turn as much of a profit as they can - of course, without stepping on the toes of the little people of Lowell, thousands of miles away from Corporate Headquarters.

However, while listening to impassioned park representatives and regular Lowellians talk about the history of the dam and the way it has worked for over 150 years, the whole time fighting to be heard over the spring flow rate of the Merrimack (currently about 20,000 cubic feet per second [cfs]), my mind was made up - Lowell is right, the foreign-owned energy company is wrong. The trivial amount of extra energy this will generate does not translate into giving up a major part of our heritage. After all, as was pointed out, these falls are why Lowell was built in the first place, and the archaic pin-and-flashboard setup is our heritage.

So, after the presentation, I went over to the Pawtucket Gatehouse, then I got started home. I had walked, and running late as usual, I only had a chance to take pictures on the way back. One of my favorite things about travelling on foot: the more you want to be on time, the faster you can go. There's no traffic to make you later and later. I made what Google considers a 22 minute walk in 15 minutes!

I went down Pawtucket Street to Merrimack Street, having taken Market/Salem on my way there to save a minute or two.

Photos after the jump

The view from the new Spalding Park. The Pawtucket Gatehouse, the top of the dam, the O'Donnell Bridge, and Pawtucket Congregational Church. I had been in this area before to take pictures back in July of 2007.

Inside the Pawtucket Gatehouse. These screws raise and lower the sluicegates down below, controlling the flow of water into the Northern Canal from the Merrimack River. Note the square peg holes in the shafts between the screws. Could this have been to control the gates by cranking in the event of a failure of the primary power source?

These old controls used to raise and lower the gates, in fact, originally the power to do this was driven by a turbine running off the river itself! It is now controlled entirely remotely and the power is electric, and many of the control arms are missing. Still, being able to control this remotely seems like a good thing. This reminds us, like the dam itself, this 160+ year old building is a piece of working history.

This must be the old Francis Turbine that would've powered the gate equipment. The vertical shaft long-gone, it would've connected to pulleys up above, which provided power back down to the gate equipment via belts.

And what have we here? The pulleys and the belts that are in the space above the control room!

The Pawtucket Dam is currently hidden under a ton of water. I mentioned the flow is currently about 20,000 CFS, which translates into about 9 million gallons per minute.

My camera has a zoom lens and an adjustable shutter setting. Yay.

The Spaulding house c1760. Next to a few triple deckers that are probably 180 years newer or so. And a much newer still vehicle. Imagine all the concrete and other buildings gone from this fairly busy part of Lowell, and picture this house, standing nearly alone, with the great falls of the Merrimack in its backyard. It served as a tavern for people disembarking their cargo from the river just above the falls, after which they had to port it over land until they got below the falls, down by the Concord River. In the 1790s, the falls were bypassed by the Pawtucket Canal.

The Old Stone House. At one point, this home belonged to Dr. James C. Ayer, who I have written about a few times before. It apparently later became the home for the Nuns who worked across Pawtucket Street at Saint Joseph's Hospital.

The original building of Saint Joseph's Hospital is at the end of this courtyard. Founded in 1840 as the Corporation Hospital for injured mill employees, it was sold in 1930 to become Saint Joseph's Hospital. Merging with its older, cross-town, also-Catholic rival Saint John's in 1992, it became part of Saints Memorial Medical Center. After being largely shut down over the years and having smaller rehabilitation centers in it, etc, it was recently sold to UMass Lowell to become "University Crossing." Which, among other things, will consolidate all of the bookstores. Hopefully this new project breathes some new life into the neighborhood, because Salem Street and upper Merrimack Street have been known as a rough part of Lowell for decades. Read more about the hospital's history here.

Construction across the river at UMass Lowell North Campus. This is the $70 Million "Emerging Technologies and Innovations Center." Read about it here.

St Jean Baptiste, a beautiful closed church on Merrimack Street I have written about before. Within the year, the National Park has put up new informational signs. There is one over by Wannalancit Mill on the Northern Canal that, in describing Little Canada, calls this church "A Cathedral in the Slums." How proud the working-class French Canadian community must've been of this church!

A block of fairly old buildings along Merrimack Street, opposite of and a little further up from City Hall / the Library. This continuous block would be fascinating to learn about, I'm sure. Many of the ground floors house ethnic establishments, but unfortunately, a few were video stores, and Netflix has apparently now overtaken the immigrant market as well, because they're out of business.

Rest of the photos I took here:

Pawtucket Falls

And as a first for this blog, a (shaky, camera-phone) video!

Appleton Mill, Jan-May 2011

2011-05-01T21:20:00.000-04:00

I took some pictures of the (re)construction of the Appleton Mill buildings in February, and then again this afternoon. Construction is nearing completion, and a tour will be granted in a few weeks (May 12-14) for Doors Open Lowell. A direct link to the Doors Open description for this building is here.

Most of the final finishings are on

Including this new overhang over a door

Appleton Mill, Jan-May 2011

New Computer!

2011-04-30T18:07:00.000-04:00

Well, it finally happened: My 7-year old Windows XP Pentium 4 had a total hard drive failure. Fortunately, due to my paranoia mentioned here, I only lost a month's worth of emails and photos. So, if you've emailed me between St. Patrick's day and April at my Comcast address, I probably lost your email and that's why I didn't respond! Well, the computer was beyond old, even with a memory and video upgrade a few years ago, and starting to be below spec even for web browsing. Time to bite the bullet and get a new system.

So, I went to NewEgg and built a computer myself for the first time. I've always had a custom machine, but as computers have transformed from a hobbyist's toy into an appliance, the small businesses that will build machines for you have fallen by the wayside. NewEgg is a pleasant experience - with a little research and a good amount of time browsing and reading reviews, it's not too difficult to find the components you'd need to build your own machine. Plus, it seems more environmentally friendly and responsible to only buy the components you really need replaced. Add in the human time element that it takes for a company to build you a machine and install the software, and building your own box saves at least some money. In my case, the computer case, mouse, keyboard, and monitor were still usable. So, to build a new machine, I only needed: A power supply, a motherboard, a processor (and thermal paste to attach it), RAM, a hard drive, a BluRay drive, a DVD burner, and a video card. Plus, an operating system and other software. Most things today are plug-and-play, so installation has gotten trivial. Not bad. Also, they have a warehouse in New Jersey, just outside of New York City, so they can process your order on the first day, ship it, and it'll arrive the next day. Sweet.

The upsetting thing so far, and this feeds into my paranoia (as a heavy technology user and a history buff concerned about preserving digital media, even stupid personal correspondence), is all the obsolete or pay-through-the-nose-to-keep proprietary formats. In the worst cases, this causes data to essentially be lost forever. My email has been kept in Outlook since 2001. I have backed up the Outlook PST file, but my new machine doesn't have Outlook, because that stupid program is like $150 and the version of Outlook I was running is extremely old and might not have even worked on my new system. Unreasonable price completely if you're just using it for email and not for setting up meetings or connecting to an Exchange Server. So, I went with Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free. However, there is no way to read PST files without having Outlook installed. Since I have it at work, after passing files back and forth for a few hours between my home and work computer, I was able to get my email into Thunderbird's much more palatable for long-term archiving ASCII format. Similarly, the Microsoft Backup Utility for Windows XP produces a file called a .bkf. Windows 7 does not support BKF. To get my files back, I had to install a Hotfix that wasn't available until well after Windows 7 launched. A company not supporting their own backup format in future operating systems out of the gate is upsetting.

Also, now that I have a DVD burner, it'll be easier for me to do optical backups again (as I can probably back up all my photos on say, three DVDs). Given that as a final failsafe, I now have my external hard drive plugged in all the time to do automated, weekly (primary) backups. Of course, that's still in a (different) proprietary Microsoft format.

I should just get over my fear of that current buzzword, The Cloud ;-)

Haverhill on Chronicle

2011-04-12T22:14:00.002-04:00

I mentioned weeks ago Haverhill's recent fortunes were going to be featured on Chronicle. They were a few weeks ago, but I just watched it today. Interesting stuff (in four parts, you need to search for the other three):

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/video/27314880/detail.html

Perverting environmental terminology

2011-03-31T17:05:00.000-04:00

"Green" is a big buzzword right now, and it's being misused and abused. Soon, it will have no meaning anymore, and environmentalists will have lost a powerful tool.

I work down off of Route 62 in Bedford, by the Middlesex Turnpike. I have taken the turnpike a few times in the past few days, and like some scene out of a kid's environmentalism movie, I'm horrified at all the trees we have lost, seemingly overnight. Sure, the traffic down there is bad, and for economic reasons, it's likely necessary to finally widen the 200-year-old turnpike. However, it is disingenuous at best to call this sprawl-enhancing cluster**** a "Green Road" or a "Smart Parkway" or "Smart Growth" as it is being advertised: http://middlesexturnpikeplus3.org/. Sidewalks, bike lanes, and buses, oh my! And a "hydrogen fueling station." Great.

So, let's look at sidewalks. Unfortunately, the five-minute walk rule (people are willing to walk 5-10 minutes, a quarter to half mile, before driving) breaks down horribly in the land of office parks set way back from the street by "driveways" and surface parking lots. Where are you going to walk from anywhere on Middlesex Turnpike to any other kind of use in 5-10 minutes? Here is the part of the Turnpike in Billerica that Millipore, a centerpiece of the project, is part of, on Suburban Park Drive, courtesy of Google Maps.

You see three types of uses here: A lot of job sites, some houses, and a few restaurants. Technically four uses if you want to count the Vining School. So, what is five minutes from another use here? This map is .8 miles across, as the crow flies. Well, the big office parks just down the road from the 99s (which contains Millipore) are a five to 10 minute walk from it, although some of them up by Linnel Circle, due to poor road connectivity, are twice as far from the restaurant by road as they are by air. Similarly, much of Manning Rd and Fortune Drive are walking distance from what is labeled Dunkin' Donuts (the map is screwed up, that's actually a Subway and Dunkin' Donuts is off the map to the north). OK, so these low-rise office parks are generally under half a mile, or 10 minutes, from a restaurant on the Turnpike by foot. Notice we didn't actually walk on the Turnpike to get anywhere, because there are no groupings of restaurants, so the "improvments" to the Turnpike didn't do anything for us here.

Largely restaurants are on the main road - and nearly exclusively office parks on the side streets. Not walker friendly. And the houses? Can anybody in the surrounding low-density residential area walk to work? Look close and pan around this area on Google Maps. You'll notice something interesting: the residential streets, even when houses back office buildings, don't actually connect through to the main road. Without jumping fences or walking through the woods, you can get from very few houses to office buildings in a reasonable period of time. Some "adjacent" houses are at least a mile away from ways to legally get there. Similarly, neither Manning Road or Lexington Road interchange with Route 3 on the left-hand side of the map. In fact, Manning Road is a half-long dead end. The definition of a car-only area.

The "Smart Growth" housing projects they mention in some of the articles that should increase the number of walkers in the area similarly don't actually exist on the Turnpike, but are off in pods in the woods...just like any other cluster-zoned mid-density auto-suburb housing project. To be fair, they're not a far walk. but they still don't really feature anything you would consider "urban" or "smart" like new through-streets or very much retail of use.

So, by similar logic, the bike lanes are only a little more useful. How much further people tend to bike than walk, I don't know. But they get to take fewer shortcuts across grass and ducking under fences than people, so the purpose-built poor connectivity in this area hinders biking as well. With so few places to live along the Turnpike and so few minor residential streets connecting to it, bikers in the area are forced to ride on other major, high-speed roads to be able to get to the Turnpike. For example, Lexington Road. Somebody living on Elizabeth Drive has to bike for 1.6 miles, much of it down bike-unfriendly Lexington Rd, to get to an office building that is really only a quarter mile away from their house.

Transit has all the same problems: Too few people live along the transit route and work along it as well because the density is too low and the single-use zoned areas too large. Too many of the house and office buildings are set far too far back from the main road (or along a pedestrian friendly and well connected side street) for people to walk to or from a bus stop. And, too few buses run this route with any regularity. The LRTA from downtown Lowell comes by once an hour, and it's an hour trip (and a 15 minute drive in a private car).

It's almost like linear development, by definition, is car-centric development, as opposed to a well-connected, more circular, city center. And it's almost like car-centric developments are inherently un-green because of pollution, fossil fuel use, and tree clearing, etc. So it's almost like when our politicians get behind "green" projects like this one, the oxymoronic "green smart parkway road", that they are really going to sink large amounts of our money building just more sprawl. So, we should make them admit what they're really doing and not resort to outright lying or delirium via buzzwords, diluting the meanings of important concepts.

Why rail trails are depressing

2011-03-28T10:51:00.000-04:00

I walked part of the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail yesterday. While it was a nice walk (I made it from CrossPoint to Chelmsford Center), there was an unpleasant feeling upon me the whole way. This pathway, now an asphalt multi-purpose exercise trail, used to form an industrial link between Lowell and Framingham. There are still some old cinder block factories that back onto the old line, some abandoned. Decayed railroad signal equipment hangs from the concrete walls that raise 495 over the right-of-way, and occasionally you'll see an old spike driven into a tree. What was bothering me was that in a day and age of $3.50 gas and staggering unemployment, there is something perverse about converting a railway into a jogging trail. Why can't we manufacture along the line? Why can't passengers commute efficiently along it? Clearly, this is just another attempt at "adaptive re-use" in the age of post-industrialism: an additional expense for area communities already facing budget struggles along something that used to generate business.

The list of manufacturers that left Lowell during my lifetime has a few notable entries in it: Wang and Prince Spaghetti come to mind. In my parent's lifetime, the list gets fairly depressing. In my grandparent's lifetime, it's mind-boggling. The list of major employers in Lowell today is heavily focused on the services, education, and retail segment, and the number employed by these companies are tiny. By the time we get to all employers over 100 employees, we've employed a whopping 11,000 people (the City of Lowell itself doesn't show up on the list, but it's one of the largest employers).

For comparison, a great link was posted on RichardHowe.com last week: The Courier-Citizen Centennial newspaper from 1936. Here, in the midst of the Great Depression, the list of long-time, well-established, large, local companies, who were willing to advertise in the paper and be part of the community, was far more impressive than anything we could muster today. We've fallen to the point we get excited about this (richardhowe.com this morning linking to the New York Times): Food manufacturing and boutique, enviro-feelgood bags. Similarly, Lowell touts Moms and Jobs, while, a great idea, is not going to ever provide a large number of jobs for the local workforce - not unless we are willing to admit there is a social cost to buying Chinese-made mittens for $10 at Wal-Mart instead of $40 locally-made mittens.

Eventually, something will have to give. Healthcare is breaking down as it has become far too expensive. The education bubble is going to burst as people are getting crushed under student loans and poor job prospects. How long can we cheer the bargain shopping and "job creation" provided by big-box retail moving into town? Outside tax revenue and paying the small, largely unskilled workforce, do these superstores do anything other than suck money out of our communities? When the government is forced to scale down the DOD, what happens to all those politically valuable Military Industrial Complex companies that employ so many regionally today? How much free income for fancy restaurants and art does the average Lowellian actually have? How about five years from now, as gas prices continue to rise, bringing everything else up along with it? Once the cornerstones of our so-called "modern economy" give away, maybe we will revert to smaller scale, locally-made, more expensive "boutique" manufacturing. Necessity -also known as reality- will force it to lose its stigma as feel-good products for the overpaid and overeducated.

Maybe we'll start converting jogging trails into railways.

Merrimack River, beginning to end

2011-03-26T21:18:00.003-04:00

In the past few months, I happened to be in Franklin, New Hampshire where the Pemigewasset River meets the Winnipesaukee River and forms the Merrimack. I also was in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where the Merrimack ends at the Atlantic Ocean. Excuse the cameraphone snapshots.

Franklin, NH. The Winnipesaukee River (foreground) meeting the Pemigewasset (Background)

The mouth of the Merrimack, between Newburyport and Salisbury, Massachusetts

Lowell Downtown Neighborhood Association: Lowell High Students Populate Google Earth

2011-03-17T10:05:00.000-04:00

A quick one, thought this was pretty neat:

Lowell Downtown Neighborhood Association: Lowell High Students Populate Google Earth

The Twelve Foot lane

2011-03-16T23:05:00.000-04:00

This kind of ties back to my post on Boulevardizing the Lowell Connector.

My office park recently sent a scolding email to its residents for walking from the parking lot, over the driveway, up a bankon, and over a fence and into the building. Aside from us trampling flowers to save 30 seconds on our way into the office, they were worried we were going to get run over in the driveway.

Yes, there is a less than ideal curve and grade in the roadway right before where we cross. However, this seems silly to me: why are cars going so fast in a driveway, they risk running over adults merely crossing the street? A car going 20 MPH stops in 20 feet, including reaction time. That's not much more than a car length. If a road is so curvy you can't see a car length in front of you - you should be going slower than 20 MPH, and this office park driveway isn't that bad.

My argument was that the road is simply too wide. That it has lanes the size of an interstate yet is merely a driveway in theory. People didn't believe me so I broke out the tape measurer: Yup, twelve-foot lanes. And then some. Crazy, I said. Dangerous.

This is the required lane size for an interstate! Before you say, "hey! The lanes on an interstate don't seem that wide to me!" Think about this: The twelve-foot-wide lane can keep your below-average driver in your below-average car within its boundaries at 75 miles per hour. At 75 mph, any deviation from straight is going to get you in real trouble, real fast. If the road is narrower, to keep in our lane, we reflexively drive slower.

How wide is your average car? My Altima isn't even six feet wide. An F-150 is about 8 feet wide, and a semi might run 9 feet. While a re-engineered Connector couldn't ban Semis, we also do not want to encourage 75 mph driving, we want to encourage 30 MPH driving. So the lanes should be narrower by a foot or two a piece. Added benefit is less road noise and more room for people, bikes, and parking. The Jeff Speck Report gave the same suggestion for Market Street and other downtown roads for the same reason.

Remember kids, just say no to Twelve-foot lanes on secondary roads.

The "Haverhill Renaissance"

2011-03-15T23:56:00.000-04:00

I keep meaning to get a good-sized post going on Haverhill, but seem to never get around to it.

However, the progress being made on revitalizing Haverhill's downtown is being covered on Chronicle in about three weeks. Preview:

If you haven't been, aside from the sad fact that a huge part of Downtown Haverhill was demolished for Urban Renewal in the 1960s, what remains has some really nice streets with some pretty decent restaurants. Some of the surrounding neighborhoods are nice as well, and the city has a lot more greenspace than Lowell (it's also much smaller and further from major job centers).

Mary Ann McNamara - Lowell's Acre: Irish History Tour; March 12, 2011

2011-03-13T22:19:00.001-04:00

This Thursday, as I'm sure you all know, is Saint Patrick's Day. Like a huge number of people in the most Irish of American counties (Middlesex), I too claim Irish ancestry. However, I missed out on Irish Cultural Week.

Fellow Lowell history buff Mary Ann McNamara, did not. Mary Ann found me on Facebook a few months ago, and since then, we've shared a few stories and photos about the city with each other. Being an earlier weekend riser than I dare to be, she went on a walking tour this past Saturday with St. Patrick's Church Parish Historian/ Archivist Dave McKeanand and shared the photos she took there.

I have received a lot of requests over the years to go into churches in Lowell and photograph them. I've always felt strange about as much as trying, and the one time I did try to go into Immaculate (an easy walk from my house and a beautiful church inside), the doors were locked. Mary Ann has, in addition to neighborhood photos, added a few pictures of the inside of Saint Patrick's Church in here. Although I knew it was a Patrick Keely church, I was surprised to see that such a simple-looking church was so detailed inside. The murals are a great detail. She's very knowledgeable about the neighborhood and the parish, so go check it out!

Mary Ann McNamara - Lowell's Acre: Irish History Tour; March 12, 2011

Bill Walsh

2011-03-13T13:07:00.000-04:00

Fellow Lowell Historical Society board member Gray Fitzsimons sent me a series of photos taken by Bill Walsh from 1959 to 1961. The focus is on industrial concerns along the Concord River / River Meadow (Hales) Brook. I did my best to place these on the maps from the photos themselves, Lowell Firefighting (in the case of American Hide and Leather, which burnt in the late 1970s), or from stories I've heard over the years.

Any other help identifying where these pictures are or more information about the companies or buildings would be much appreciated!

Bill Walsh

Re-imagining the Lowell Connector

2011-02-25T21:52:00.004-05:00

Back in December when we did the Blogger's Meetup, I met Allegra Williams who had just joined the DPD. She proposed an idea to me that I admit I found somewhat absurd at face value: Demolish the Lowell Connector.

We often talk about how highways are often a blight to cities, but Lowell's connection to the area super-highway network seems like something we just can't give up. She had mentioned putting a linear park in its place. Linear parks to nowhere and near nowhere are not my favorite idea. Sounds like a way to spend a lot of parks money on something that will only introduce crime, but maybe I misunderstood her (I'll get back to this). I mentioned I would gladly see the Connector lose a lane because it is clear, much like Fr. Morissette Blvd, that it was made wider than it needs to be because it was never completed as planned. The width encourages speeding, and the loss of a lane would slow cars down and improve the ramp geometry. Really, at under 3 miles in length, how much better than 3 minutes at 60 MPH do we need to go? Chelmsford Street, I argued, could not handle the extra traffic the city would face, and the Connector really isn't very disruptive to the city. This isn't the Central Artery (thank God!)

Meanwhile, others have argued that Lowell needs a Daniel Webster style shopping district, or perhaps a business district like we see in the suburbs. Along the Connector, they'd argue, would be perfect. While I remain skeptical that we actually need, want, or could support such a thing, Tanner Street is clearly underutilized.

However, in the last few months, I have heard Adam Baacke over at DPD make a pie-in-the sky proposal that is perhaps what Allegra actually meant: Make the Connector a Boulevard. Ok, NOW we're talking my language! This has been done elsewhere. San Francisco boulevardized the Embarcadero Freeway many years ago. My modest proposal tackles many things at once that bother me about Lowell's layout. So, let's do a mental exercise on what we could do here:

Phase 1:

The Connector becomes street level at Howard/Tanner Street at a light, heading inbound. It is two or three lanes in each direction (I imagine three inbound, two out because of the existent Gorham Street bottleneck) with a very small curb-like median. Maybe it's got trees. We allow parking on the side between curb bump-outs near the intersections with Gorham Street and Thorndike Street and the speed limit is 30MPH. The lanes are narrowed to encourage this speed.
A major intersection with a focus on left-turn lanes inbound from the new Boulevard to Thorndike Street. Maybe we make this a two-lane wide traffic circle, but it would probably have to be pretty sizable and the park in the center, while a nice gateway, would likely be a dead zone without a lot of good uses nearby.
Remove the massive offramp from the Connector inbound to Thorndike Street. This would allow us a huge amount of room to redevelop the area around Gallagher Square.
Similarly, the ramp to 3A south being removed and the ramp from Thorndike to the Connector Outbound being removed also opens a lot of space for new construction along Thorndike, The Connector Boulevard, and YMCA Drive.
A shuttle bus could be run out of the train station, down Thorndike, along the new boulevard, and back up YMCA drive to the bus station. Maybe we'd have bike lanes on the roads if they fit. People would want a trolley but I don't see it working right now.
The buildings along this stretch would be mixed-use, and shoot for ground-floor uses when possible. Parking is structured or in the back.
Build a new building with ground-floor retail and structured parking in the parking lot for Comfort Furniture. While one of the MIT plans suggested simply removing the current tenants of that building so that people would walk to retail from the train/bus station, I don't think that's right. There is room for a building right along Thorndike Street there that would encourage people to walk by it and into the new developments further down the road.
This stretch of road is so short that I don't see it having much effect on total travel time from Gorham Street to Industrial Ave. Besides, once YMCA Drive to Tanner becomes a way to get on the Connector and the ramp near YMCA drive is removed, some traffic will move off of the troublesome YMCA Drive/Thorndike/Connector intersectiony-thing, increasing capacity of the road network.

Phase 2:

The Connector becomes street level at Plain Street. It is two lanes in each direction and it widens to three for places with intersections to allow for generous turn lanes and curb bump-outs at intersections for pedestrian safety. Travel time from Gorham Street to Industrial Ave goes from three minutes to say, seven or eight, to account for the new lights and halved (ideal) speed. Eating up the two-plus lane wide median, the graded banks, and narrowing the lanes by a foot or so each would allow us to fit narrow but usable buildings along the side of the Connector Boulevard. These buildings, which will lag behind the Connector redesign by many years likely (and some will fall into Phase 3) would likely be a combination of offices and apartment buildings. A linear street like this does not really attract too much pedestrian activity so I'm afraid storefronts would be limited, but keep the buildings on the street and parking access in the rear to allow this to change.
New intersections:

Lincoln Street, which will get a Y in it so it also crosses over River Meadow Brook to connect to say, Factory St by the old RMV as well as Connector Blvd. Or maybe we do W. London to Parker instead.
A reconnected Cambridge Street
Perhaps some of the side-streets off of Hale that dead-end along the Connector are connected to the Connector at stop-signs. Perhaps not.

Remove the ramps from Plain St inbound and Connector to Plain outbound. This opens up a lot of land for some pretty sizable buildings in their place along Manufacturers Street and across the brook from Tanner Street.

OK, so that's Phase Two. Phase Three after the jump.

Still with me? Good! Phase Three:

The removal of the ramps from Plain Street would allow us to shift the Connector Blvd away from Tanner Street, making it possible to add a sensible set of lights there.
Tanner Street is widened to two lanes in each direction, looking much like the Connector Blvd.
There is a massive amount of hard to access and underutilized land along Tanner Street - add streets here and new car-oriented businesses and apartment buildings. This area is about the size of Lowell's current core downtown - let's not get too greedy pretending that this area is going to look like the Hamilton Canal District. Besides, we want to keep many of the existing companies down there, including the NIMBY L'Energia power plant. However, put the parking lots in back and use garages when practical and affordable.
One of those streets should be a continuation of Cambridge Street over to Gorham, probably coming out near the Mobil. This would require a large bridge over the rail-yard, but so be it. Another option would be to have it come out closer to Moore St.
Perhaps some of the large new buildings on Tanner Street cross over River Meadow Brook like the mill buildings are perched over the canals or like Providence-Place Mall - this would allow large buildings to front the Connector as well.
However, they would have room for a walkway underneath them with access into the buildings. The buildings that do not cross the brook would also have back entrances along the brook, where we would put a walkway with frequent pedestrian bridges over to the Connector.
Do something to make the brook not the ugly drainage ditch it has become.
Having a more used Tanner Street with frequent street tie-ins to the Connector would allow people to drive one or the other depending on the traffic. Today, Tanner Street is very underutilized.

Phase Four:

Extend Tanner Street down along the parking lot for the Target to Industrial Ave East. Let's not pretend this will be for anything but cars, but it will improve connectivity. The rail line separating the two streets is long dead and can be built over.
Narrow the remaining freeway part of the Connector, or at least fix the outbound weave situation from Industrial Ave to Route 3 South some other way.
Build a bridge over the brook and over the Connector to connect this area to Chelmsford Street by Lowe's. Perhaps we actually put a stoplight on the Connector instead of building a bridge over it. However, this step is probably not worth the trouble. This will remain an area for cars and trucks, and the current street network around here seems to work fine.
Build the long-ago planned ramp from Gorham Street to 495. It is far too hard to cross the Concord River down there by trekking up to Lawrence Street or over through the Cemeteries to Industrial Ave.

Crazy? Probably. Also unaffordable and likely oversized to meet the current demand. But interesting to think about.

Information Overload! High Volume, Low Quality

2011-02-18T00:01:00.000-05:00

I've always felt I was born at a particularly interesting time to comment on the Information Revolution, because the core changes happened just as I was growing up. I'm about the youngest you'll get that remembers life before all these changes and about the oldest you'll get that will spend their whole adult life trying to figure out how to function with them.

Maybe that's just me thinking I'm special because I'm part of "Generation Me" or the Millennials, or Gen Y or whatever we are this week. I was born in 1983, so that means that I'm near the older end of where people are drawing the line between Generations X and Y. When I think about how learning, playing, and interacting with the world was done when I was growing up (let's say 1995) versus when my late Boomer parents were growing up (say 1970), what was different? I had video games and VHS. I guess by the time I was 12 we had cable TV, but we didn't when I was real young. Computers hadn't trickled down to really affect kids beyond being another way to play video games yet (I saw the internet for the first time in 1994, I remember sending my first email maybe in 1996 and posted in newsgroups by 1997). Beyond that, TV, radio, telephone, long-playing recorded music (LPs and CDs aren't all that different in terms of functionality), encyclopedias, newspapers, magazines, hell going to the library...all pretty much the same between the first ten or so years of my life and my parents.

When it comes to how we communicate and how we consume media, there is a far, far larger gap between me and someone maybe even ten years younger than I am, never mind what 25 years will look like. If you were born in 1993, by the time you were twelve, there was a mature broadband internet with things like a young Facebook and iTunes and the dawn of YouTube, dirt cheap powerful computers, cell phones, mp3 players, etc. And 12-year olds use these things! Sure, there were cell phones in 1995, but no kids had them. I don't remember anybody in high school sending text messages. YouTube didn't exist until I was basically out of college.

I remember being disconnected and unreachable...having to plan your day in advance (ok, another difference between my parents childhood and mine: answering machines). I remember what it was like to not know the answer to something and to either have to ask somebody or find a book and hope the answer was available, and not just have Wikipedia on an iPhone to go to.

So, for better or for worse - and I'm far, far, far from the first person to comment on this - the world has changed in fundamental ways...and quickly. Too quickly for society to have understood and adjusted to. What does it mean? Over the past few years, there has been a lot of discussion over what all this technology is doing to our brains: Email makes you dumber than smoking marijuana (2005). Those under 30 are the 'Dumbest Generation.' (2008) Kids spend every waking minute they are not in school plugged in (2010). Of course, there has been backlash: One mom recently unplugged her family for six months.

There are certainly benefits to the always-on and on-demand information revolution. For example, I'm writing a blog entry (that people I've never met are going to read) on a wireless-broadband laptop with a multi-hour battery charge from bed and I found all four of the stories I posted in the last paragraph in under five minutes on Google. However, it took me fifteen minutes to get my concentration together to actually start writing because I got distracted by a huge volume of information as soon as I logged in. So, I wonder what is going on with how people think, learn, and participate in society. Now that we do have these amazing and convenient technologies, what did we lose?

I'm not sure we'll know for sure until those ten, fifteen, twenty years younger than me enter the workforce starting in another four years or so. Because, as I said, unlike myself on the generational cusp, these kids will never know any different.

More after the jump.

I did something I hadn't done in a long time yesterday: I read a magazine article. I was stuck at the car dealership and National Geographic had a great article on the world population hitting seven billion. But this isn't about the article. This isn't about how in a saner world, our unnamed suburb I was trapped in would've plowed the sidewalks on its major commercial street so I could walk to a coffee shop. It's about the fact that it is the first feature-length article I've read in a very, very long time. I've read plenty of short, factual articles on the topic. I've read plenty of books on tangential topics, but books tend to have much stronger agendas and be one-sided. This article made me really think, instead of nodding agreeingly as I often do.

This is why we are being called the Dumbest Generation: our constant consumption of media is via social networking, blog posts, and short online news articles - no depth, no concentration, no reflection. Even the 24/7 news cycle of cable news can't hold our attention because we want the good stuff now - only John Stewart's very short and ADD Daily Show can. Even the Paper of Record here in Lowell (which I hold a dead-tree subscription to although I tend to just toss it because I read it online before I even see the print copy at my house), basically never runs a feature-length story these days. The difference with me from many of the Dumbest Generation attacks, and maybe the fact that I'm not all that young plays into this, is that I still read a lot of books. And paper ones at that, thank you very much.

As someone who was reared on Nintendo Power, Highlights, Boy's Life, Astronomy, and later Rolling Stone, Popular Mechanics, and Newsweek, this was sort of a frightening realization. I very carefully select what parts of the deluge of media I want to read, and digest it in small chunks. That means, at least in theory, I'm missing out on a whole hell of a lot. That is, even though I consider my breadth of knowledge, being an unapologetic Wikipedian, above average, my depth in crucial areas - like politics - is pretty poor. And it's not exactly that I don't care...it's how we are presented the material today.

I spent last weekend drinking beers and playing board games with some old friends of mine. Of course, the topic went to politics, and I found myself sorely outmatched. They too, are avid book readers, but we read in different - but tangential - areas. It was one of those rare adult opportunities to sit down with a group of people and just talk and make each other think, and it was one of the most enriching experiences I've had in a long time. Human contact! Civilized debate! Sam Adams! I recently got a copy of Bowling Alone, which had been recommended to me many times, which I think talks about this sort of thing. Did I mention I drove 100 miles each way for this conversation? What happened to a neighborhood group of friends?

A few days later, I had a phone conversation with another friend who lives hundreds of miles away about this very topic - our failure to get any depth out of the media. NPR had mentioned a few days before (my girlfriend listens, I prefer WFNX) that the number of foreign correspondents for major US news organizations is frighteningly low and dropping (note the article is from 2007). The context was what just happened in Egypt. What did just happen in Egypt? My friend and I knew that there were protests, the president stepped down, the military took over, and the constitution had been suspended...but we really didn't know why or why we should care. Something about oppression and a potential domino effect. Really kinda sad.

So, while some of us might feel heady because we read a lot of Wikipedia, Google News, SlashDot and other blogs...or because our friends post Facebook updates about graphics on the national budget instead of pictures of them drinking at some seedy bar, how much better are we than those who rapidly digest the latest celebrity news on PerezHilton or feel-good off of CuteOverload? Probably not as much as we'd like to think. We still miss a lot of the meat. You like knowing what Giselle is up to, I'd prefer to understand the history and layout of Westminster Palace. Doesn't mean I know much of anything about Parliament. I defend myself by saying at least with broad knowledge, I know what I don't know. Which, I think, is one of the most powerful tools in successfully navigating our world.

So, in closing, while I feel like I should subscribe to a news magazine or two and work on building a better local network of People Who Care, I'm going to do a shout-out to Greg Page over at http://anewenglanderinlowell.blogspot.com/, who is getting deployed to Afganistan. I had posted this on my Facebook a while back, and he appreciated it. I think with all the preparation he had to do for deployment, he never got a chance to repost it on his own site. It's somewhat topical to my post.

Here is why cell phones are ruining America and how we can stop it:

I know that it has been fewer than 15 years since cell phones started showing up everywhere, but we need to lay out some ground rules. The base is, that cell phones are a new technology that add a lot of convenience to life, but people survived without them for millennia. Therefore, you don't owe them anything, and life would continue without them.
1. WHEN IT IS OK TO ANSWER A PHONE
If you are having a conversation in person, especially if in public, it is often rude to interrupt it to answer your phone. You are dealing with somebody who is right there who has given you the time out of their day to talk to you. The person on the other end of the phone might be sitting on the toilet. It is ok to excuse yourself and check what the number is. If you have to take the call, excuse yourself. The rules for text messages are the same. Odds are the person on the other end can wait.
1a. If you make an important call and you don't get an answer, call right back. Ringing twice in a row implies "this is important!" Don't ignore people that keep calling.
1b. It is never proper to send critical text messages. Most phones have a very short ring for a new text message. You have no idea if and when they noticed it, because there is no confirmation on receipt. Text messages get lost in routing sometimes as well. Phone rings are far more likely to get someone's attention.
2. WHEN IT IS OK TO LEAVE VOICEMAILS
Don't leave useless voicemails. They know you called from the missed call log, they'll probably call you back. If it's going to take longer for them to log into voicemail than it will to listen to you tell them you need eggs on the way home, you just stole part of somebody's life. Send a text message instead if you must.
3. GENERAL RULES ON WHEN PHONES ARE NECESSARY
Don't message or call people physically near you unless you have a very compelling reason. We didn't invent phones that interact with space so you can message someone within earshot about something stupid. Cell phones emit radiation in the microwave band. Don't cook your brain any more than you have to, there's only so much you can lose and still manage to be coherent enough to end up on textsfromlastnight.com.
3a. It is still ok to rock it like it's 1995 and actually plan things ahead. "I will meet you at time at place" and then sticking to your schedule instead of winging it by cell is perfectly ok. What if the phone dies or something? With the magic of cell phones though, if something CHANGES in the plan, now you have a way to do something about it! This is technology for good, not evil. Plus, studies show the constant interruptions by cell phones are ruining people's abilities to concentrate and making them stupider. Phone etiquette confirms this.

4. WHEN TO CALL VS WHEN TO TEXT

If it's something quick and stupid that is not super time sensitive, send a text message. If you're trying to express something that requires careful wording, send a text message, or better yet, an email. If it's complex sets of instructions, or requires input from the other person, or, as I said earlier, really important, use the phone. No text message conversation should exceed 3 messages for each party, back and forth. And even that is pushing it. There is only one thing worse than a call where you answer and all you have to say is "oh yeah sure, will do - bye." That thing is being interrupted every 15 seconds by a new text message. It is often quicker to talk and better for people's sanity. Remember, I'm a computer nerd: Text message: asynchronous, connectionless. Phone call: synchronous, session-based. You'd never misuse these messaging types on the internet, don't do it in real life.

4a. That said, it is often a good idea to follow up a call with a text, so the person doesn't forget what you need them to do. Addresses, phone numbers, grocery lists...these are good text message things. But make sure the person got them!

4b. It is perfectly ok to again, do it old school and text someone you expect to be busy and say "call when you have a chance." They used to call this paging and it was a good idea.

5. HOW TO USE PHONES IN PUBLIC

I don't care how long they've been around - those bluetooth headsets make you look crazy and self-important. Anybody that is worth talking to in public that isn't actually there is worth the respect of you giving up one hand to hold a phone to your ear.

5a. Similarly, if you can't text and walk, don't do it. If you can't talk and drive, don't do it. Never text and drive, you can't do it.

5b. LOUDLY TALKING ON YOUR PHONE or being glued to your keyboard texting in public is often very rude. Nobody else cares about the awesome night you're about to have. Nobody cares about your babysitting plans. Get up and go to the places where they used to put the phone booths if you have to gab. They were set off by the bathrooms and not at each and every table for a reason - common courtesy.

5c. It is impolite, if you must text in public, to leave your ringer on. It is impolite to leave your cell phone ringer on in places that are fairly quiet, like restaurants, or meetings, or movies.

6. WHAT TO EXPECT FROM OTHER CELLULAR USERS

It is perfectly ok to not answer your phone or not immediately return a phone call. If you get mad when you don't hear from somebody within 10 minutes, you are a bad person. 150 years ago, it'd take four days by mail for somebody to get your letter and write back, if they were in a nearby town. You can wait an hour or two for most conversations today.

6a. As I said, it is a good idea to make plans and stick to them. It is incredibly rude and disrespectful to be both unable to make plans, and refuse to respond promptly to calls/messages. You can badly screw up people's day this way.

8. WHEN TO USE FURTHER FEATURES OF YOUR PHONE

It is EXTREMELY impolite to use flashes on cameras in public. The bar is dark for a reason - we don't want to see you. Stop blinding us and interrupting us by taking yet another duck-faced, pompadoured, bleached out, colored contacted, orange-skinned, brand pimping, malternative drinking photo for Facebook.

Thank you

And with that, I continue to barrage you with media. This one is a video from Lewis C.K., the comedian that Lowellians know from his supporting role in The Invention of Lying. This may be a re-post for me, but he's discussing being appreciative of technology and understanding how it has changed the world. He's right, the world today is amazing and people take it for granted, but technology is to serve us...we can't let it destroy us.

Wouldn't it be nice...

2011-02-14T00:58:00.001-05:00

This past Friday I went to a Young Professionals of Greater Lowell event at the Tsongas Center. This was my first YPGL event and also my first time to the Arena since it became a Center. I have to say that I'm impressed with what they've done with the place!

The new club areas look great. The YPGL meeting was in one of the clubs, the Talon Club. Although I decided against introducing myself to Chancellor Meehan (this was a dual-function meet with UML alumni), I did have a good, long conversation with somebody I met who works over at the Department of Planning and Development. Go networking.

Having only a passing interest in hockey (it was UML versus Northeastern, Northeastern won in OT), I spent much of the game studying the crowd. Total seats sold? About 50% UML student count? Very low. Commuter school, Friday night...not too surprised. Is it always like this? Northeastern fans? Surpisingly high. How many are current and how many are locals who went there years earlier, I don't know. UML fans from the community, many with children? Probably the largest demographic, and a pleasant surprise after the loss of our AHL team. Watching the scoreboard list off organizations that were there, a surprising number of companies and schools were at the game for a Friday night hours after work closes.

After the game, my friend and I walked back to my house, down Arcand Drive and then along Dutton Street. As we were walking on sheer ice and knee-deep snow along high-speed roads and by one parking lot after another, it occurred to me that we had just watched an audience of I guess around 3,000 people just outside of downtown Lowell nearly all pile into their cars and wait to get out of that garage. My guess is most were headed directly home. Anybody coming from Northeastern by public transit would've found they took the green line from school to North Station to get a commuter train to Lowell to...have to walk down Dutton Street's narrow sidewalks in the dark to get to the game, never really passing down a single major or attractive commercial street on the way? Not a good selling point. Now...what if the pie-in-the-sky plans to add some sort of commercial spaces along Arcand Drive and Cox Circle materialize? There would be a few nights during hockey season that they'd get extra business from the game alone. People going to Spinners games would drive past on their way to the ballpark, and maybe they'd stop, too. Is it enough of a draw to cause the buildings to get built? Alone? No way. Yet, look at the restaurant and bar density near the Garden or Fenway. Lowell is no Boston, but I bet we can do better than we are (look at the Kearney Square crowds when something is up at the Auditorium), and I know it's being discussed.

Happy Birthday Blog!

2011-02-14T00:09:00.000-05:00

So, my blog has made it one year...actually it made it a little over a week ago. As expected, the main topic has been Lowell, and particularly urbanism. What does year two bring? Maybe I'll go take some more pictures as the weather warms up and the snow melts but before the trees come in. I'm sure there will be things in the news worth talking about. Beyond that, I don't know.

I've enjoyed blogging because beyond the standard knowledge-sharing bit, it has allowed me to meet with and bounce ideas off quite a few people virtually and in person. Besides, I write largely to organize and challenge my own thoughts. However, I don't like to be a broken record and at times I feel like I'm getting to that territory. Sometimes, I also feel maybe I should name my blog :-)

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

2011-01-25T23:50:00.001-05:00

I've been saying for many months that I've been intending to read - then was reading, Jane Jacob's famous 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I've finally finished it! While looking up some facts that would be hard to track down in the book, I ran upon a kind of Cliff's Notes for the book here, but I'll give mine, too. I'm going to try to keep this short (for me) as I don't have much to add and I'd just recommend you read the book.

While the cover quotes the New York Times saying "Perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning...a work of literature," Jacobs herself begins the book, simply enough, "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." For the next 450 pages across 22 chapters in four parts, she does just that. More importantly, she offers insight into what was - and often still is - wrong with American thought on urbanism, and what can be done about it. She is remarkably astute at seeing things how they really were, or are, and what the city planners of the day completely failed to see as the real solution.

However, as a "work of literature", we need to mentally transport ourselves back to 1961 to understand why she was so worked up. Here was a time in city planning that "urban renewal" was in full swing - neighborhood after neighborhood from coast to coast was being demolished for monolithic housing projects, which, even in 1961, were turning failing neighborhoods into perpetual slums. Interstates were being driven through well-established neighborhoods, doing irreversible damage. Suburban malls and subdivisions were springing up everywhere, draining cities of their middle class, along with their income, vibrancy, and later, their jobs.

Here in Lowell, which by her definition is far from a Great American City (more on that later), the Connector had just been constructed and plans for its extension were being contemplated. The Merrimack Manufacturing Company millyard had just been demolished, and the clearing of Little Canada was in full-swing. Lowell's economy was crumbling, and places like Chelmsford, spurred by the construction of I-495 and the continued movement of US-3 onto a slowly-constructed freeway, were rapidly turning pre-Revolution farmland into middle-class suburbia. Jacobs stood up and simply said "Stop! This is all a counterproductive, false solution to a very real problem!" As a street-level resident of New York City's now much-loved Greenwich Village, she was in a fantastic position to tell us why the greatest of America's Great Cities succeeds where it does, and fails where it does. Her research on other major American cities confirms what she had largely learnt from walking her own streets.

Her ultimate complaint was that scientific methods unsuited for, as the last chapter of the book is titled, "The kind of problem a city is" had been applied to city planning since the late 19th century. Throughout movements like the Garden City Movement, the Radiant City concepts, and the City Beautiful Movement, attempts had been made by those who were "trained," and as she puts it having an "Olympian" viewpoint on a city, had converged on a plan she calls Radiant Garden City Beautiful.

Radiant Garden City Beautiful tells us that urban street life is bad. It's dirty, it's congested, it's full of strangers and traffic. It keeps people of means near people without, leading to crime. It would be much better for a City of the Future to be a series of towers in a park, surrounded by wide boulevards for high-speed car traffic. The towers would sort like people with like people, and they may feature schools and continuing ed centers, carefully planned civic centers, and controlled shopping centers. The residents would love their spacious, well-lit apartments, they'd love their campus-like setting for living, they'd love knowing their neighbors so well. Outside the city, connected by massive expressways, we'd have houses on sizable lots, again, set out for like people, where a life not entirely unlike village life before the Industrial Revolution would exist.

However, as I said, even by 1961, this was proving to not be the case. I had written about Cabrini-Greene in the past: this poster-child of failed projects dates to the 1940s, being completed in 1962. Why don't they work? People don't use the parks around projects because they are uninteresting. Often people don't use city parks in general because they are uninteresting, underused, and therefore, dangerous. The lack of decent stores - if any - is boring. The lack of "eyes on the street" as she discusses makes the halls and elevators of these projects dangerous. The same lack of eyes on the street makes grey areas, old semi-suburban neighborhoods like we have plenty of in Lowell, dangerous (back to this later a bit as well). The huge boulevards around the projects makes crossing them unattractive to people inside and outside the projects. People likewise don't like to cross through the projects, leading to what she calls in a late chapter "border vacuums" which, much like interstates or civic centers, people will not cross without great reason.

Ultimately, while looking for a Utopian way of dealing with city problems, a solution had been settled on that attempted to simplify cities into discrete blocks of "Retail", "Low Income Residential", "Civic Center", etc. In essence, they worked to destroy city diversity to make it easier to conceptualize and plan. They try to bring order to chaos, to make art out of the city at a macro level*. It ultimately doesn't add up. She repeatedly goes back to the planner that wanted the North End of Boston to meet the fate of the former West End: conversion to dull high-rises (If you lived here, you'd be home by now!) His argument to destroy the vibrant, stable, but then unwealthy ethnic neighborhood people from all over America come to see? On paper, it's a slum. It's too dense, and too poor. Then, she argues, why do people stay? She also draws a line between too dense (too many housing units per acre) and too crowded (too many people in one housing unit. Guess which one is likely really the problem here in Lowell as well?)

*An aside: To fellow SimCity players, this all makes sense. The best SimCities are those that are meticulously laid out, mathematically, in particular ratios of megablocks. A chaotic, organic city often breaks the game's cellular automata engine, causing massive waves of change in established neighborhoods, and senseless commuting patterns. The city never settles into equilibrium because the number of variables on a given building (or cell) never evens out. The query tools become useless, and the "real" city never works out in the game. Therefore, the best way to play SimCity is just like a mid-century urban planner - with very well separated out areas for commercial, residential, and industrial uses. And for this reason, I've gotten tired of the game.

More after the jump

Jacobs argues throughout the middle part of the book that diversity brings robustness, and robustness makes a city thrive. The lack of diversity, she argues, is ultimately what makes cities - and projects and suburbs - ultimately fail. They become fragile.

She has four criteria for diversity that she discusses at great length, and all are required for a truly virbant neighborhood: First, districts must have more than one primary use. Secondly, blocks must be short with a lot of cross streets. Third, buildings must be of mixed age, so that different types of uses may be found (some require new construction, some need the low rents of old construction). Finally, populations must meet a certain density, and much of that must be residential. We see these arguments here in Lowell today. After decades of decreasing the numbers of streets in Lowell, building massive projects all at once, decreasing density, and separating out residential uses from others, we are beginning to see things as Jacobs saw them. Probably largely because as other, far "greater" cities have found out, Radiant Garden City ideas don't work.

However, when we think of Lowell as a "city," she would see it largely as semi-suburban, and therefore, bound to have problems. She's right, I think. Much of truly "urban" Lowell had been lost to renewal projects around the time she was writing. She would classify much of Lowell as a "grey area." The first part of the book discusses why a good city neighborhood works, and why grey areas ultimately fail.

Now, I know that not everybody wants to live in a dense city, and I know all about the studies of people getting murdered in New York and plenty of people hearing it and nobody doing anything, and about "tight-knit" streets in Lowell where everyone knows everyone else and nothing bad ever happens, but what she says makes sense at a level as well. I'm not advocating turning the entire city of Lowell into a repeat of the densities downtown, I'm saying some of our collective conventional wisdom is off. Her argument goes as such:

Grey areas are lower density residential neighborhoods built for a middle class that, over time, become enveloped inside the growing city. However, as the mobile and wealthy middle class moves further out, they leave behind them housing that is not equipped to handle the population that moves in, at times, turning over very quickly, destabilizing the neighborhood. The housing units become overcrowded and unpleasant, which as I said above, is different from being too dense. A dense city with active street life and a steady cast of invested characters (residents young and old, shopkeepers, landlords) provides eyes on the street, which includes built-in education and civic direction for children, and safety in general. It's inherently an interesting place, with varied street life during much of the day and night. People watch out for each other, even if they don't know them, because there is no real expectation of commitment with assisting strangers in small ways. A less dense semi-suburb of largely one income class with no street life and a few people who move in and out at will provides no protection in the public realm, because the public realm becomes a desert. What's scarier? A junkie on Central Street at noon on a Tuesday, surrounded by cars, businessmen, students, etc or a man standing outside an out-of-place old van on a dark suburban street in Tyngsboro at 10 PM? This is why we've invented gated communities.

I promised I'd keep this short so I can't properly summarize - or parrot - and certainly not coherently edit a review of - 450 pages, so I'm going to cut myself off here. The book is really good. She talks about how cars are not what's really ruining cities, how interstates should be for trucks only instead of our current cars-only parkways. She discusses how money coming into an area too quickly can be catastrophic, how public housing is a huge mistake and subsidized housing is the right way to go. She suggests letting people stay in their previously subsidized housing at market-rate rent after they can afford more to keep people in the neighborhood.

As another aside towards the end of the book, she says the following. I think it really captures a lot of how I feel about what we've done to cities and the environment in this country:

It is neither love for nature nor respect for nature that leads to this [viewpoint that cities are not natural, a la, she cites, Thomas Jefferson's hatred of cities and love for farming (done by slaves in his case!)]. Instead it is a sentimental desire to toy, rather patronizingly, with some insipid, standardized, suburbanized shadow of nature—apparently in sheer disbelief that we and our cities, just by virtue of being, are a legitimate part of nature too, and involved with it in much deeper and more inescapable ways than grass trimming, sunbathing, and contemplative uplift. And so, each day, several thousand more acres of our countryside are eaten by the bulldozers, covered by pavement, dotted with suburbanites who have killed the thing they thought they came to find. Our irreplaceable heritage of Grade I agricultural land (a rare treasure of nature on this earth) is sacrificed for highways or supermarket parking lots as ruthlessly and unthinkingly as the trees in the woodlands are uprooted, the streams and rivers polluted and the air itself filled with the gasoline exhausts (products of eons of nature’s manufacturing) required in this great national effort to cozy up with a fictionalized nature and flee the “unnaturalness” of the city.

Amen...

Parks and Recreation Programs

2011-01-24T09:32:00.001-05:00

A reader asked me to spread the word about some city programs for kids going on:

I saw the city is starting to offer some great and needed programs thru Parks and Recreation. My daughter plays in the "free" indoor hockey league and loves it. The staff is awesome with the kids too!

http://www.lowellma.gov/depts/parks-recreation/parks-and-recreation

Tony Sampas

2011-01-18T09:03:00.002-05:00

Readers of richardhowe.com are familiar with Tony Sampas' photography. He has done a great job capturing Lowell,including architectural detail work and night shots. Check out his flickr photostream here

Albany paper's blog on urbanism

2011-01-12T01:27:00.000-05:00

I'm on a roll, so don't miss the other two posts I put up tonight below!

I mentioned back in October that a staff writer for the Albany Times-Union, Chris Churchill, was writing some interesting articles about the Capital District, which includes Troy and Schenectady as well as Albany. His blog is very interesting if you're into urban stuff at all (and I'd hope you were if you bother reading me ;-) ). Recent highlights include a new redevelopment project for downtown Troy that will feature grad student housing for RPI, and the demolition of Troy City Hall: an atrocious concrete building that was a mere 35 years old and made the JFK Civic Center look like a baroque palace:

http://blog.timesunion.com/realestate/author/chrischurchill/

As sort of an aside, I mentioned James Kunstler in my post on his book The Long Emergency. Living in upstate New York, he does a webcast with a Troy resident, Duncan Crary, who was transcribed on Churchill's blog here. I want people to pay attention to the level of discourse in the comments section on this blog: New City Hall Doesn't Need Parking. Why can't Lowell's "official" media do this!?

Judge Doom

2011-01-12T00:54:00.000-05:00

Don't miss my new post below this one about redevelopment projects through the years in Lowell, but I love this clip from 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit, taking a stab at the alleged GM Streetcar Conspiracy and the thought-processes of postwar America:

A history of redevelopment in central Lowell

2011-01-12T00:27:00.010-05:00

While the discussion at leftinlowell around Dharma Buns and Downtown Lowell in general is still going on, I wanted to take a step back to look at the history of some larger redevelopment projects in Lowell, going back 80 years:

(Click map for big!)

Pink: North Common, 1930s. One of the first public redevelopment projects in the history of America, The Greek Acre was cleared for housing . The dilapidated and crowded neighborhood and the residents and businesses in it were replaced with low to mid-rise apartments - and no new storefronts. Some streets in the area were removed as well, generally replaced with pedestrian ways.

Green: Bishop Markham, etc, 1950s. There are a few different projects included here. The cross-shaped buildings along South Common and Gorham Street replaced a neighborhood and de-mapped quite a few streets. The end of the Connector demolished even more homes and streets. What little was left of the neighborhood beginning at the intersection of Gorham and Thorndike (Gallagher Square) and continuing up to the northern border of South Common at ~~South~~ Summer Street is often blamed for the death of Saint Peter's parish. I can't say for sure, but I've heard South Street was closed to traffic for years.

Other projects around this time (or a little later, I'm doing this from memory!) were the Lord Overpass, which split Middlesex Street in half and took the old train station and hotel, and the clearing of the old Middlesex Mills on Warren Street for a parking lot that became the Lower Locks garage and hotel, now the ICC, decades later. The VFW highway was built this decade, but aside from destroying a few buildings along Bridge Street at Lakeview Ave, this seems like it was fairly unobtrusive, like most of the Lowell Connector was (which was built along River Meadow / Hale's Brook). I also included the construction of Veteran's Way and the Central Plaza in with this project, but I'm not sure when those happened. I think Central Plaza was the 1950s, but I believe Veteran's way was decades later.

Yellow: North Canal / Little Canada / Merrimack Manufacturing Company, 1960s. Apparently intended to be redeveloped along a Lowell Connector that was never completed through and around the downtown, the clearing of the Little Canada neighborhood between the North Canal and the river was done in the 1960s. This neighborhood was replaced with Father Morissette Boulevard, low-rise industrial concerns with large parking lots like Notini's and a supermarket which was where Lelacheur park stands today. One business which survived was today's Lowell Provision Company, which moved across the Aiken Street Bridge to West Centralville. Moody Street was cut off at both ends, disconnecting Merrimack Street from the then Moody Street, now University Ave Bridge (and in my opinion, causing the current plans for a realignment of that bridge to surviving Merrimack Street), and removed a few cross streets that used to connect Merrimack Street to what is now Father Morissette Boulevard. For example, Suffolk Street, which I didn't color all of. Somehow, in the middle of all of this, the Wannalancit Mill remains.

The same decade saw the demolition of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company and its boardinghouses, and the construction of Arcand Drive. The Boardinghouses were replaced in the 1970s with the Lowell High addition, and the rest of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company properties were replaced with a small professional building (behind Cobblestones), a small office building which is now the headquarters for Lowell Five, the much-unloved JFK Civic Center, and Riverplace Towers. The low industrial buildings which were built at the end of Arcand Drive on land just beyond the Merrimack Manufacturing Company yard were replaced in the 1990s with the Tsongas Arena.

Red: Hale-Howard, 1970s. This project running along Chelmsford Street and de-mapping large parts of Hale and Howard streets replaced a tenement neighborhood with a few large industrial buildings, the new train station, and its garages. Part of Hale Street became known as YMCA drive when the new YMCA was built and the bridge over the railroad tracks was removed, making it a dead-end street. The bridge I believe was re-built in the 1990s. Howard Street only remains as a small section from Chelmsford to (almost) Middlesex Street, that end being lost to the ramps of the Lord Overpass. The other end remains where Tanner Street makes a sharp turn at the power plant. Hale Street's original termination at Lincoln Square where Lincoln, Liberty, Hale, and Chelmsford Streets all meet, was removed at the same time I think.

In the 1980s, all I can think of was the construction of the Sampson Connector, which redirected Thorndike Street to Dutton Street instead of Fletcher Street, and removed parking along Dutton. We also built many of the garages, although I'm sure some date to the late 1970s. I think they were all built on already vacant or nearly vacant land, which signifies a positive trend. Similarly, we built the hotel and the Wang building that is now Middlesex Community College on what used to be surface parking lots. Also, the later Gateway Center buildings on Warren Street I know used to be empty railyards, but I don't know what was there in between, if anything. By the 1990s and into the 2000s, we built the ballpark and the arena, and the mill re-purposing instead of demolition that had begun with the creation of the National Park at the end of the 1970s and gaining steam in the 1980s continued.

So, looking at our history, the massive clearance projects that destroyed just about every neighborhood bordering downtown Lowell but not too much of downtown itself (thank God, that was in the works in the 1960s with the Connector extension plans!) have not been any better to Lowell than they were to most other cities. We've done much better through very careful spot clearing and adaptive re-use.

I'm currently reading Jane Jacob's famous Death and Life of Great American Cities, which, though written in the 1960s as the Renewal Movement in Lowell was in full swing, argued that these projects were supremely misguided, and would make matters far worse. I plan to write a post about this 400-plus page book as soon as I finish it.

That brings us to a plan that is hopefully going to function as showing we've learnt our lessons and people like Jacobs have been right all along:

Blue: Hamilton Canal District, 2000s- So far, a few empty warehouses and old industrial buildings that can't be repurposed have been demolished, and the rebuild of what remains is in progress. This time, what is going in instead of the old buildings includes more, not fewer, streets and an urban-style neighborhood instead of a suburban one.

Fingers crossed.

The Recession and the State of the Blogosphere in the 978

2011-01-08T03:45:00.003-05:00

Lynne over at Left In Lowell has a good post with good follow-up discussion going reporting on me reporting via Facebook reporting on Bistro Broad via Facebook reporting on her blog that Dharma Buns went under. It wasn't too long ago that Ms. Pierce had interesting restaurant news in Lowell seemingly weekly. It's really slowed along with the economy, often going to the 'burbs or to vacation spots for new places to eat. But it's not just restaurant news downtown that's slowing, things look pretty precarious all around right now. But how bad is it and what is to be done? Carry on the discussion over there.

Meanwhile, Dich Howe has an article by Mike Luciano criticizing a particular Sun editorial that seems pretty typically far-right and off base. Bob Forrant muses in the comment section on how The Sun's editorials continue to hate the government while failing to realize (except when Wallace sort of points it out in The Column with a positive spin "we win! our politicians are the best!") that Lowell depends extremely heavily on outside money to survive. I asked about this inconsistency here a few weeks ago as an aside. But where does this money come from and what's the end-game?

Over at The New Englander, a very thoughtful discussion about racism in the context of the shootings over New Years and the response it has generated is going on. It specifically calls out Topix, the comment engine The Sun uses, and how poorly moderated and full of hate the people who still use it are. When I'm feeling like I deserve a good mental beating, I post there too. I know that there is maybe a 10% chance something serious and meaningful will come out of what I have to say.

Finally, Paul Marion posted a backlink to my pics of the development at Appleton Mills. While I agree with him and Maxine Farkas from Western Avenue Studios that this is exciting that the reconstruction is coming along so well, I still am uncomfortable with the funding and the income-eligibility rules. I'm not sure an overreaching government was acting for the common good here - maybe the long-silent Lowell Shallot was right - this Trinity development is a shady inside deal. So far, a tenant for the old Freudenburg office building is yet to surface as well.

Well, the economy sucks and we're having a rash of violence (related?), but I guess I can say that the Lowell blogosphere is healthy at least.

Appleton Mill, September 2010 - December 2010

2011-01-06T21:42:00.001-05:00

No comment really, but this is the latest batch of photos (snapshots at best sadly) of the construction at the old Appleton Millyard. Resident selection is apparently underway; hard-hat tours have been given. It's really starting to shape up over there, and the Revolving Museum is now across the street on Jackson St.

Appleton Mill, September 2010 - December 2010

Lowell's Walk Score

2010-12-29T16:54:00.000-05:00

I finally got around to seeing The Fighter, and was impressed to see some very nice sections of town far off of the main streets I know. Many of them appear to be in the Outer Highlands on streets you're not going to find by accident. A conversation with my girlfriend on the way home brought up where we'd like to live someday, and I would love to stay in Lowell. However, there is a complex cross between her desires for a little more space and greenery and my desires to have interesting places to walk to. So, into this equation comes walkscore.com.

Walkscore.com is a site that you can give your address to and it uses I believe Google to figure out how many different amenities are within walking distance of your house. They have full gradient maps of some of the larger towns, and Lowell is fortunate enough to be included:

http://www.walkscore.com/MA/Lowell

Sadly, it is clear from the map that Upper Belvidere, the Outer Highlands, and West Pawtucketville are all bright, bright red, meaning very little is available on foot. Dowtown, Back Central, parts of the Acre, Lower Belvidere, and Lower Centralville are all the most green. But of course, those are Lowell's only real urban sections.

What do people think? Is this tool fair? It doesn't take into consideration deep parking lots and wide roads that impede foot traffic like exist on Rogers Street. The method the map uses to find businesses is actually a little too liberal as well, as it only looks for certain words. For example, it identifies some home-based business with the word "market" in it on Lincoln Parkway as a grocery store, when clearly it is not. Personally, I am looking for a place that is about a 10 minute walk or less, on safe sidewalks through safe neighborhoods, from a cup of coffee, a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk, and an active-use park. Where are Lowell's best options for this?

Last part of Gateway Cities series

2010-12-27T02:40:00.000-05:00

This Sunday was the last of I believe six Boston Globe editorials on the Commonwealth's Gateway Cities - or the economically disadvantaged cities in the state that are still, decades after losing their economic reason for existing, struggling to find footing (article).

This one focuses a bit on Haverhill, a city I've come to know fairly well, and compares it to Lowell, which it says is looked at as a model city for the others in the group.

If you missed the rest of the series, I'd recommend trying to find it. I believe "gateway cities" appears in every article in the series. There was great information on the economic and social issues that confront our older and poorer cities, and ideas for how to take advantage of their remaining strengths.

Lowell Junction

2010-12-11T04:13:00.000-05:00

Brian asked what I thought about the Lowell Junction project over in the Gateway Cities post. My answer is over 4096 characters, so I'll just put it up here:

I've been pretty indifferent to it. Other than at a very high level, I actually knew very little about what it was. I've now read this

http://i93tritowninterchange.mhd.state.ma.us/faq/default.aspx

and this

http://andoverma.gov/planning/i93/tritowndevplan.pdf

The area that is being talked about is here:

http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=r31tyc923fm2&lvl=14&dir=0&sty=b

While it'd be nice to see the development in Lowell instead, I think the scale and type of businesses they're talking about here isn't really feasible for us right now. I don't think this really negatively impacts Lowell because I can't imagine us doing any of the retrofitting for tractor trailers necessary to get a Lowell Junction company like Gillette to locate here, especially downtown. The train system in the US is a mess, and we'd need to fix that if we ever wanted to consider bringing large-scale manufacturing back to Lowell - and that's a bigger issue than we should be tackling now, IMHO. Besides, in a pretend world where people lived and worked in more centralized places, Lowell and Lowell junction are pretty far apart. The name must come from the fact that the rail line that used to begin at the old train station on Central Street intersects the B&M mainline there.

So as to the project itself...

As you can see from the maps, the gap in interchanges between Dascomb Rd and Ballardvale Street is significant. The length of Ballardvale Street is full of industries, including the Gillette plant. All of these companies generate car traffic, and many of them freight. Coming from the south, you get off on 125, then take Ballardvale St. Coming from the North (as people going in the direction of morning rush-hour traffic jams are, making them less keen to drive an extra ramp south to come back north), you're going through a residential neighborhood on River St. I can see how this would be a problem, plus there's the orphaned slice of Tewksbury on the other side of I-93 off of South Street which contains the Rocco's superfund site, the notorious stinking pig farm (for and against), and the abandoned plans for a shopping mall.

So, it's clear that there's a big hole in the road network here, just like you'd see if you look for roads that connect Middlesex Turnpike to 3A in Billerica (http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=r2kyxx91wwqz&lvl=15&dir=0&sty=b), or connect Middlesex Turnpike over Route 3 to Springs Rd in Bedford. They're been working on and will continue working on tearing down a bunch of trees right now to widen Middlesex Turnpike from Exit 27 to the south, but if there was just another exit further down the road where the office parks on Manning Rd dead-end against the highway, things would be much simpler. The land is pretty close to maxed out for zoning, so it's not as likely to encourage much more sprawl in the way that building through greenfields does. Which, of course, is why they don't do anything about it. It simply wouldn't open enough land up to new development or reduce commute times enough to matter. The PDF document I posted here about "Phase III" of the widening is amusing. Bike lanes and a bus connection to the North Billerica train station for a suburban office park 4 miles away...right.

In both of these places, Lowell Junction and Middlesex Turnpike, construction along land that's already been turned over to office park use is being underused because of the China-wall a limited access highway creates (or a purposefully disconnected street network creates, I'll get back to that).

Lowell Junction is closer to the Lowell area than 128, which, while not Lowell itself and still requires a car, is still a more attractive option than many other places. Lowell Junction has the additional feature of being right along the Haverhill commuter rail line (although to be fair the LRTA covers Middlesex Turnpike...at a snail's pace). While the rail service means absolutely nothing right now (much like the Lowell line Mishawum station in Woburn probably gets very few people to work in that massive office park), it might help things later if the plan develops into an edge city - or a retrofitted office park that is now mixed use and develops along transit lines. They're talking about building Lowell Junction in that context already (and again to be fair, the office parks down by the Burlington Mall, yet there is no rail service there), which makes me think of some reasonably interesting places in the Washington DC metro area.

However - and this is a big however - the issue still remains there is not a critical mass of mass transit for that to mean much at all. You won't even be able to get from Lowell to Lowell junction by rail unless they introduce commuter service along either the old B&M Lowell spur or in the reverse direction along the so-called Wildcat Branch that allows the Haverhill trains to run down the Lowell line south of Wilmington.

So...I guess ultimately I'm skeptical of the plan, but not against it. I will say I'm against towns with no commercial tax base. I'm against widening 93 to get it done as well because I think that's simply a sprawl-inducing boon to New Hampshire. One of the biggest reasons I'm skeptical of the project being anything other than another office park development in a region of underutilized office parks is the buzzword bingo going on in those planning documents about transit-oriented "mixed-use", "sustainable" office parks. Office parks are not sustainable. They are not mixed use. At least not the way they are built today. I'd assume they meant well and were just using the wrong terms, but when you see Tewksbury saying they don't want this development connected to South Street whatsoever - in other words, making people have to drive further to get to the place so that cars stay off residential (but public!) streets - it seems like business as usual.

This is the same issue that occurs in Billerica with the traffic on the Middlesex Turnpike. Street network connectivity is a good thing. If the cars are driving too fast for the neighborhood, don't cut off the street and disconnect the network lengthening commutes and endangering emergency vehicles, narrow the road. Towns are starting to get this. There was an article in the paper recently that the Pelham fire department was pretty close to getting that town to connect a few streets to provide alternate routes around Bridge Street. Jeff Speck talked about narrowing lanes in Lowell to slow traffic. Things are changing.

The End of an Era - Chicago's Notorious Cabrini Greene

2010-12-02T23:35:00.001-05:00

In all the talk today about arsenic-friendly life being announced, a smaller - but interesting - story got buried: Cabrini-Green, the infamous failed housing project in Chicago's Near North Side, had its final residents ordered out.

In a time before I was born, in fact, when my parents were quite young (and sometimes, my grandparents!), public housing projects were going to solve the issues of housing the poor in America. Cabrini-Green, with its plethora of problems, were the poster-child of how high-density, single-income housing just didn't work. It lead to disinventment and crime: warehousing of the poor as one article mentioned. We've seen these same sorts of projects, on a much smaller scale, fail here in Lowell. While it sounds like not everyone will be successfully relocated, this is still a large step forward in undoing the damage done to America's cities in the post-war era.

Gateway Cities

2010-12-01T17:35:00.000-05:00

Thanks once again to RichardHowe.com for tipping me in on a series The Globe will be running on Sundays about Massachusetts' Gateway Cities. The first article is up already here.

While it's nice to see the article's photo be of Lowell and to hear us mentioned as a "more successful" city, the article's point is clear: The state's smaller cities (as in, not Boston), have been left behind by the capital and the suburbs in the new economy, and much of it was deliberate, or full of good intentions gone wrong. Some of the more interesting points made in the article or the comments ask why these cities must take on the brunt of their regional problems via government housing and welfare programs instead of "right-sizing" themselves in relationship to their lost industrial advantages. Others talk about NIMBYism (Not in my backyard!) and the advantages the wealthier suburbs and cities have with regard to it - not needing government carrots to stay solvent. Others talk about the hard do-not-cross line drawn between the suburbs and the cities.

As for solutions... If I had my way? Organizations like the Northern Middlesex Council of Governments would have some teeth. In most of the US, government bodies much larger than New England towns have the real power. It's not uncommon in the US or other parts of the world for cities to merge with growing suburbs (look at London!). The fact that this practice began stopping in the United States in the late 19th century (and in Lowell around 1910), I feel has added to the issues we see today by creating an Us and Them mentality between cities and outlying areas.

The Long Emergency

2010-11-26T16:57:00.000-05:00

I'm going to take a minute on the most consumer-driven of holidays (Black Friday) to plug a book I just finished: The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler, 2005. The book predicts a very, very bleak future for the consumerist way of life.

The subtitle of The Long Emergency is "Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty First Century." Essentially, this is a book about the devastation caused by the coming of Peak Oil.

Kunstler is not a scientist nor an urban planner. He is a one-time journalist and now author living in Upstate New York. I'm familiar with him because of his book The Geography of Nowhere, which focused on the destruction of America's cities for carbon-copy suburbia, and the social, ecological, and economic costs of doing that. Due to his background, he brings a lot of energy to the Peak Oil topic, but does very little to source his data or present dissenting viewpoints. That said, he makes compelling arguments.

If you are unfamiliar with the theory, Peak Oil states that there is a bell curve shaped oil extraction rate - once we ramp up to the maximum extraction rate possible (the peak), wells don't simply run dry overnight, they decay over time. This is because not all oil is created equal. Some is far, far easier to extract than others, some might be so costly to extract, it will never be worth it. As the easy stuff runs out, the harder stuff comes online, at a higher cost and a lower production rate. The production curve is called the Hubbert Curve after its creator, M. King Hubbert, who correctly predicted in the mid 1950s that US oil production would peak in 1970. In the 1970s, he also predicted a peak for world oil in the mid 1990s (which did not happen). However, many other countries have had their oil production peak, but are still churning out oil at reduced rates.

There seems to be little disagreement that there is only so much oil in the ground or that its output produces a curve. There is disagreement about how much oil there is in the ground, what it will cost to retrieve it, and how much the world will need, leading to disagreements about when exactly we'll begin running out of oil. For example, the oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico or the Canadian Oil Sands or the talk of shale oil mining in the middle of America would not have been talked about a generation ago as there was far easier to retrieve oil out there, especially in the Middle East. However, this oil will be far more expensive than what we have now, so talking about it as being just more oil for us to use is misleading.

Oil is more important than a lot of people realize. Higher oil prices means a lot more than having to carpool more, buying a Prius, and heating your house to t-shirt weather on natural gas. Oil is a miracle fuel storing eons of stored solar energy that is easy to retrieve and process, easy to extract energy from, easy to transport, and useful for secondary things like plastic and pesticides. There is nothing else like it. There are really not even any collective things summed up that are like it.

As oil is so central to our economy, demand is only so elastic, and people can't simply stop buying it to cut costs. So, in addition to remaining oil supplies becoming more expensive to extract and therefore more expensive to buy, a reduced supply in relation to demand will likewise push prices up because of scarcity. As more money is spent on oil or expensive alternatives, profits and discretionary income will fall, leading to recession. Then, profits will turn to deficits and domestic budgets will turn to debt in a market allowing no credit. This is very likely to cause a worldwide economic depression. Our debt-based society hedged on continual growth using fossil fuels to pay off the debt will collapse. It might cause resource wars. As the economy fails, the economic engine - demand for oil - will drop as well. Society will ratchet down the slope of oil production.

It gets worse than an economic crash and war. Without the miracle of cheap oil, the modern world is just not possible. Intensive industrial food production using tractors and chemical fertilizers and pesticides will fail, leading to food shortages. The transport of food and other goods will fail. Electricity costs will go up and there will be brownouts, destroying industry and rendering many buildings relying on mechanical ventilation, electric water pumps, or elevators unusable. Suburbia will collapse when it can no longer support the enormous energy costs of private vehicles, road maintenance, and giant single family homes. Cities will devolve into riots. Nations may collapse, and people will die.

So, don't we have alternatives? How long do we have?

There are similar concerns about peak natural gas and peak coal as well. Renewable energy sources, aside from the high-tech metallurgy and batteries that go into them (requiring rare minerals the US doesn't have and huge energy inputs to create that may not be possible without oil), just aren't going to be able to replace our dependence on fossil fuels to live. Nuclear power is risky, slow to get online, and not portable. Batteries and fuel cells don't solve all of our portable energy needs. Peak Oil appears to be a decade or two away at best, and some have said it occurred as early as 2005. In other words, we're in big trouble, barring a technological miracle.

Kunstler says he doesn't relish the idea of all of this happening, but he does seem to at least somewhat welcome a return to simpler, agrarian times - but this time with knowledge of germ theory, etc. As an anti-suburbanist, it's easy to see how he might feel vindication, or even Schadenfreude, over all this. He has, as is visible on his website, a nearly zealous devotion to this idea, violently attacking detractors. His website recently attacked a New York Times article saying we have plenty of fuel by going after the source instead of the content. This is a fundamentalist tactic: don't believe the credibility of the messenger if it contradicts you. In his defense, it is a suspect article. The article says the US now has plenty of natural gas, and the Canadian Oil Sands will provide us with oil. It then goes on to say that the oil sands will produce 5 million barrels of oil a day by 2030. However, the world currently uses something like 80 million barrels a day, and China and India are ramping up rapidly. The argument about natural gas seems a bit more convincing, but I've seen in other reports these new extraction techniques are supposedly highly damaging ecologically. And again, natural gas is not oil.

As to his predictions on how life carries on in the Long Emergency, he is also most optimistic (and possibly a bit unfair) about his - and our - region of the US surviving best. The Southwest and its water and heat issues are problematic even without Peak Oil. The Great Plains are overly reliant on fertilizers and high-energy irrigation systems to survive. The Mountain region is a lost cause without food from elsewhere as well. He goes after the South as being "prone to violence," expecting it to devolve back to sharecropping, if a government lasts at all in the car-worshiping land of the Dukes of Hazzard and Christian Fundamentalism. Being unable to find a way to put the Northeast ahead of the Northwest objectively, he suggests the Northwest will be attacked by Asian pirates (but no similar reports of the British coming back to take us over once the North Sea oil runs out!).

That said, the good news for us Lowellians is that he suggests smaller, compact cities with a lot of walkable areas and a lack of huge buildings will survive best. He also says that hydropower and easy access to water in general is a great resource. Hey, that's us! Lowell, of course, was a large and important city well before the dawn of the oil age, and had been an important human settlement for a long time before Europeans arrived. And if Kunstler is right and the oil age is just about over, if we can survive the strife (and turn Chelmsford and Dracut back into farms so we can eat), we might come out ok.

"All About Cities"

2010-11-09T21:04:00.000-05:00

Following some links from the Suburban Pioneer blog Richard Howe recently blogged about, I found a very active blog about urbanism: All About Cities. Check it out.

What is a city?

2010-10-29T02:35:00.000-04:00

This is one of my half-baked ideas from when I wrote the posts on Speck's document, expanded into a "I didn't have time to write you a short blog post, so I wrote you a long one" post.

So, what is a city?

This seemingly silly question is important because it cuts deep into a lot of the important ideas behind plans like Speck's and highlights the source of the complaints about it: Why do it? Why have cities? If we can't define what we're trying to have here, we can't have a constructive discussion about it.

The dictionary defines a city simply as "a place bigger than a town" whereas a town is "a place that isn't rural." OK, that's totally useless, so here is my definition:

"A city is a place where humans chose to live closely together. They do so to engage in trade and for economic opportunities, for convenience, and to participate in the development, expression, and consumption of culture. The economic basis for the city and its expression of culture -which can only occur in an economically prosperous climate- defines the settlement and contributes to the unique characteristics of a city as well as the cohesiveness of its citizenry."

This definition held well for thousands of years, but over time, it has started to fall apart a bit as technologies have changed. Where does it still hold, where has it lost ground, and what does that mean? After the jump.

A brief history of cities

Safety

When you hear the word "safety" and "city," is that a positive or negative connection? Probably negative. Today, cities are often magnets for poverty and crime (we'll get back to that). However, prior to the invention of gunpowder, a walled city provided safety from external threats. Cities were built in strategic mountain passes, on hills overlooking rivers, whatever a good, defensible place might be. The capital of the Roman Empire was purportedly moved from Rome to Constantinople because the latter, a peninsula, was far more defensible than the location along the Tiber. Even some American cities, like Detroit, grew out of strategic fortifications.

Today, this point is a non-issue for Americans. There are no roving barbarian hordes, and just about anywhere is at equal risk from air attacks at any time. ICBMs don't respect city walls.

Economic Center

Economically speaking, ability to trade (along with the ability to be defensible) has been the basis for cities since the dawn of civilization. Many cities grew up at the end of the navigable parts of rivers (London, Albany), others in places with excellent harbors (Boston, New York). Others had critical access to important natural resources, or were the market town for rural goods. Improved technologies in the industrial age changed the rules a bit. Suddenly, the Erie Canal made New York America's foremost metropolis: Now, a city that always had a world-class deep-water port had access to all the resources of the hinterlands of New York State. And, those same towns would now be supplied with goods coming through the port of New York. Boston, which was founded on a good harbor with adequate fresh water and a defensible peninsula but on the barely-a-brook Charles River, suffered. Chicago was born because it was on an easy place to make portage from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River - canals and railroads made that journey easier still and made Chicago a trade hub and a metropolis. The Industrial Revolution, beginning here with water-powered textile mills, expanded into the coal and steel producing regions of the Northeast. The cities in the Lehigh Valley grew up around steel, Detroit grew explosively around the auto industry.

Modern transportation has shrunk the world considerably and removed much of the focus around access to major navigable water systems - airports and interstates can be built virtually anywhere. There are major American cities in places that were essentially uninhabitable (due to lack of access to food and clean water) and incredibly remote only 100 years ago. Cities now exist on economies that are completely unrelated to their geography, like Boston or San Francisco, and their focus on high tech. Of course, both of these cities also have large tourism industries related to their history and especially their waterfronts. And, there still are us people out there that would prefer trees and water to Las Vegas' desert landscape.

Convenience / Economic Opportunity

The compact urban center with its jobs and infrastructure has major draws, and major drawbacks like pollution, noise, lack of space, cost. These problems became far worse during the Industrial Revolution, when the population switched from a rural one to an industrial one, concentrating people into tiny tenements around polluting factories. However, first, with the invention of mass transit, then the automobile, and partially compounded by fear of modern weapons (which can do huge amounts of damage to densely populated areas), people found ways to keep many of the conveniences of the city while avoiding many of the drawbacks: live further out, commute in (I'll discuss this more later). This changed the idea of a city in drastic ways - my post a few months ago about the preservation movement discussed Lowell in the 60s focusing on becoming more focused on jobs, and trying purposefully to lose people, especially poor ones.

Cultural Center

Why do I say production of culture is part of the definition of a city? It's not just because I've played too much Sid Meyer's Civilization IV. If culture is the highest product of a successful economy, then it can only exist within a highly successful economy. If a small town is economically productive, it likely will grow into a city. If the town is marginally productive, it will both not grow into a city, and its residents will be too busy working for the level of leisure time and wealth for luxuries needed to support advanced cultures. Sure, there are artists' colonies around (Lenox, MA) - but the economically successful ones get all their money from major cities. Of course there is culture in primitive civilizations, but there is, to my knowledge, no "creative economy."

As for cohesiveness and identity, a place producing economic activity and culture is a place a person can be proud of. There is a sense of belonging, and as time goes on, a connection to the shared history of that place. "I'm a New Yorker." I think it's harder to say "I'm proud to live in a subdivision of identical homes for people with identical skin color of identical income levels behind identical Wal-Marts and Applebees."

"Cities of To-morrow"

Ebenezer Howard published a book at the end of the 1890s that was influential in the Garden City movement, which, aside from implementation in Great Britain and supposedly places like North Billerica in the United States (purported to be one of America's first suburbs, of course, a suburb of Lowell), lead to the modern suburb. His famous magnet diagram still holds value today:

As you can see, he held the Garden City to be the ideal - no negative column. In fact, most of his positives hold true for the American suburb, in its ideal form. However, the automobile was in its infancy, and the migration of much of the population away from independent farmer to factory cog (or burger flipper) was still taking place. It could probably be argued that the streetcar suburb, a la Tyler Park, was actually closer to what he had in mind - and is the model that today's New Urbanism is actually going for. I'm also not sure if he realized what would happen to cities and the country as people moved to the "Town-Country" en masse.

We Must Destroy the City to Save It

As suburbanization became possible, those with the desire, means, and privilege to escape the inner city did so, taking much of the money, stores, institutions, and later, jobs, with them. Economic opportunity faded from the city along with money to be spent on infrastructure, services, or new businesses. The people that were left behind were increasingly poor (as they didn't have the means to leave), which only served to push more people out, causing a cycle that partially because of certain policies enacted at the time and partially due to social tensions, is now referred to as White Flight. Of course, they were moving to former farmlands, destroying the country as well.

Furthermore, the focus on the automobile and the desire to try to curb the urban decay that was resulting from the growing concentration of poverty, lead to misguided Urban Renewal policies including massive housing projects that only concentrated poverty and crime further and urban highway construction, that only destroyed neighborhoods and allowed further suburbanization (urban sprawl). Many of these ideas were based on Modernist ideas, like the Towers in the Park of Le Corbusier. I can't find the exact quote or who to attribute it to, but the section title was a feeling many like Le Corbusier had been holding for years (the car did not create the slum, but it allowed it to spread, and for people to move far away from it).

While this was going on, there were big changes to our economy as well, as we moved into the post-industrial era. Foreign competition is often unbeatable by cities traditionally bound to manufacturing. Many of the Northeast's cities lost virtually their entire economies to competition elsewhere - Lowell included. When that happens, what happens to the city? Well, in the case of Detroit and much of the Rust Belt, the city dies. In the case of Boston, it re-invents itself around something else - higher education and the resulting high-tech sector. My opinion is Lowell still exists largely because shrinking distances gobbled it up into the Boston economy. This is oversimplified, but it is what makes the difference between Lowell, and industrial cities further away from successful modern economies, like the towns of Upstate New York.

And at the same time, the shrinking of the world due to changes in transportation and communication technologies now meant you didn't have to live in New York City to see a world-class play or hear a world-class concert, if you have a television, or a car. Our affluent society means people almost all the way to the bottom have these things.

Why do we still have cities?

It's an interesting question. Blows to urban areas continue today. After 9/11, the wisdom of large office buildings was questioned (To be fair, many urbanists question skyscrapers as well - for ecological and social reasons). Telecommuting gives people the option to not commute to work at all. This saves time, gasoline...all in exchange for human contact. Yet, Manhattan still exists. It still has as many people as the entirety of Middlesex County, from Lowell to Cambridge and Somerville. It still is the financial center of the hemisphere - not some suburban beltway around a decayed downtown like 128 had begun to do to Boston. And New York City proper has as many people as Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined. Something is making many of those people chose to live there. Certainly, many people in the South Bronx would live elsewhere if they could, for example, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a poor part of Manhattan today.

I already said that the same forces that drew people to the suburbs took many of the jobs and cultural institutions with them, but clearly not all of them. At least not for all cities. There is still a tangibility aspect that people miss, a sense of belonging and community, and producers and serious consumers of culture do still tend to congregate together, and that is frequently in population centers. Young people still crave the excitement, as that Rush song spoke to 30 years ago:

What next?

On the flip-side of all this desire to put a new spin on a romanticized past urban model, There is something somewhat condescending about the educated, affluent proponents of New Urbanism desiring a near-freeze on urban planning ca 1890. That is, after the electric trolley made it possible for a middle class to live on more land further from the city center but before the automobile destabilized the city. While they (me) can pine for that character-rich Victorian home, is there realization that this model requires the working class to live in tenements? I'm not so sure, and I'm not so sure how to reconcile this issue. Perhaps it is because compact communities have a diversity to them that is considered a way to raise all boats? This is fundamentally different from that Randy Newman line: "I’m glad I’m living in the land of the free / Where the rich just get richer / And the poor you don’t ever have to see."

Related, it also bothers me that many compact communities today are largely outdoor malls and entertainment zones, or should I say Lifestyle Centres: they have become full of high-end consumerist stores, with little trace of a "real" economic center, one where daily goods are produced and sold, and daily services can be found, populated by the diverse populace required to make such a place operate.

Then, of course, there is the environmental argument, which I think will be at least as important as the "suburbs are boring, morally questionable, and a false promise" argument: Our lifestyles are highly dependent on acres and acres of cheap, open land to build on, and the cheap fuel and plentiful construction funds that makes getting from one single-use, single-income zone to another. If and when that stops, and theories like Peak Oil say it will sooner rather than later, those of us living within walking distance of other zoning types like many people in Lowell do are going to have a serious leg up .

Albany, New York

2010-10-11T21:17:00.001-04:00

As I mentioned previously on my old site, I spent my college years in Troy, NY. Troy is across the river and just to the north of the state capital of Albany. The Albany area...how do I put this nicely...like much of the Northeast, has had ... challenges? ... with urban blight over the past 30, 40 ... 50 years. I've always felt it's a region with so much history, character and potential, but for some reason, nothing seems to be going their way out there. But, like here in the Merrimack Valley, there is a can-do spirit out there. Their paper, The Times Union, appears to have a blog writer who covers urban issues as part of his real estate task.

So, I was Googling around today and by chance stumbled across an interesting blog post associated with the Times Union. The article was Poll result: Interstate 787 was a big mistake. The brief article, and many of the comments (this paper, unlike ours, seems to be written for and by a left-leaning populace*), discuss how the riverside interstate highway, much like Boston's old Central Artery, cut the city off from its waterfront. As someone who lived in the area for years and drove 787 plenty, it's worse than that even because it's underused. Worst traffic jam in Troy? Trying to head east out of the city on Route 7, where it went from four lanes to two, on its way to Troy's suburban grocery store and Wal-Mart (the closest grocery store to downtown Troy closed about 2002). Being ex-rural soon-to-be perfect suburbia out there, there were no real alternate routes. Back to Albany: Albany's population has fallen from 130,000 in 1950 to about 95,000 today. While I won't claim that 787 destroyed Albany (I don't think that's fair), it also didn't help it thrive at all.

In Lowell, we might lament the JFK Civic Center. Well, look what Albany did to itself in the 1960s (allegedly in response to redeveloping a blighted neighborhood): Empire State Plaza. That's right: tore down an entire neighborhood (about half the size of the North End) for an underground mall, a dead plaza, and some international-style concrete high-rises.

Take a look at an areal view of downtown Albany: note all the pavement, the expressways, how they cut the downtown in half and away from the river. Look at the Empire State Plaza mega-block, then notice all the vacant lots around downtown (this article on a site by a retired San Francisco urban planner, compares what's wrong with Albany with what's right with Portland, OR).

But, like I said, people out there, like people here, are getting it. Notice this anti-freeway letter to the editor: Don't Widen the Northway.

It is nice to see that, at least in some (sizable) circles, interest in re-urbanizing America. It's nice to see things like Speck's report here in Lowell, and the sentiments of preservation and human-scale living in places in much worse shape, like the Capital District around Albany. It's also always heartening to see how well Lowell does at this stuff in relation to other struggling cities in the United States.

* A left-leaning media source is going to favor "socialist" topics like urban planning, so why The Sun supports taxpayer-funded, subsidized things like the Hamilton Canal District and Speck's plan is beyond me to be quite honest.

Lowell Downtown Evolution Plan - full report

2010-10-08T00:55:00.003-04:00

Jeff Speck's full plan is now available here. It's over 150 pages with over 100 pages not being full of traffic count data. I read most of it, skimming a few sections (traffic data included in skipped). While I'd love to recommend you read it, it's pretty long, so I took care of that ;-)

My summary, a few choice excerpts and a few of my thoughts after the jump.

First off, we need to commend Speck on actually "getting" Lowell, or at least, talking to enough people that do get it to be informed. His closing remarks, which I'll open with, were:

Lowell is remarkable because people stay here. Most subjects interviewed in this study had been born in Lowell, and the majority or them were third generation Lowellians or more. This planning team has never before worked in a place with such a high percentage of family retention. Indeed, it wasn't until arriving in Lowell that we first heard the term “blowins,” let alone its modification “Blowellians.” This continuity of population has its advantages and its disadvantages.

The advantages, which dominate, include a powerful culture of stewardship, reinvestment, and philanthropy. People take better care of places where they plan to stay, and in Lowell that occurs in spades. The principal disadvantage is that the city’s long institutional memory includes some pretty bad experiences, and many Lowellians’ impression of Lowell remains the old Lowell of the seventies and eighties, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary. Indeed, there exists a surprising disconnect between the quality of the downtown and locals' opinion of it. Of course, some of the most critical haven’t been downtown in years.

These critics, some of whom enjoy responding anonymously and bitterly to news articles about downtown, would benefit from more interaction with the tourists who know only the Lowell of today, or the many young families and empty nesters who are choosing to make downtown their home. For them, and for this planning team, Lowell provides most of the advantages of a Boston or Cambridge, at a fraction of the price.

The more one travels the United States and experiences its gradual transformation into a repetitive collection of nondescript suburban autocentric zones, the more precious Lowell becomes. With its handsome landscape of mills, main streets, rivers, and canals, the city has already managed to gracefully outlive its original reason for being. Taking further advantage of these assets and others—as outlined in this Plan—will give the city an even greater promise as we enter an era that increasingly values those qualities that make Lowell exceptional.

This is all great news for me. He hits a bunch of nails squarely on the head. While I still can't figure out if I'm a "blow-in" or not, I do know that many people that read my blog have as long, or longer, familial histories in Lowell than the 100 years I have, and it's families like that that have kept the city going through the tough times he talks about. I've also met, and count as readers, plenty of relative newbies, who like Speck, really get Lowell. These people are generally younger, and like myself (and to paraphrase Speck) grew up with urban ideals, watching Seinfeld and Friends, not the suburban dreams of Happy Days and The Brady Bunch. These people want ideas like Speck's plan to happen. I also count in my family people who are of these older generations and of different mindsets, and no longer get the city at all, as he charges. And I know huge numbers of people who have heard so much bad about Lowell, or had a few bad experiences, that they will never give it enough of a chance for it to grow on them. Only continued improvement and word of mouth is going to change this.

Now, to specific points he makes:

Traffic

Much of the report, as expected, focuses on transit and walking.

His analysis on the street system was enlightening on many levels. First off, he makes an excellent point that many of Lowell's traffic problems are due to bottlenecks, not road capacity. To that end, he justifies his suggestion that Lowell needs to make many streets two-way again, and on those streets and those that remain one way, we don't need 12-foot expressway lanes - 10 feet with bike lanes, more parking, or wider sidewalks would do fine. As much as I enjoy bombing down Thorndike, Dutton, and Market, the pedestrian experience would be improved if I couldn't, and the lengthy traffic light phases, and the lack of synchronization between lights that should really work in groups, really is more of a "hurry up and wait" situation than anything else resembling efficient traffic movement.

Here as well, Speck's level of research is heartening: Aside from his modeling, he knows we did the conversions of Middlesex and Appleton Streets back to two-ways, and he's right, even though I was one of the Doubting Thomases, it seems to have worked. He doesn't point it out, but Lawrence made Essex Street (their Merrimack Street equivalent) two-way again recently as well. Additionally, he knows why Father Morrissette Boulevard is an expressway: because of a connection with the Connector and further demolition downtown to make a full loop that never happened. Because he understands this, he understands the road will never live up to capacity and should be re-thought.

Finally, he understands the pain of those of us who deal with downtown with regard to some of the more bizarre traffic flow situations the one-ways downtown cause, drawing graphics of some of the ultra-long trips around the "super-loop" of Market, Central, Merrimack, Shattuck/Dutton. He points out many of these trips would avoid these notoriously congested intersections all together if only cars could take more direct trips. He also has a sense here for our self-deprecating sense of humor, and perhaps hints to the badge-of-honor we wear that we understand how downtown streets are laid out at all:

Lowell’s overlay of a one-way system upon a cranky medieval-style street network can objectively be said to have created one of the most disorienting downtowns in America.

He goes on to say:

On a lighter note, this western stretch [of Market Street, between Shattuck and Dutton] provides some useful experience regarding the performance of a two-way Market Street: local residents inform us that it is already used that way by several lost visitors daily.

Trolley

Lowell's current trolley system is "toy transit" as he calls it for the National Park. A real trolley would be very nice, but he doesn't outright recommend we do it. He points out this will be an all-or-nothing proposal. A trolley that goes nowhere useful and doesn't run often enough is worse than an LRTA bus system that goes useful places, but runs so rarely and in roundabout patterns that nobody would take it by choice. He recommends that a system that doesn't at least connect downtown to the three ULowell campuses (including East, the dorms), and runs 16 hours a day, is not worth doing. I agree, but I would like to see the cost figures. He also recommends we make up our minds on this in under a year. Commit to it, or table it for a long time.

My feelings are also reserved, but for additional reasons. To summarize, I feel an honest mass transit system in downtown Lowell is going to be hard to implement, because there is a HUGE disconnect in the types of jobs downtown and the types of jobs people living along the lines can attain. The jobs, which tends to be white collar, are not filled by many people who live in a place on the planned transit lines, which are decidedly working-class neighborhoods. Until something about that is done (what?), this line would be nothing but a drunk bus at night (not a bad thing, really), and maybe serve some students during the day.

High School

By his estimates, Lowell High students spend no less than $2/day downtown on average. Times 3,000 students times the number of days in a school year, it's not exactly no money as is commonly accused. One of his most pie-in-the-sky ideas - and he freely admits it - is re-building the 80s addition to the high school, taking over the doctor's building on Arcand in the process. He recommends Dutton be re-extended through to French Street, provided it is only for school use. I appreciated that even though he wants to pull the school back from the Merrimack Canal, he wants to maintain a massing of the building alongside it, echoing the historic boarding houses that were there before the high school (which, if it did anything right, echoes the boardinghouses as well). He is against what he says people told him would be "pulling a Lawrence" and moving the school to a suburban location. In addition to the obvious fast that Lowell's street and bus transit network is not designed to get people from say, Pawtucketville to Rogers Street efficiently, he says many students and former students told him that being downtown both gave them a sense of civic pride (at which point he points out how few people ever actually move out of Lowell), and an ability to excel in urban collegiate environments.

Parking

Here is where we differ. While he's right that on-street parking is good for both shop visitors and pedestrians who are shielded from traffic by the stopped cars, I'm not as convinced that two-way streets make it easier. You have twice as many parking opportunities on a one-way street (as it's illegal to cross a double yellow to park a car on the wrong side of the road), and a car backing into a spot doesn't block a lane of traffic executing the maneuver. However, two way streets make for shorter blocks, which makes it easier to orbit looking for a spot. I'll trust him on that one. He makes a mistake I think with the pricing scheme.

His recommendation is that we increase the price of parking in Lowell, gradually. He at least isn't completely out there - he knows it can't be done all at once. However, I think this is a deal-breaker for downtown Lowell. The problem isn't the price of parking is too low, it's the abuses, or that it's too high. Unlike many cities out in the middle of nowhere, Lowell isn't the only game in town by a long shot, for either suburban or urban destinations.

I can agree with him on-street parking should be more expensive than garaged parking. I can probably get behind charging for parking on the street later into the night as well, to free up more spaces for bar and restaurant goers, as opposed to residents who are just being lazy. But, by his own admission, the garages are nearly empty at night. It simply does not follow that we need to make garages more expensive, at least at night. Supply and demand would dictate if the prices fell at night and on weekends, more people would park in them. As someone who lives in a downtown building without guaranteed parking for guests and pays $60/mo to park one car in a garage a block away, I know how frustrating and embarrassing it can be to ask someone to come over for the night and expect them to cough up the $8-$10 it costs to garage a car overnight if we are unable to manage a free space in the one public lot in my neighborhood.

Here's my recommendation on parking:

Charge for on-street parking from 6 AM to 2 AM on weekdays. From 6 AM to 6 PM, restrict most, if not all street spaces to two or three hours. Long enough for a doctor's appointment, long enough for a dinner, but not long enough for a resident or an office worker.
DO NOT increase the parking rates anywhere, garage or on-street. In fact, lower garage prices considerably after 6 PM to encourage their use. Daytime parking rates need to be reasonable to compete at all with suburban locations. As I said, it's currently a pipe dream to think that many people who can manage to work in downtown Lowell will be living where the transit lines are planned. And the students don't need the price increases, either.
Implement some sort of guest parking for residents. Perhaps every garage has, I don't know, 50 spaces that can be had for a very low or nothing rate at night, provided someone shows an ID with a downtown address when the car needs to leave. Bonus points if it can be computerized so that people abusing the system by taking up the guest spaces with their second car get penalized.
The NPS lot and other similar lots that get filled by residents who leave their cars there for days to avoid paying for parking should be towed after 7 or 8 AM.
The first floor of all garages is to be short-term 3 hour parking (or as much capacity as the garages can allow during the day, some nearly fill), but still cheaper than on the street. Some garages do this for a few spots already. I remember a few years back a motorcycle took up the same full-sized spot in my garage on the first floor all winter long. That's a valuable spot to visitors during the day, when the garages fill to the roofs. That's a long drive up and down, and a long walk as well.

Retail/Office

Speck is a realist here again, saying we're not getting big-box retail or anything like that. There is not the highway access or parking availability for visitors nor the 18-wheelers that make these places run. He also realizes, contrary to his miss with the parking situation, that Lowell is not a wealthy place and needs to work at attracting some lower-rent entertainment and dining options downtown. Of course, the realist in me is well aware of the complaints about what types of places the places "those people" tend to attract are. He never touches on crime, which is a major issue to just about anybody else you talk to. We need to fund more beat cops or bike cops. Cruisers are useless for downtown Lowell problems. The high-density office buildings he's targeted for Cox Circle in front of the Tsongas center seems like a nice idea, and reasonably feasible. I've said for a while that the Ayotte Garage is underused during the day, on major thoroughfares, and could support more business use.

Housing/new Construction

Speck points out that there are a lot of pocket areas that can likely support more housing, even that with little/no subsidy. The side effect to this kind of construction, beyond added tax revenues, etc, is some thin housing can block the view of parking lots from the street, while making the street feel better to pedestrians, while not requiring any / much more new parking spaces. One thing he does not address however is noise. He wants luxury row-houses across from the Boott Mill driveway from Boarding House Park to hide the parking lot back there. Those rich people are gonna LOVE concert nights! This is a major sticking point downtown already - how to make the downtown more "lively" with more residents, while still maintaining some semblance of night-life for everyone else. His recommendation to put a sizable building at the foot of the Merrimack Canal where the current Lowell Five headquarters is (used to be JDCU, not the one on John St) that would be complete with a "...bandstand barge pulling up to the river's edge to serenade the amphitheatre on a summer night." gave me a rare cringe-worthy moment: Uh...the rivah is just about dry right heyah buddy. His pie-in-the-sky re-design of the Monument Square area that would keep the Civic Center as the core of a new building is kinda yawn. He acknowledges, to paraphrase, "Cambridge types, not Lowellians, are the only people who can appreciate Brutalism" but I feel that his changes would disguise the building to the point where it no longer has any historic context. I understand it's being renovated and can't be torn down. While I'm in full support of removing the Hess and Goodyear buildings from that very prominent location, he's 100% right that's just not economically feasible any time soon.

Conclusion

I liked the report and thought that these ideas, along with many others he called laid out, were really interesting. People are going to complain about the cost of this plan (I don't remember what it was, but it was a lot). However, I think we have a good chance of getting our money's worth, provided current trends continue. If the economy improves, and the trend for both younger people and empty-nesters to move to urban places continues, the vibrant community of Lowell, and the "good bones" that make up the physical city, are going to be better-positioned to take advantage of the situation. While many of Speck's ideas are kind of out there, he at least acknowledges it.

He understands that "Many people who visit Lowell, or who live in Lowell, aren’t the type to set foot in a museum" and "While some people think of Lowell as a suburb of Boston, it feels and functions more like an independent city-state." Yet, in the same breath that he looks at the provincial, lower-brow city that we really are, he understands there is a potential for Lowell to be a better Lowell, and it's full of people who have proven time and time again they're willing to fight for that. I was worried this plan might call for the wholesale conversion of our city into a museum or a larger Newburyport or something. Or it would be so unrealistic and insensitive to the culture here it'd read like one of those MIT neighborhood reports. I was pleasantly surprised. While I'm not sure we're the type of city to get behind an saccharine slogan like "Alive, Unique, Inspiring," maybe it's not all hot air, either. And having vision plans like this one helps direct us towards those goals.

Latent Demand

2010-10-06T03:12:00.001-04:00

I've made two separate attempts tonight to write a post about the Executive Summary for Jeff Speck's Lowell Downtown Evolution Plan; both went wildly off-topic and lacked focus. So, here's a third try. Perhaps if I focus on a very precise topic, I'll have better luck. Expect the rest of my thoughts to be organized in the future, probably as the actual full report comes out.

Speck's plan is heavily focused, like many modern urban-design plans, on walkability and dense development oriented towards efficient use of mass-transit. This is wildly different from the car-centric models we used throughout much of the second half of the last century. To those familiar with the design methodologies of the past, some of Speck's ideas, like making most streets downtown two way and shrinking the width of lanes, seem totally crazy. In addition to other complaints, the commenters on Jen Myers article often fall into this mindset (Dan Phelps, on the other hand, trusts Speck on this particular point [I'll try to get to some of the other chief complaints another time]). In fact, many of them are supporting an extension to the Connector around downtown to get cross-town traffic off the streets and/or connection of the Rourke Bridge crossing to Route 3 as the long-discussed extension to MA-213. After all, we had purposely made these streets wide one-way roads and eliminated on-street parking to try to eliminate the traffic issues downtown and increase businesses only 50 years ago, and people are still complaining getting into, through, or parking in downtown is too hard. It clearly wasn't enough, so why undo it?

Because of Latent, or Induced, demand. It's applying basic economic principles to the automobile. The basic idea is, the more space you give to the car, the more cars will use that space. You will never, in the long run, satisfy the car's lust for more pavement. You will only temporarily fix the traffic problem while making the place less attractive to pedestrians.

As an example, there was a rainstorm last week that slowed the AM commute southbound on Route 3 to about 30 MPH. My Facebook was full of people complaining about how long it took for them to get to work. Somebody asked, "didn't we widen Route 3 to fix this!?" Why, yes we did. We removed all of the trees from the median and sometimes the edges, widening the highway to as many as five lanes in places from two, and what did we actually accomplish other than invading people's back yards along the right-of-way? We helped people that were used to hour-long commutes on the old route 3 move further away from population centers along the new route 3, where their commute will still be an hour...until more people get the same idea and slow the traffic once again. Land usage and annual miles driven are growing far, far faster in the US than the actual population.

If we hadn't widened Route 3, what would've happened instead? People would've made a time-is-money economic decision where they hit a tipping point: "enough is enough!". They might've adjusted their schedules to avoid peak hours. They might've moved closer to work. They might've clamored for better mass-transit options along the corridor. Their jobs might've moved closer to them. They might've moved somewhere else entirely. Probably all of these options encourage less gasoline use than widening the highway, and most also reduce sprawl, which is the taking of open land for automobile-oriented, low-density development.

So, pull that logic into extending the Connector into Dracut. I personally would never live in Dracut because of the traffic situation: it's not worth the trouble, and it's only getting worse. Adding more highway capacity to the town is going to do only one thing in the medium-term: increase development pressure on Dracut, Pawtucketville, Tyngsboro, Pelham, etc. These towns will be more than happy to meet the demand for financial reasons. In a few years time, we'll have added to the miles people are driving a year, while ruining the remaining rural character of the area, and helping the traffic none whatsoever.

Instead, planners like Speck suggest focusing our development efforts on compact urban areas like Lowell, and focusing on transit in particular (where mass transit can be efficient). However, there's a mental leap here that isn't that easy to make: While I think it's unarguable that cars have damaged Lowell, can we really say that by redesigning Lowell to not be focused on the car, that we will improve things? What is to say that jobs will relocate to Lowell to take advantage of the now less-mobile workforce, as opposed to people and jobs just leaving the city en-masse?

I think this actually might not be that complicated of a choice when we look at all our options: either we do nothing and Lowell continues to suffer losses to suburban locations for the same reasons it has for the past 50 years, or we do something and Lowell continues to suffer losses to suburban locations for accessibility reasons. OR - the third option, we do something, this plan actually works, and Lowell is poised to grow as a re-invigorated place to work, play, and live.

The Fighter trailer

2010-09-19T21:59:00.002-04:00

While not likely to paint an entirely flattering picture of Lowell, the trailer to The Fighter starring Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, and Amy Adams has been released:

Featured: Cupples Square, East Merrimack Street, and, of course, the Top Donut.

Energy efficiencies of food

2010-09-06T22:58:00.000-04:00

Second (and last) short post for today. I often talk about urbanism and I've probably talked about that in the context of the environment, but I had a conversation this week that I'd like to re-iterate here: Beef is an extremely energy-inefficient food. If you're looking to lower your energy consumption, switching to eating less meat, in particularly beef, is pretty simple. Don't forget that agricultural subsidies, such as that on a key feed crop, corn, costs us billions of dollars a year on top of that and corn itself can be an environmentally problematic feed and crop. For this reason, I've also questioned why we use corn-based ethanol in gasoline, when the fossil fuels required to produce the corn are so costly in the first place.

Android security

2010-09-06T22:32:00.000-04:00

One of the scary things about smartphones is what happens if you lose one. Android devices - the Google operating system - have constant connections without password re-check for your Google, Facebook, and other accounts. GMail alone, if compromised, would be a serious security breach for many people. Leaving one of these things at a bar, remembering the next morning, and finding years worth of email has been gone through by an anonymous third party is a non-option. What can be done?

Android, until for me this week, only had a finger-swipe pattern security system. Connect four to nine dots in any order, unlock the phone. Turns out that there are over 300,000 combinations possible, but I just never liked it. It always seemed to me that any reasonable unlock pattern would be too easily guessed. The times I've seen it used, people draw Z's, lines, circles, etc. There is now a pin-pad or password option available that allows for millions of patterns. By brute force, it could now take years to crack an Android on average - certainly more than enough time to change all your passwords. Still, many smartphones come with remote kill capabilities, something that apparently is available through the app store for Android.

"In praise of Ugly Buildings"

2010-08-29T12:26:00.001-04:00

Jan (check her blog out, she's a really talented local photographer and throws in some of the history behind her subjects as well) commented on my last post that she can't find the love for the JFK Civic Center. Shortly before I established this blog, I had posted an article from the Boston Globe to Facebook that gets into the topic of Brutalist architecture. Unlike our local paper *ahem* they don't charge for archives (at least ones that are merely a year old), so I can repost the article and my comments here:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/01/24/in_praise_of_ugly_buildings/?page=full

I agree. The whole Brutalist (based not on English "brutal" how we think of it, but the French term "Beton Brut" for Raw Concrete)/Modernist thing has certainly not reached romantic thought yet, but that's not to say it won't. The context that made these buildings a good idea at the time need to be understood, because we might go that way again.

Modernism came into vogue as a backlash against the perceived excesses of the Victorian era, especially once the Depression and the World Wars hit and modern technologies changed the way we look at the world. A world focused on at first frugality and then a re-thinking based on technological innovation and forward-thinking was very happy to get rid of the Victorian/Guilded Age we romance today.

Why focus design and thought on re-hashing ancient European architecture? Why waste money on ornamental construction? Isn't there value in Truth in Materials (if it's concrete, why make it a phony, looking like it's brick)? Isn't the ability to form that material - concrete - into all sorts of shapes interesting? Isn't using modern indoor lighting and air systems and strong structural members to create large, complex spaces with interesting artificial lighting noble? What is inherently wrong with the monumental Towers in the Park movement, over the wish to build dense and low we are returning to today, where public and private open spaces are again nearly an afterthought? Why should buildings blend into a "street as a room" instead of being monumental?

I know precisely the reasons why we don't like those concepts today, but some day, today's cheaply built prefab buildings with equally cheesy fascades, designed with the idea of romantizing the 19th century ideal of heavy and embellished construction as just one hamonizing player in a dense outdoor room will go out of style again, I'm sure. Architecture is art, and to appreciate it as an expression of the time, you need to understand why it happened.

Some day, we'll look back on these buildings as being part of the culture that brought us space-utopia things like The Jetsons and say "how quaint!"

As for Brutalism in Lowell, there are buildings on North and South campus in the style (one on Riverside just past the intersection of University comes to mind), as was typical in academia in the 60s and 70s. UMass Amherst and Dartmouth are both notorious examples of how cold and Soviet the style can feel. Lowell also had the North Canal apartments which were re-clad in "brick" fascades at some point.

Then, of course, there's the JFK Civic Center. JFKs fault I think is its location. It disrespects the focal point of what is supposed to be the Merrimack Street Indoor Room - The typical-of-the-genre Richardson Romanesque City Hall. It de-mapped a street and neighborhood. Like many Brutalist screw-ups, it has the theoretically useful plaza with the very moving officer statue...that nobody uses and is a decaying waste of space.

Fox Hall on East Campus works much better with its plaza and as a focal point to the park-like assortment of dorms around it.

There is one more I can think of: The Lowell 5 building at the head of the Merrimack Canal. Not one of my favorites, and I'd tear it down before JFK. What used to be a spot filled with a monumental mill tower terminating the important view down the Merrimack Canal from Merrimack Street is now a nondescript concrete low-rise with an ugly parking lot. The good news is the slightly later high school addition, while destroying historic rowhouses and being pretty ugly, didn't hurt the massing in the area.

So yeah, that's my thoughts on that. If you want an interesting book with a local focus that discusses primarily Victorian architecture, pick up Mill and Mansion by John Coolidge. It was written in 1942 and updated fifty years later. In addition to the nice little ego trip that a Lowellian gets from hearing a Harvard professor say he picked Lowell for his project because it is one of the best examples of 19th century industrial architecture in context in the world, he discusses why Victorian architecture should be saved - and why people didn't want to do it. At the time of his first writing, during World War II, a generation gap was appearing around modernism, with his "younger" generation (he was born in the nineteen teens) starting to appreciate the now aging buildings, while their fathers considered most of the styles "sentimental." Of course, I'm sure most of us agree with Coolidge that these buildings are interesting - they show concern for detail, pride of work, etc. They don't build them like they used to, you know.

But I still agree with the Globe article: Modernism will have its day again.