Ryan W. Owen, Writer and Photographer
Moore, Andrews, Whipple, Meadowcroft: If you spent a good span of your childhood years in Lowell, Massachusetts attending school or church at Sacred Heart, all of these names will be familiar to you. The streets closest to Sacred Heart carry those names, which date back to the decades before Sacred Heart’s founding when the area […]
Read MoreDowntown Lowell sure has come a long way since the early 1980’s. My earliest memories of Downtown Lowell involve weekend visits to my grandmother, who once lived in the large apartment building at the corner of Middle and Central streets. During those visits, we would walk up Central Street to Merrimack Street, follow Merrimack up […]
Read MoreOnce located on Lowell‘s Gorham Street, St. Peter’s Church was founded in Lowell in 1841, ten years after the founding of St. Patrick’s, the city’s first Catholic church. Many readers will remember the impressive edifice that once stood at 323 Gorham, across from Lowell’s courthouse building; however, this was actually the church’s third building. St. […]
Read MoreParking lots aren’t usually very interesting. And, as I found out this morning, it’s rather difficult to take an interesting photograph if your subject happens to be that parking lot. And, usually, when one dives into the history of a parking lot, you find, as its predecessor, an open field, a burnt-out residence, or maybe […]
Read MoreIn the early spring of 1973, if you were to drive west along Chelmsford‘s Route 110, just beyond the Lowell city line, you wouldn’t get far before you came across a large clearing outside your driver’s side window. Masses of steel would be shooting skyward, well back on a newly-cleared 12-acre parcel of land. There […]
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McDonald’s captures imaginations. These days, it’s hard to travel a strip of suburban road, even in New England, without seeing those golden arches rising from the commercial landscape. McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in Lowell during the summer of ’65, on Rogers Street – near the Tewksbury line.
Read MoreIf you’ve spent any time in Downtown Lowell, you’ve surely passed Page’s Clock in Kearney Square on Merrimack Street. The clock, refurbished in the 1990’s, has been a Downtown Lowell landmark since the D.L. Page Company moved its operations into the nearby building at 16-18 Merrimack Street in May 1913. As its advertisements claimed, the […]
Read MoreIn those long ago days before cellphones, speed dialing, and stored numbers, folks like Tommy Tutone telephoned girls like ‘Jenny’ by actually dialing 867-5309. If he was a modern type, he may have even punched the number into the telephone’s touchtone keypad, an innovation that was several years old by the time the song was […]
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Do you remember the Green Ridge Turkey Farm? Who can forget the giant turkey that once stared out across the Daniel Webster Highway from its perch atop that iconic sign?
Read MoreMaybe you’ve come through Billerica. On the northern approach, near the North Billerica commuter rail station, lies the site of the John Rogers homestead, marked by a sign erected by the Massachusetts Tercentenary Commission in 1930. The sign memorializes an event that happened even longer ago on today’s Billerica Avenue. Early in Billerica’s history, during the […]
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Forgotten New England 