Ryan W. Owen, Writer and Photographer
It wasn’t Cornhill Street, Cornhill Road, Cornhill Avenue, or even the Cornhill; instead, it was just Cornhill, and in its day, knowing this was just one more way that those in the know had to distinguish locals from those visiting Boston as tourists. In its history, Boston has had two roads called Cornhill. The first, […]
Read MoreMoore, 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 More‘Thrown from Machine at Harpin Curve in Tyngsboro’ ‘The bursting of one of the front tires on the Isotta car, entered in the automobile race to be held Monday over the Merrimack Valley course, came near resulting in the death of Al Poole, the driver, and Coot, the mechanician. The accident occurred about 5.15 o’clock […]
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 MoreReading newspapers from the morning after the Titanic sank is almost like reading the first page of an alternate history novel. The first few words are familiar: The next are shocking: The Lowell Sun, the Boston Evening Transcript, and the Lewiston Evening Journal all reported similar headlines in their April 15, 1912 editions. Just imagine, […]
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 […]
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Forgotten New England 