August 7, 2022
The focus of last week’s newsletter was the city council’s unanimous vote to sell LeLacheur Park to the University of Massachusetts Lowell. With no council meeting this week, I decided to write about how LeLacheur Park came to be in the 1990s and to put that story in the bigger context of Lowell politics in that decade.
The calendar says that the 1990s began on January 1, 1990, but in Lowell political history, the 1990s began on November 2, 1993. In that day’s Lowell city election, voters ousted five incumbent city councilors and, with a sixth not running, elected six new city councilors. That election was one of the major pivot points in Lowell political history.
The six new councilors were Laurie Machado, Stephen Gendron, Matthew Donahue, Michael Geary, Grady Mulligan, and Larry Martin. The three incumbents who were reelected were Richard Howe, Tarsy Poulios, and Bud Caulfield. Incumbents who lost were Gerald Durkin, Bernie Lemoine, Kathleen Kelley, Curtis LeMay, and Richard O’Malley. Incumbent Ray Rourke did not seek reelection. Richard Howe was elected mayor by an 8 to 1 vote. Richard Johnson was the city manager.
By this time, the Massachusetts Miracle that had propelled Governor Michael Dukakis to the Democratic nomination for President in 1988 had collapsed. The regional high-tech industry had faded, home foreclosures were at an all-time high, and several local and regional banks had been taken over by the FDIC.
In the midst of this, former U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas, who had run for the Democratic nomination for President in 1992 (he lost to Bill Clinton), launched an effort to bring minor league sports to Lowell. His initial idea was for a baseball team but while pursuing that, he learned that the American Hockey League wanted a franchise in southern New Hampshire, so he broadened the scope of his effort to include both sports.
To host a hockey team required a hockey arena, so Tsongas and the city latched onto the efforts of UMass Lowell to build an arena on campus. The school’s increasingly good hockey team, recently renamed the River Hawks (formerly the Chiefs), was still playing home games at the small and outdated Tully Forum in Billerica. A new venue closer to campus was desperately needed and efforts to obtain it were ongoing. But Paul Tsongas had the contacts, the credibility, and the persistence to get multiple people and entities to merge their previously separate plans in a common goal. On this issue, he persuaded UMass Lowell, the city of Lowell, and representatives from state government (primarily the local legislators but also Governor William Weld) to combine efforts to construct an arena in Lowell.
On May 24, 1994, the Lowell City Council appropriated $57,000 for a feasibility study for the proposed arena. Almost from the start the arena was a divisive issue. The city council endorsed it but there was constant and vocal opposition at every step. At the root of the dispute were competing visions for the city: Should local government invest in big amenities like a sports arena that would attract more businesses and residents or should government limit its spending to maintain things as they were.
The fight peaked in the 1995 city election. Candidates split into two camps, pro- and anti-arena. In the primary, the anti-arena candidates did quite well but then the city’s business community, led by the Lowell Sun, heavily promoted the arena and the candidates who supported it. In November, a majority of those elected to the council favored the arena and the project continued.
Notwithstanding the support of most of the city council, building the arena was a struggle due mostly to costs that exceeded estimates. The initial plan called for a separate practice rink to be built alongside the main arena, but that was quickly jettisoned. Then the luxury boxes were cut. It got to the point were fryolators were eliminated since the exhaust systems they needed were so costly. Lowell hockey fans would have to make do without French fries.
In the midst of this fight, the American Hockey League awarded a franchise to Lowell in June 1995. The team was to begin play in the 1997 season but as the arena construction schedule slowed, the AHL deferred the arrival of the team to the fall of 1998. However, on January 28, 1998, the brand-new Paul E. Tsongas Arena hosted the UMass Lowell River Hawks in the facility’s first hockey game. In October of that year, the Lowell Lock Monsters began to play in the American Hockey League’s 1998-99 season. (The Lock Monster’s top prospect that first year was a defenseman named Zdeno Chara).
At the same time that he was pursuing a professional hockey franchise, Paul Tsongas was lobbying the ownership of the Boston Red Sox to locate a minor league affiliate in the city. This was attractive to the Red Sox who hoped to bring their minor league clubs geographically closer to Boston. A team from Elmira, New York, in the New York-Penn short season Class A league that had lost its major league affiliation agreed to move to Lowell and become part of the Red Sox organization and the Lowell Spinners were born.
The city of Lowell made a big investment in rehabilitating Alumni Field on Route 38 which was the home of Lowell High baseball. The Spinners played their first game there on June 24, 1996. Tsongas, city government and the city’s legislative delegation obtained funding for a new baseball park and ground was broken for LeLacheur Field in June 1997. A year later the first Spinners game was played there.
The arena and ballpark proposals were not the only issues before the Lowell City Council in the mid-1990s. What to do with the Bon Marche building which had been vacant for years came before the council when a local partnership sought to buy and rehabilitate the building, but they would only proceed if they had assurances of tenants once the work was done. City leaders persuaded Wang, which had faded but was still operating, to rent two floors of the building for its call center operations. They also persuaded UMass Lowell to open a bookstore on the building’s ground floor in partnership with Barnes and Noble. This faced strong opposition from those at the University who wanted the bookstore kept on campus, but Chancellor Bill Hogan pushed it through with the proviso that textbooks would still be sold on campus. Perhaps the bitterest fight came over the city renting multiple floors of the building to use as the headquarters for the Lowell School Department which was then located in the old Post Office building at Gorham and Appleton Street (most recently the Juvenile Court). By slim majorities, the council and the school committee endorsed the move and the building was rehabilitated.
The charter school movement was in its early stages in 1994 and two were proposed for Lowell. Middlesex Charter Academy, operated by Middlesex Community College, was born and continues to operate in the city. The other, proposed by an outfit called the Edison Project, never came into being.
Another proposal that gained much attention in the mid-1990s but was never consummated was for an Alzheimer’s research and treatment facility at the Lawrence Mills which had been vacant since a massive fire nearly destroyed the place in 1986. The initial proposal called for a $94 million facility in partnership with Boston University, but then UMass Medical School put forth a competing proposal. Political leaders split on which project to back and the plan fizzled out.
The city faced a number of other challenges in that era. Efforts to save St. Peter’s Church which was on Gorham Street across from the Superior Courthouse failed and the building was demolished. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston had closed the parish decades earlier and had not maintained the building. When pieces of the façade fell into Gorham Street one day, the demolition project was given the green light by the city.
Further up Gorham Street, the local employment picture was upended when Borden announced it would close its Prince Spaghetti manufacturing plant that employed many local residents. In June 1995, the city blocked access to Dutton Street from Western Avenue. At the time, the mill building there was a fabric manufacturing plant and making Western Ave a dead end from School Street made it easier for trucks to access the facility. Finally, the city’s public image and self-regard took a hit when HBO premiered High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell, Massachusetts, a documentary about heroin addicts in the city.
On the positive side, the city council in July 1994 committed $4 million in Federal funds to guarantee the lease for the Wang Towers (now known as Cross Point) between tenant NYNEX and the little-known building owners who had recently purchased the towers at foreclosure auction. Because the building was outfitted with state-of-the-art technological infrastructure, it was a desirable place for NYNEX but the company was leery of committing to an unknown entity without some cushion. By pledging the $4 million to guarantee the landlord’s performance, the city gave NYNEX the security it needed to execute the lease. With NYNEX signing up, other tech companies rushed to the space and the towers were soon fully occupied and thriving. None of the money pledged by the city was touched.
A positive development from the summer of 1995 was the departure of the Department of Revenue’s Finance Control Board. In the early 1990s, the city lost control of its finances and ran a budget deficit. The state stepped in to cover the shortfall but in return, this financial oversite board with a majority of members coming from DOR was created to oversee Lowell’s fiscal affairs. The control board had the final say on all city finances. By July 1995, the city’s finances had so stabilized that the Finance Control Board was disbanded and full fiscal authority reverted to the city.
Finally, in September 1998, City Manager Brian Martin proposed an “artist overlay district” which represented the first efforts of use the “create economy” as an economic development engine for Lowell.
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Next Sunday I’ll be back with more news from the 2022 Lowell City Council.
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Next Saturday, August 13, 2022, at 10 am I’ll lead a Lowell Walks tour on “the founding of Lowell.” The tour begins from Lowell National Park Visitor Center at 246 Market Street and requires no advance registration or fee. For 90 minutes we’ll walk around downtown and talk about what was here in the years before Lowell received its charter in 1826. For some background about the tour topic, please check out today’s post on richardhowe.com.