July 21, 2024

Another summer gap for Lowell City Council meetings so let’s revisit Lowell political history this week. Not long ago while researching Civil Rights lawsuit brought against Lowell for segregation and unequal treatment of minority students in the public schools in the mid-1980s, I was struck by how many other things were going on in Lowell at that time. So today I’ll look at some of the big political stories in Lowell politics of the 1980s, tales that will refresh the memory of longtime residents and introduce those new to the city to some events that still influence local politics today. Instead of a chronological narrative, we’ll go topic-by-topic.

Rise of Wang Laboratories – Wang Laboratories was a computer company founded in Cambridge in the 1950s by Dr. An Wang, a Chinese immigrant who earned a Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard. Wang Labs moved to Tewksbury in 1963 and then to Lowell in 1976. The company was best known for its dedicated word processors, but it made many computer products. Along with Digital Equipment, Data General, Prime Computer, Lotus Development and Apollo Computer, Wang helped Massachusetts compete with Silicon Valley for dominance in the computer industry. By 1980, Wang had $3 billion in annual revenue and employed 30,000, making it the largest employer in Lowell. That same year, the company broke ground on its world headquarters on outer Chelmsford Street. Soon, three interconnected 14-story office towers with 1.2 million square feet of space loomed over the Highlands. In 1985, Wang opened its world-wide training headquarters on East Merrimack Street. Wang customers from across the world were to come to this state-of-the-art educational facility to learn of the latest Wang products. Wang continued to ride high into the 1990s, but the death of Dr. Wang, weak leadership from his successor and son, Fred Wang, and changes in the computer industry caused Wang to falter. The company’s lenders foreclosed on the Towers in 1994 with the new owner renaming it Cross Point, and the downtown training center was sold to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for use as Middlesex Community College.

Lowell Hilton Hotel – US Senator and Lowell native Paul Tsongas believed that for the city to reach its full potential, it needed a big downtown hotel. He and City Manager Joe Tully recruited Rhode Island based hotel developer Arthur Robbins to consider the project. When Robbins expressed doubt about the viability of a downtown hotel, the city offered to build a 1,000-space parking garage adjacent to the hotel and to reconfigure the road network leading from the Lowell Connector to the hotel to ease the arrival of hotel guests. However, the deal was only sealed when Tsongas and Tully got Wang Labs to agree to book 60 percent of the rooms in the hotel year-round to house Wang trainees who would be coming to Lowell for multi-week classes at the adjacent Wang Training Center which was just across the Pawtucket Canal from the proposed hotel. That sold Robbins on the project and the 351 room Lowell Hilton opened to rave reviews in 1985. However, by the end of the decade Wang’s business had collapsed as did the hotel’s occupancy rate. Hilton ultimately abandoned the franchise and successive ownership groups tried unsuccessfully to make the hotel work as a Holiday Inn and then as a Doubletree. Finally, in 2010, UMass Lowell purchased the building and renamed it the UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center although recently the University reverted the building to the Commonwealth which has used it to provide refugee housing.

Arrival of Lowell National Historical Park – The leadership of the National Park Service initially opposed the creation of a park in Lowell, but a united city led by US Senator Paul Tsongas and his predecessors in Congress Brad Morse and Paul Cronin, relentlessly and successfully pushed the project. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation that created the Lowell National Historical Park. The mission of the Lowell park was twofold: to tell the story of the Industrial Revolution in America; and to tell the story of immigration. One of the concerns of NPS leadership was that many of the mill buildings and ancillary historical structures had been demolished already (mostly in ill-conceived Urban Renewal projects in earlier decades). Tsongas, however, emphasized that the centerpiece of the Lowell Park should be the canals and the stories of the people who had worked here. Consequently, the National Park service took ownership of just a handful of properties. Perhaps more importantly, the legislation also created the 15-member Lowell Historic Preservation Commission to administer the “preservation district” (which was almost all of downtown Lowell) and provide other, related services. A major mission of the LHPC was to encourage private property owners to renovate their buildings in accordance with historic preservation standards. To facilitate this, the LHPC controlled large pools of money that could be lent to building owners at favorable rates in exchange for compliance with historic standards. The success of this effort helped transform the appearance of the downtown in a way that still benefits residents today.

Paul Tsongas leaves the US Senate – On January 13, 1984, US Senator Paul Tsongas stunned the political world with his announcement that he would not seek reelection to a second term in the Senate in that year’s election. He had been diagnosed with cancer at age 43, and he would devote his energy to treating the disease and working in the private sector to help provide for the future of his three young children. Although he left the Senate, Tsongas stayed involved in Lowell politics, particularly in economic development and reforming the public schools. Still, having a US Senator with growing seniority from Lowell would have been to the city’s great benefit (Tsongas was succeeded in the Senate by John Kerry). A bone marrow transplant in 1986 led to a “clean bill of health” in 1991. This prompted Tsongas to run for President in 1992 but he lost the Democratic Primary to Bill Clinton. Tsongas returned to Lowell with unrelenting civic vigor, however, the cancer returned and he died on January 18, 1997, at age 55.

Fight over Trash-to-Energy Plant – Sometime prior to 1965, the city of Lowell constructed a trash incinerator on outer Westford Street on the grounds of the city dump. By 1973, each day the Lowell incinerator was burning 360 tons of trash from Lowell, Chelmsford, Bedford, Carlisle and from commercial trash haulers. The incinerator operated 24 hours per day with three shifts. But in 1975, the Environmental Protection Agency forced the shutdown of the incinerator which repeatedly had been cited for violating state and federal air pollution standards. The city began dumping its trash directly in the landfill which until then was the resting place of the toxic ash leftover from incinerating trash. Environmental concerns about the landfill and its limited size forced the city to pay more and more to haul its trash elsewhere.

Lowell was not alone in the need for new ways to dispose of trash. The refuse industry proposed massive “trash-to-energy” plants that would generate electricity from burning rubbish. The industry maintained that new technology made this “safe” and compliant with federal regulations (although at the time the federal government did not regulate things like arsenic, cadmium, or dioxins when it came to burning trash).

In 1986, Lowell City Manager Joe Tully struck a tentative deal with Browning Ferris Industries, a massive nationwide “waste management” firm, to build such a plant on the site of the former city incinerator on Westford Street. Although Lowell produced just 300 tons of trash per day, this plant would burn 1500 tons per day with rubbish being trucked into the facility from across the region. In exchange for siting the plant in the city, Lowell would pay no fee to dispose of its trash. The city council was giddy with excitement over this plant, passing preliminary matters in a series of 8 to 1 votes with Councilor Richard Howe as the sole council opponent. Residents of the Highlands neighborhood, however, were not as enthused and a group began organizing in opposition to the plant because of concerns over increased truck traffic and environmental safety. The city administration, BFI consultants, and Lowell Sun editorial writers were all harshly critical of the neighborhood group but the Highlands Council, as the group was called, persisted with a vigorous grassroots effort that led the city council on May 20, 1987, to unanimously REJECT the proposal in what the Lowell Sun called “one of the most remarkable political turnarounds in city history.”

“The Shadow” and the Lowell Police Department – In a front-page story in the November 2, 1987, Boston Globe titled “Police squabbles in Lowell cast pall on city’s comeback,” reporter Kevin Cullen explained that while Lowell’s recent prosperity had become the centerpiece of Governor Michael Dukakis’s “Massachusetts Miracle” narrative, the city also had some problems including widespread illegal gambling, massage parlors that were fronts for prostitution, and the city becoming the region’s major cocaine distribution point. To that Cullen added, “Against such a background, a police department beset by internal squabbling can become a public safety liability, and a destabilizing force in Lowell’s comeback.” What was Cullen referring to? You need only look at the opening paragraph of his article for the answer:

“LOWELL – The good news at the Lowell Police Department is that last week they finally settled that lawsuit against the police officer who urinated on a prisoner. The bad news is, that’s the good news. For the last two years, the goings-on at the 190-member police department have played like a racy TV miniseries. Two years ago, in the middle of heated police contract negotiations, someone posted on a station bulletin board some letters signed by “The Shadow.” The letter accused the police chief of playing favorites and of ignoring misconduct by those favorites. The letters also contained some ugly innuendo . . .”

“The Shadow” so engulfed the police department and City Hall that at times, there seemed to be more effort spent trying to identify “The Shadow” than there was on fighting crime. Eventually, the police chief retired and “The Shadow” controversy faded into the background, but for several years in the late 1980s it fractured the police department and often diverted the attention of the city manager and city council from more pressing problems facing the city.

“The Bookie Tapes” – In May 1987, a Middlesex County grand jury indicted 19 persons, including a Lowell police officer and a Middlesex County police officer, in connection with a Lowell-based gambling and loan sharking ring that was “aided and patronized by public officials.” The investigation had been conducted by State Police assigned to the Middlesex District Attorney’s office. The Globe, citing sources in the State Police and the Middlesex DA’s office, reported that one of those arrested, 57-year-old Jackie McDermott, was the leader of the gambling operation and “was the chief organized crime figure in Lowell.”

Five months later as these cases worked their way through the justice system, the Boston Herald ran an explosive multi-day series of front-page stories called “The Bookie Tapes.” On October 24, 1987, the headline read, “Dirty dealings in Lowell, gamblers tied to bid for city office.” As part of the investigation, the State Police had used extensive wiretaps, including one on McDermott’s phone. The transcripts of the wiretaps, which the Herald somehow had access to, revealed a series of telephone conversations between McDermott and several city officials in which they discussed their efforts to get Michael McLaughlin of Billerica, a Middlesex County Commissioner and the head of the Lowell Housing Authority, elected as city manager back in January 1987 after the resignation of Joe Tully. Among those recorded was City Councilor Gus Coutu, who the tapes elsewhere disclosed, owed a $10,000 gambling debt to McDermott (although law enforcement officials emphasized that Coutu was a victim of loansharking and not a suspect in the investigation).

These disclosures obviously put that city manager selection in a different light. That vote had been taken on January 7, 1987. Jim Campbell, who had been the assistant city manager under Joe Tully, was elected city manager receiving votes from Mayor Robert Kennedy and Councilors Brian Martin, Armand LeMay, Richard O’Malley and Ray Rourke. McLaughlin received votes from Coutu, Brendan Fleming and Kathy Kelley. Councilor Richard Howe voted for City Clerk William Busby.

In the course of this prosecution, it was also disclosed that while running the gambling operation, McDermott had also been an informant for the FBI. Several months after that, McDermott was shot and killed by William Barnoski inside McDermott’s Carroll Parkway home. Barnoski, identified in the media as an organized crime enforcer, and his wife were later convicted of McDermott’s murder.

Federal Investigation of Political Corruption – On September 2, 1988, the Boston Globe reported that former Lowell city manager B. Joseph Tully, who had resigned in late 1986 after serving as city manager since 1979, had been indicted by a federal grand jury in connection with a 1985 swap of land between the city and the company that owned the Lowell Ford car dealership. Both parcels were adjacent to the city’s land fill off Westford and Stedman Streets. The indictment ended a three year long FBI investigation of several real estate developments in Lowell, although these were the only charges that resulted. In December 1988, a Federal jury found Tully guilty of one count of attempted extortion and three counts of mail fraud.     

Massachusetts Miracle – In 1975, the unemployment rate in Lowell was 13 percent, which was the highest in the nation for a city its size. Ten years later Lowell’s unemployment rate was 3 percent, and the economy was booming. So was the rest of Massachusetts, mostly riding the wave of the computer and financial services industries. At the same time, the economy in much of the rest of the country was depressed. This imbalance was a big factor in the “secondary migration” that brought thousands of Cambodian immigrants from their initial homes in the United States to Lowell. It also propelled Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis into the 1988 presidential race. After defeating Democrats Joe Biden, Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson, Dukakis faced incumbent vice president George H.W. Bush in November. The Bush-Quayle ticket won a landslide victory over Dukakis-Bentsen with the Republicans winning 54 percent of the nationwide popular vote and 426 electoral votes to just 111 for the Democrats. Dukakis returned to Massachusetts to finish his term as governor but that coincided with a collapse of the state’s economy at the start of the 1990s. In Lowell, the fallout included the bankruptcy of Wang, the liquidation of several century-old city banks, and home foreclosure rates 30 percent higher than in the worst years of the Great Recession of 2008.

School Desegregation Lawsuit and Settlement – As I mentioned at the start, all of the events described above were a backdrop to the struggle over desegregating the city’s schools that played out at the same time. If you haven’t already read my story about that, you can find it on my website, richardhowe.com.