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  #21  
Old Posted Sep 6, 2013, 3:35 PM
jkgavin jkgavin is offline
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Wow! Thank you for taking the time to compile this post! Your work is spreading around the Lowell community and making many people (even more) proud of our city. I moved to Lowell in 2008 and have been able to watch many of these changes and it's been amazing. You included a places I've lived, worked and see every day but getting to see the changes again is eye-opening. A special thanks for including the 307 Market St. home of the Arts League of Lowell and Gates Block Studios with the mention of volunteers, we appreciate it so much!

Thanks again, looking forward to the rest of your posts to see progress and areas we still need to focus on.
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  #22  
Old Posted Sep 6, 2013, 8:19 PM
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diskojoe diskojoe is offline
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I FUCKING love this city!!!

Great tour. Love everything that is going down there.
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  #23  
Old Posted Sep 6, 2013, 11:57 PM
Smuttynose1 Smuttynose1 is offline
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Originally Posted by jkgavin View Post
Wow! Thank you for taking the time to compile this post! Your work is spreading around the Lowell community and making many people (even more) proud of our city. I moved to Lowell in 2008 and have been able to watch many of these changes and it's been amazing. You included a places I've lived, worked and see every day but getting to see the changes again is eye-opening. A special thanks for including the 307 Market St. home of the Arts League of Lowell and Gates Block Studios with the mention of volunteers, we appreciate it so much!

Thanks again, looking forward to the rest of your posts to see progress and areas we still need to focus on.
No problem at all. I'm so glad you liked it. But really it's a joy to walk around Lowell and try to chronicle it. I honestly feel like it's the best time to be in Lowell at least in many decades. There are positive signs in so many different corners of the downtown. I was impressed by all the lights on in the upper stories of the downtown buildings. It's really heartening to see the city come alive as it is.
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  #24  
Old Posted Sep 7, 2013, 12:42 AM
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Awesome thread. Lowell is such a fascinating place.

If anyone is interested, I have some pictures of it from 2001, from a visit to my sister who lived in Massachusetts Mills at the time.
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  #25  
Old Posted Sep 8, 2013, 3:24 PM
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Wow, that is a stunning amount of change in 4.5 years. Go Lowell!
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  #26  
Old Posted Sep 11, 2013, 6:29 AM
beyondtheforest beyondtheforest is offline
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This is fantastic. The level of preservation is inspiring and extremely impressive. I would love to see the 19th century residential districts.
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  #27  
Old Posted Sep 11, 2013, 7:08 AM
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Great thread. Very interesting from my perspective - I live in the ''cradle of industrial Canada'' along the Lachine Canal in Montreal (neighborhood: Pointe-Saint-Charles). A similar restoration project began in the late nineties here.

Some of the buildings in my hood look very similar to those in your photos. Not surprising since they were built around the same time and restored around the same time as well.

Corticelli Lofts (formerly Belding-Corticelli industrial complex)



Redpath lofts (formerly Redpath sugar refinery)



Imperial lofts (formerly Imperial Tobacco complex)



Rock climbing facility (formerly Redpath silo)




The latest project in my area is currently underway and will be the largest to date - an 1,100-unit condo project for Canada's largest brick-facade building, le Nordelec (Northern Electric building).



The catalyst for these renewal projects was the re-opening of the Lachine Canal for pleasure boating in 2001 (it had been closed for several decades)

Here's how it was back then







Anyhow, thanks for sharing ! The tour was much appreciated.

Last edited by leftimage; Sep 11, 2013 at 7:52 AM.
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  #28  
Old Posted Sep 11, 2013, 9:23 AM
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Lowell looks downright amazing now, especially given the last time I went through there was in the mid 1990's when I lived in Manchester NH for a couple of years! Lowell's mills looks every bit as renovated nowadays as the old Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, which is a very good thing indeed!

Awesome thread!

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  #29  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2013, 12:52 AM
sterlippo1 sterlippo1 is offline
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Wow, that is a stunning amount of change in 4.5 years. Go Lowell!
the change actually started over 20 years ago and Lowell has Paul Tsongas to thank for all of it. All of you, come in the summer and take in a Lowell Spinners baseball game at LeLacheur park and do look around on your way to the game.
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  #30  
Old Posted Sep 13, 2013, 1:02 AM
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So sad that other cities are still tearing down so many buildings because they are "too old". If Lowell had done the same there would more parking lots and cheap overpriced new builds instead of all that wonderful building stock. Glad I got to take a stroll around Downtown.
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  #31  
Old Posted Mar 4, 2014, 6:58 PM
JG573 JG573 is offline
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Sorry to bump this thread but SmuttyNose1 you did an amazing job with this thread. I am originally from Boston and while visiting family for the past two weeks, I visited one of my friends who teaches at Umass Lowell. Started to do some digging on the forum for Lowell and found this.

I was in shock seeing Lowell from what it use to be when I had been there years ago. The transformation is amazing and I am glad I was able to personally see it. Parts of it did not even look like I was in the same city.

For anyone that has seen old Lowell and what it is now would be shocked. Even the Umass Lowell Campus has been going through a huge expansion it seems with a few beautiful new trendy buildings that have been built around the different campuses.

This city is really an american model for reviving run down an depressed american rust belt and northeast american cities.
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  #32  
Old Posted Mar 4, 2014, 8:30 PM
mhays mhays is offline
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That's awesome stuff.

A place needs decent demand and rent levels to make this sort of thing happen, unless there are significant subsidies, even outside of a seismic zone. Guessing Lowell is doing well?
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  #33  
Old Posted Mar 4, 2014, 9:32 PM
JG573 JG573 is offline
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Originally Posted by mhays View Post
That's awesome stuff.

A place needs decent demand and rent levels to make this sort of thing happen, unless there are significant subsidies, even outside of a seismic zone. Guessing Lowell is doing well?
I think what helped was its proximity to Boston with luring talent and especially Umass-Lowell while most cities that took a turn for the worse are not in a favorable position especially like Lowell having a university downtown.

From the tour of the campus my friend gave me I got two things that jumped at me and it was that Umass-Lowell increased enrollment since 2007 by 45 percent to now almost 17,000 students and 1,100 faculty with many living in dorms and off campus housing. That is a huge surge of people and money in a short period of time. Especially that I saw at least 5 to 6 new facilities and dorms built in the past 5 years with them easily spending around 700 million in capital investments.

Then a lot of the mills where cheap and ripe for redevelopment while most cities tore them down for urban renewable and new construction is not as attractive.

Lowell is doing well for a big reason that it is almost like night and day in some parts of the city and if you where there before this investment the place was scary and literally bombed out. It definitely is doing well in the fact it has made a rebound but it still has a ways to go, I mean there is still grit and development that needs to take place. Still has its fair share of problems but its far better than it use to be and if the trend upward continues this city could turn into a gem in massachusetts.

Last edited by JG573; Mar 5, 2014 at 1:59 AM.
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  #34  
Old Posted Mar 4, 2014, 9:52 PM
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one of the best threads i've ever seen on this site!
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  #35  
Old Posted Mar 5, 2014, 2:20 AM
Shawn Shawn is offline
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Originally Posted by mhays View Post
That's awesome stuff.

A place needs decent demand and rent levels to make this sort of thing happen, unless there are significant subsidies, even outside of a seismic zone. Guessing Lowell is doing well?
Lowell is doing quite well in these regards - about 7-8 years ago Lowell was Ground Zero for artist relocation from Boston. They drove the initial wave of renovation and investment. Now for artists, Lowell itself is becoming too expensive.
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