Not Your Run-Of-The-Mill Turnaround

"Shades of gray."

That's what Bernard Lynch sees when he summons memories of visiting Lowell in the '60s and then attending college there a decade later.

"There was no color, no life in Lowell at that time ... it was a very dark and dismal place - it had the highest unemployment rate in

Over the next several months, BusinessWest will be visiting several cities across the region to see how they are addressing the issues now facing all Northeast urban centers - from poverty to job creation; from neighborhoods to downtown revitalization - and identify lessons that might be applied in Springfield and other communities in the Pioneer Valleys We start with the Middlesex County city of Lowell, near the New Hampshire border. Once a thriving textiles center, it deteriorated rapidly after those businesses succumbed to competition from southern mills decades ago. In recent years, the city has re-invented itself as a cultural center with numerous museums and art galleries, and as home to many empty-nesters and professionals working in and around Boston. The extent of the renaissance has been questioned by some academics, but Lowell is generally considered one of the better success stories in the Northeast.

Known as "the Acre," it has been home to virtually every immigrant population to arrive in this Middlesex County community that was a thriving textile hub until that sector went south - literally and figuratively - in the '50s and '60s. The Acre, long home to dilapidated housing and often-vacant storefronts, is now seeing progress in the form of some new shops, facade improvements, and building-restoration projects. "People want to live in the Acre now," said Lynch.

Within a mile of that neighborhood are more than 2.5 million square feet of old mill space and commercial buildings that have been converted into condominiums and market-rate apartments, occupied mostly by young professionals and, increasingly, empty-nesters relocating from dozens of Eastern Mass. communities. These individuals are drawn, in part, by dozens of new (since the late '90s) restaurants, museums, art galleries, and even two sushi bars now located downtown.

The Tsongas Arena, home to the city's American Hockey League franchise, sits two blocks from City Hall, and LeLacheur Park, home to the Single A Spinners, an affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, is another half-mile or so down one of many canal walks.

"Lowell has managed to create a very attractive quality of life," said Lynch. "This is a city that people want to visit, live in, and work in - and that is the complete opposite of where Lowell was back all those years ago."

Which is why Lynch - and many others in this city of just over 100,000 - were surprised and dismayed by a recent Boston Globe story on Lowell that featured the headline `What Renaissance?' The writer quoted academics and economic development gurus who questioned Lowell's come-back, turnaround, or revitalization (the words are used interchangeably) that has been staged over the past 30 years, primarily because, in their view, it hasn't yielded large numbers of high-paying jobs, and poverty rates have actually gone up, not down.

While they acknowledge poverty and the fact that all have not shared equally in whatever revitalization Lowell has recorded, Lynch and others in the city say the Globe piece and those quoted in it miss the basic point - meaning those shades of gray. That is how many people remember Lowell, or did remember it until recently, said Jim Cook, president and executive director of something called the Lowell Plan and also director of the Lowell Development and Financial Corp.

He told Business West that Lowell has managed to restore civic pride and make itself relevant again, not as a textile hub, but as a city with lots of culture, ethnic diversity, history, and large quantities of what would be considered attractive and affordable housing in the eastern part of the state.

"This is a place where people now want to live and work and play," said Cook, noting that in Lowell, urban renewal has been accomplished by embracing and preserving the past, not bulldozing it, and by maintaining economic diversity and not gentrifying the city.

This may not be Webster's definition of 'renaissance,' but it works for most of those now managing this city and planning future development. "If I were to pick a single statistic to show whether revitalization has occurred in an urban area, I would look at vacancy and decay," said Adam Baacke, deputy director of the city's Division of Planning and Development. "We've redeveloped more than 2.7 million square feet of formerly vacant property in just the last seven years."

And besides, he says, this recovery story is still being written.

Indeed, the city is advancing plans for something called the Hamilton Canal District project, a 15-acre initiative that will transform a blighted section near the Gallagher rail terminal into a mix of retail, housing, and office components, as well as a new Lowell Trial Court. The project will effectively expand the city's downtown and could be a half-billion-dollar development when completed.

And there are more plans being developed to bring more of the elements that have contributed to this story - housing, the arts, restaurants, and sushi - to the city.

In this issue, Business West takes an indepth look at Lowell, its comeback story, and what is being touted as the "Lowell Model," which, in Lynch's mind, can be boiled down to a philosophy that the work to revitalize a city is never finished.

The Future Looms

Long before Theresa Park started talking about Lowell's vibrant downtown as the city's director of Economic Development, she became a part of it.

In 2003, after watching what was happening in Lowell from nearby Newton, where she served as planning director, she purchased a condo unit in a project called Ayer Lofts, a 51-unit development carved out of the Ayer Building, formerly a furniture store, on Middle Street, just a few short blocks from City Hall. Ayer Lofts is generally considered to be the first of the conversions of downtown-area mills and other commercial buildings into condos and apartments, and opened its doors in late 1999.

There have been 26 projects since, many bearing names that speak to the city's past as a textiles center - Boot Mills East and West, the Hamilton Canal Lofts, Massachusetts Mills III, and Canal Place III, for example. They range in size (three condos to nearly 200 rental units), private-sector investments (the total is $183 million), and price tags (condos run anywhere from $150,000 to $800,000).

"I grew up thinking of Lowell in a very different way," said Park, an Andover native, recalling what the city was like decades ago. "But because I was in economic development, I came to Lowell often over a long period of time and could see what was happening here. I could see the visible changes and was really drawn to the city."

The new housing initiatives are a big part of a multi-faceted initiative that has brought Lowell headlines (most of them not at all like the one in the Globe) and acclaim as a tired Northeast manufacturing center that has managed to reinvent itself when so many other communities like it are struggling with that same assignment.

And while the Globe piece has spawned new dialogue about what constitutes a renaissance and what doesn't, many view Lowell's comeback as a model worthy of envy and, if possible, imitation, To understand if that's doable by cities like Springfield, it is necessary to rewind the tape and see just how far the city has come, and how it went about this turnaround.

Cook grew up in Lowell in the '50s. He remembers having a goal shared by most people his age - to simply get out. "That's all anyone wanted to do," he recalled. "Most people didn't think the city had a future - that's how bad it was."

Returning to the mid-'70s again, Lynch said many theorize that then-traditional urban renewal - razing entire blighted sections - wouldn't have worked in Lowell at that time because few if any would have been interested in developing the vacant lots.

How Lowell recovered from this hole few thought it could climb out of is a play with many acts, said Baacke, noting that while some might say that there have two distinct turnarounds, most consider it to be one protracted recovery.

It started, most say, with the work of Paul Tsongas, the Lowell native who represented the state's Fifth District in the U.S. House of Representatives and later went on to become the Commonwealth's junior senator. It was Tsongas, sensing that Lowell needed some kind of spark, who laid the groundwork for what would become the Lowell National Historic Park.

Officially opened in the '80s, the park pays tribute to the city's heritage as the nation's first great industrial city, and also to those who toiled in the mills along the Merrimack and Concord Rivers and a sprawling canal system that gave the city the nickname the "Venice of America." The park includes the Boot Hills Cotton Museum, with its operating weave room, a turbine exhibit, the "mill girl" boarding house, and 5.6 miles of canals, gatehouses, and 19th-century commercial buildings.

The park succeeded in bringing people to the city, thus stimulating many tourism-related ventures, said Baacke, but also restored a measure of pride in the community, something that has helped carry it through an often-turbulent revitalization process.

A Different Spin

While Lowell's leaders were pursuing cultural history as. an economic development strategy, An Wang brought a different kind of spark. The computer technology pioneer and founder of Wang Laboratories was persuaded by the LDFC to make Lowell home to its corporate headquarters. By the mid-'80s, thousands were employed by the company, with most working at the 500,000-square-foot Wang Towers.

Wang eventually fell behind other computer makers and never made up the lost ground. When the company folded in the early '90s, Lowell was severely impacted, but it learned a valuable lesson, said Baccke - not to put all its eggs in one basket.

While Wang's collapse set the recovery back, the infrastructure was in place, said Baccke, and it helped set the stage for the next series of steps in the revitalization process.

These included the development of the Tsongas Center and the baseball stadium - which proponents thought would bring some jobs and commerce, said Cook, but, more importantly, would further instill a greater sense of civic pride while also bringing people into the city and exposing to the progress taking shape there.

By the start of the new millennium, the focus shifted to a broad effort to "create a critical mass," said Baacke, referring to initiatives that would bring people, like Park, to Lowell and its downtown for roughly 18 of the 24 hours in a day - "they need to sleep the other six."

Elaborating, he said the city went about assembling the pieces that would make the city a destination for tourists, while also prompting empty-nesters to trade large houses in several Boston suburbs for airy condos overlooking the Merrimack and providing an attractive alternative for young professionals working at companies located along Routes 128 and 495.

Housing was and is a critical part of that mix, he said, but so too are the quality-of-life issues that, coupled with reasonable prices, draw people to urban living decades after many people left cities for the suburbs.

And such a critical mass builds on itself, said Baacke, adding that he doesn't believe the city is even approaching a saturation point when it comes to residential growth.

"In order for an urban environment to work well, there needs to be activity and occupancy," he explained. "You need a healthy mix of office users who form the base population during the daytime and the residential users who are there at night; cities work well when they have both, and that's why we want to see more of both."

The arts have played in a big role in the city's revitalization, said Park, noting that the city is now home to several museums. In addition to the American Textile History Museum, the city also boasts the New England Quilt Museum; the Brush Art Gallery, which has exhibits of contemporary art; the Whistler House Museum of Art, which displays works of James McNeil Whistler, a Lowell native; and the Revolving Museum, so named because its exhibits are always changing. It recently featured the On the Road scroll, the original document that became the signature work of another Lowell native, Jack Kerouac.

The city has also become home to several music and cultural festivals, including the Lowell Folk Festival, the largest free folk festival in the country; the Lowell Summer Music Festival, and annual banjo and fiddle contests. The Tsongas Center and a renovated Lowell Memorial Auditorium have enabled the city to become a popular site for conventions - an association of barbershop quartets was in town when BusinessWest visited, and there was a clown convention a few months earlier.

"There were clowns everywhere, and they were all doing their thing," Cook recalled. "Having lunch downtown was a real adventure, to say the least."

Fabric of the Community

Assessing how Lowell has accomplished all this, Cook, Lynch, and others started by saying that nothing has come easily - the Tsongas Center, for example, went to a city-wide referendum vote, one that surprisingly (at least in the minds of many) passed.

Overall, there are many factors that have contributed to the progress made over the past 30 years and especially the past decade, said Park, listing everything from revamped zoning codes to development of downtown parking garages; from effective political consensus building to aggressive marketing; from a widely acclaimed community policing program that has driven down crime rates to strong ethnic diversity.

"The city has a large immigrant population, and I think that enriches the character of the community in ways you can't quantify," she explained. "These people left their home countries to find opportunities, and that's characteristic of what this city is all about."

The city's governmental structure has also been a benefit, she said, noting that the city manager/weak mayor format takes a good measure of politics out of the equation and fosters an environment in which things can get done.

"One of the things that has been critical to Lowell's success, and Paul Tsongas introduced this to the community," said Baacke, "is the sense that the political culture needs to be more about cooperation, collaboration, and partnership, rather than about short-sighted political self interests, which often leads to parochialism or a sense of "I can gain some political favor by being the contrarian or opponent to an otherwise-embraced agenda.

"Since the '80s, when there's been a good idea, particularly with respect to revitalization and economic development, it's generally been embraced by everyone in the political sphere," he continued, "When that happens, when people work together, there's a broad sharing of responsibility and a broad sharing of credit and benefit. And what comes from that is an elimination of the infighting that sometimes scuttles revitalization."

Cook, who has worked for the quasi-public LDFC for nearly 30 years, used the word "partnerships," in the plural, on a number of occasions, and noted that they have involved a wide range of agencies, institutions, and individuals, ranging from the LDFC to the University of Lowell (which helped inspire and fund the Tsongas Center) to city banks, which have created pools of funding used to help bring businesses to the city, and facilitate facade improvements and other initiatives.

Another key to the city's success has been strong marketing, said Cook, noting that the LDFC has a $250,000 annual budget to promote the city. And when asked to whom the city markets itself, he said simply, "everyone."

"We market to people, businesses, retailers ... we move in all directions," he said, noting that the city uses the slogan "There's a lot to like about Lowell," in its various promotions, including a 12-page supplement included in a recent edition of the Lowell Sun. It detailed the pending arrival of Lowe's and Target in Lowell, outlined plans for the Hamilton Canal District project, recounted a number of improvements downtown, and quoted several business owners about why they chose to come to the city.

In those statements, and in general, the decisions have little to do with tax rates or utility costs, said Cook, and much more to do with quality of life. "We asked business people. what it would take to get them to come here, and they all talked about quality of life, which has been the focus of every-thing we've doing for the past 30 years."

Simple geography has certainly helped the cause, said Lynch, noting that Lowell's close proximity to Boston (a 40-minute train ride) and the Route 128 beltway has no doubt brought many young professionals to the city. But many other urban centers with similarly short commutes have not fared as well as Lowell, he continued, speculating that any city needs much more than highway access to achieve what most would consider a renaissance.

"We've done it by embracing the past, but generally looking ahead," Lynch said. "It's been a case of public-private partnerships, embracing new ideas, and adopting an attitude of success that has allowed the city to continually move forward."

Weaving Their Way

The general tone of the recent Boston Globe piece was widely criticized in letters to that paper and The Sun, and also on a host of Lowell-focused blogs. Writers said the city is a much better place than it was a few decades ago. and that the struggles to add good jobs are symptomatic of what's happening in many old mill towns in Northeast and elsewhere.

Park theorizes that the writer probably hasn't visited the city or hasn't spent any real time there.

"If he did, I think he'd see what everyone else sees," she said. "A vibrant city that has a lot going on and has an exciting future."

In other words, no more shades of gray.