Renewing the Rust-Belt
Tony Aldous looks at the redevelopment of the city of Lowell in America.
If you go north out of Boston, Massachusetts, the names of towns are familiar to English ears – Malden and Waltham, Winchester and Woburn, Wakefield, Reading and Billericay – but their geographical relationships confusing. There is not only a Suffolk-Essex border, but a Norfolk-Middlesex one! Then, just north of Chelmsford comes the city of Lowell, named not after a place in England but a Bostonian merchant with a photographic memory. It happened like this.
In the 1790s, the merchants of Newburyport – a small seaport at the mouth of the Merrimack River – built a canal to bypass the Pawtucket Falls, in a bid to bring farm produce down through their port. Alas, the Bostonians built a better canal to link the area to their city. The Pawtucket Canal attracted next to no traffic.
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