The Lowell Effect

There's a story in yesterday's Worcester Telegram (here's a link to the home page, but you need a subscription to see the story) about downtown Fitchburg. It's mostly positive, and contains the usual reference to Lowell.

Whenever anyone writes or talks about a down-on-its-luck urban area trying to climb back, Lowell also gets the reference as the way things should be done. But here's the dirty little secret: Downtown Lowell isn't all it's cracked up to be. Decent restaurants open and close regularly. Most of the retail doesn't cater to middle- or upper-class buyers. According to a Lowell Sun story this month, there are 14 vacant storefronts downtown.

While downtown Lowell is improving, the city has been living off its reputation, one that was self-created. Lowell officials take every opportunity -- and create some of their own -- to talk about the greatness of Lowell and how it's one of the best mid-sized cities in the country. It has become a self-propelled reputation that has stuck.

One of the reasons to like the Telegram story is that Fitchburg is stealing a couple of pages from the Lowell playbook, particularly the optimistic view. The overall tone in Fitchburg has been pretty negative lately (yeah, yeah, we're lobbing rocks from our glass house right now), but the public message needs to be one of growth, energy, and potential. This story begins to move in that direction.

The story runs through a laundry list of projects going on downtown. The ones we like best (probably along with Councilor Dean Tran based on his pro-housing comment last week) are the couple of high-end condo buildings being finished. The city will need to find a handful of good restaurants, bars and stores to keep those condo owners downtown and happy, but it's definitely a good start.

While we take our swipe at Lowell above, the city has done a number of things that has made the city successful. The One Big Idea (ballpark and arena) which we advocate for Fitchburg, it is turning downtown into a viable living option (as Fitchburg seems to be doing), and no one touts Lowell harder than its own (something Fitchburg needs to do more). Fitchburg doesn't need to be Lowell, and should strive to do better, but it can learn a valuable lesson or two from the Mill City.