It's a roughly fifteen-square-mile patch of seeming contradictions: it's blue-collar working class to the bone, filled with the pool halls and drinking holes that factory workers in any given Springsteen song would find refuge inside, yet it has one of the most vibrant art and culture scenes anywhere north of Boston; it has abundant natural resources (the Concord and Merrimack rivers, a state forest within its borders, the only urban greenspace conservation effort in the Northeast), yet it famously harnessed them to usher in the Industrial Revolution in America and establish itself, definitively, as the prototype of a factory town; the tech and I.T. industries have flourished around here, helped enormously by some of the premier applied chemistry and nursing programs in the country at local colleges, yet the city's banner weekend every year is the Folk Festival, the largest gathering of earthy-crunchy hipsters, craft-lovers, and foodies anywhere in New England.
As I grow up to appreciate it more, I find these contradictions give Lowell a kind of liminal, in-between, hard to pin down quality that may seem strange at first to outsiders, but can provide a battery of creativity to those who know where to look. I'm not the only writer to feel that way, incidentally; Lowell's got a long history with literary icons from Edgar Allan Poe to Charles Dickens, who've visited and drawn inspiration from this out-of-the-ordinary atmosphere. Poe supposedly composed his masterpiece The Raven at the local Worthen Pub (a claim The Worthen's sign seems to settle for evermore), while a Lowell historian and Dickens scholar recently claimed that Old 'Boz drew inspiration for his Christmas ghosts after he toured the area and encountered a similar notion in literary circulations produced as entertainment by the Mill Girls.
I'm here today to peel back the curtain on one of the best places I know of to chase down that off-kilter creativeness, a place I've visited for several years and where I suspect Poe, Dickens, and any other wanderers who enjoy stepping off the beaten path would feel right at home. The more selfish parts of my brain are screaming out as I type now, "Stop it! Don't let out this secret and ruin the city's best hangout spot!" But in the name of public interest, here is the absolute best - and certainly most unknown - Lowell attraction that you've probably never experienced.
Head on down to the booming Jackson Street area of Lowell, right on the fringes of the downtown. Jackson Street and its environs are currently experiencing a renaissance of sorts thanks to a city-wide renovation effort aimed at converting the previously run-down or abandoned shells of mill properties (there are dozens and dozens of them around here) into artist lofts and studios, resulting in the largest concentrated community of live-in artists on the Eastern Seaboard. At the end of the street nearer to the Lord Overpass and the Lowell MBTA station, you'll see a gated doorway and these signs:
Head through the gate into a dimly-lit tunnel that'll probably make you want to clutch your jewels a little tighter for a second or two; ward off thoughts of "I definitely took a wrong turn somewhere," follow the signs, and find yourself waiting for what's possibly the world's slowest-moving elevator.
After the elevator makes its snail's way to the 4th floor, the doors will open and, for a moment, you'll double-take that you've crossed into a "somewhere else" zone from the city street below; maybe the elevator was so slow because it wasn't just going up a few floors, so much as it was transporting you into a pocket of a secret, alternate world along the lines of Harry Potter's Diagon Alley.
Welcome to Mill No. 5
This strange marketplace, whose banner tagline is "It's Not What You Think," opened its doors for the first time in the summer of 2013. At the time, it wasn't much more than some disparate storefronts that were probably too quirky or niche to stand a chance in the cutthroat, crowded competition of Merrimack St., the main artery through Lowell's downtown district where shops can be called successful if they endure through even one calendar rotation.
The Mill's "directory" can be found once you exit the elevator onto the cavernously creaking floorboards, and its contents can give you a pretty good idea of the experience lying ahead of you. Nerds, bibliophiles, and pop culture geeks of all denominations: brownie points for every reference you can spot on here.
Almost none of the stores here are open for business full time; most are their owners' pet side projects, an extra occupation for nights and on weekends, when Mill 5 hosts "Little Bazaars" that transform the space into a curio marketplace (usually seasonally themed) for local artists, farmers, and craft sellers.
There are some regular staples, however: hands-down one of the best coffee places in a caffeinated city full of them is Coffee & Cotton, where you can juice up on some organic offerings before settling down in the adjacent reading room I'd mentioned.
Continue on down the hallway and you'll find a genuine '50s-esque soda fountain, complete with countertop stools, mineral sodas, and those red-and-white striped straws that scream out to be shared nose-to-nose on a date; an apothecary; photography & yoga studios; print shops; a guitar workshop; cheese makers; a vinyl record shop; and lots of other storefronts of the "huh, that's fun... know what, let's stop in for a second and see what they're about" variety -
- not to mention the odd paranormal research center or two. First instincts may laugh this off as an obvious gag, but maybe?...
Sitting proud at the opposite end of the long hallway from the elevator, however, is arguably Mill No. 5's main attraction: the Luna Theater.
Much as I love these kind of offerings in their own right, the Luna offers no midnight showings of Avengers: Endgame or Fast & Furious - come instead for screenings of Casablanca, the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, or the slasher films of the '80s horror heydays. I hate to repeat myself, but the movies shown here are reflective of Mill 5 as a whole, and register well off the mainstream. They're purposely NOT showing the same stuff as AMC or Showcase theaters here, because there are plenty of those to go around, and why not shake things up a bit and see something else for a change? There are special events where, say, the entire Harry Potter series will be shown over a weekend, but you're just as likely - if not more so - to show up at the box office and find a screening of an obscure late-60s documentary on Jimi Hendrix. If you're a Greater Lowell resident looking for a night out, the Luna Theater needs to be at the top of your list.
Mill 5 has expanded its bazaars over the years to now include a second floor upstairs. On weekdays, there's not much up here except a cool place to walk around and wander, but on weekends, this place turns into a beehive of etchings, necklaces, fresh fruits, and more.
Once you get your fill of all this wonderful weirdness, you can head down one of the old mill's tower staircases (just make sure to follow the signs and refrain from social media-ing during emergencies as much as possible). Re-emerging back onto the street below, you can be forgiven for feeling just the slightest bit jarred - is that Diagon Alley marketplace upstairs really contained in such an unassuming, almost deceptive shell? Is it really that short a distance from "somewhere else" to paved city streets with parking meters and potholes? In Lowell, that fifteen square mile patch of those proud contradictions, the answer seems to be yes.
My grandparents had an apartment in a similar mill complex on the other side of the downtown when I was a kid, and their building's entryway had a staircase nearly identical to the one leading from Mill 5 to the streets; thinking about it, I can't remember one visit to see them (and the visits were countless, living as close as I did) where I didn't peek my head over the railing on my way past, trying to follow the spirals up their dizzying heights to... I never knew what.
Even as a kid, maybe that Lowell DNA in me was already wondering just what you could find in these mills, these mills that are the very origin and emblem of my hometown (it ain't called "The Mill City" for nothing). Once or twice, I broke off as my parents brought in groceries or my grandparents checked their lobby mail box, and I tried to sneak up that staircase to find out what the spirals led to on the upper floors. I never made it further than the very first bend, where a locked wooden grate across the steps stopped me going any higher. But my instincts were correct. I think I understood, with childhood's ability to understand based on nothing more concrete than a hunch, that there was magic in these mills, special secrets on faraway floors that could be uncovered by those who knew enough to look for the paths to get there.
Turns out I was right all along.
