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Editor's Introduction: In this 50th anniversary issue we have endeavored to offer some articles that highlight historic events and changes over the past fifty years, in addition to articles that offer reinterpretations of well-known topics or document lesser-known events. This article admirably fulfills all of these goals. In the opening one-third of his article, Dr. Forrant sketches a succinct overview of Lowell's history from 1820 to 1970, a period in which Lowell led the nation in both industrialization and then deindustrialization. Although popular and public memory often associates deindustrialization with the midwestern "Rust Belt" states of the 1970s and 1980s, Massachusetts was the real poster child for the demise of manufacturing in the U.S. Between 1920 and 1960, nearly all of the Commonwealth's textile mills and textile jobs were lost as mill owners relocated to the South and then abroad in pursuit ofever lower wages and higher profits.
Dr. Forrant documents these forces and their impact on the city of Lowell, whose experience and fate were shared by other textile cities in the Commonwealth: Lawrence, New Bedford, Fall River and Holyoke. However, Lowell was unique in the 1970s in its ability to successfully navigate and create the foundations for a new economy. The remaining two-thirds of his article focuses on developments over the past fifty years. Anchored by the National Historical Park (NHP), established in 1978, a new economy based on historic preservation, tourism, and mill reuse emerged.
In the 1970s, the concept of a city being designated as a national park was novel and even confusing to many. As historian Cathy Stanton explains:
Unlike traditional national parks, it is not a neatly bounded by a piece of real estate owned outright by the National Park Service, but a series of open spaces and buildings within the downtown area and along a canal system that once powered the textile mills. This kind of decentralized park . . . has now become more common in the Park Service, but when Lowell NHP was being developed, it was an entirely new concept. Visitors-and even local residents-are often still confused about where the park actually is. . .1
Park rangers often explain to disoriented tourists that, "The park is the city and the city is the park. "