Interpreting American Industrial History: The Lowell National Historical Park's General Management Plan—An Overview

In August, 1981 Lowell National Historical Park officials released the Gen eral Management Plan (GMP) which will govern "interpretation and visitor use, cultural resources management, and general development" within the Park. Sig nificantly, the Plan also depicts cooperative agreements and technical assistance available to meet Park goals. The Plan's implementation will take place in a phased development over the next ten years with the GMP also serving as the long-range guide for Park interpretation and management. Congress created the Lowell National Historical Park (LNHP) by providing for an historical/cultural park at Lowell, Massachusetts, an industrial city of 92,000 approximately thirty miles northwest of Boston. The concept of Lowell's urban park emerged in the early 1960s when a Model Cities community group suggested Lowell's rehabilitation through a rediscovery of its impressive history. By 1972, the Lowell City Council had approved an "historical park" theme for all future rehabilitation and city and state officials forged a unique partnership to promote the park/revitalization concept. In 1975, Congress established the "Lowell Historic Canal District Commission" to devise a proposal which ulti mately became the LNHP. In the 1978 "Lowell Park" bill, Congress created a new park managed by the National Park Service but it also established a broader "Preservation District" supervised by a new federal agency within the Depart ment of the Interior, the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission (LHPC). The LHPC oversees the "human story of the Industrial Revolution in a nineteenth-century setting by encouraging cultural expression" in Lowell but it also offers financial incentives to preserve nationally-significant structures in a manner complementary to park development. The new Park sits in the heart of the Preservation District in an extremely small geographical area stretching from the Lowell Manufacturing Company, down Shattuck to Merrimack Street, down Kirk