History
Built in the early 1960s and opened on October 24, 1962, the Lowell Connector is located along the re-channelled River Meadow (or Hales) Brook. This alignment minimally affected existing neighborhoods, unlike many urban expressways in the region. Plans to extend the Connector through the city's Back Central neighborhood, up to and along the Concord River, then onward to Lowell's main street, Merrimack Street, were drawn out, but abandoned after they were decided to be too disruptive to one of the oldest parts of the city. This left the highway terminating abruptly at a residential section of Gorham Street.
Another plan circa 1968 had the connector connecting to the planned route of Massachusetts Route 213 in Dracut.
The Connector was officially named for the American Legion on May 20, 1963, a few months after opening; however, signs reflecting this were not posted until November 16, 2010.
When the Connector was originally built, it was signed as Interstate 495 Business Spur. It no longer carries any numeric designation, although a sign that was recently removed had designated it as such on Plain Street (Exit 4).
Read more about this topic: Lowell Connector
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)