Photos by MIchael Piazza

Sometimes magic happens where you least expect it. In Lowell, 26 miles north of Boston, an experiment in historic preservation and community design is evolving into one of the most inspiring local food stories in the region. Mill No. 5, a collective of independent businesses housed in a refurbished mill building, has silenced doubters, activating its downtown neighborhood and nourishing residents from all walks of life with locally grown food, served with love.

Lowell is a mill town, often characterized as the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution due to its rich history in textile production. As is true of so many of America’s mill towns, hardship followed the migration of production south or overseas and the advent of new manufacturing technology. The textile industry left the city, but the iconic red brick buildings remained. Some have been designated as the Lowell National Historic Park, part of the National Park Service. Some have been converted into housing or become part of the 125-acre campus of UMass Lowell.

In 1975, the Lichoulas family bought Appleton Mills, built in 1873 in what is now considered the city’s downtown. Mill No. 5, the oldest of the buildings in the complex, had been sitting vacant since the 1920s and was considered prime for condominium development. But owner and designer Jim Lichoulas, who grew up helping his father care for the historic brick buildings, envisioned something different, something transformational. He wanted to create a sophisticated, eclectic environment that would arouse “a sense of wonder, of escapism,” in visitors. Inspired by Diagon Alley of the Harry Potter series and Chelsea Market in Manhattan, he dreamed up an interior streetscape lined with shops and cafés where people from Lowell and beyond could wander and shop in a sort of magical getaway right upstairs from the busy street.

First opened in 2013 with a record shop and not much else, the Mill’s fourth-floor “main street” is now lined with shops and eateries. 250th Camera, Ashley Eisenman Art, Drift, Hive & Forge, Jack Attack Clothing, Lowell Book Company, Merrimack Company, One Urban Tribe, Pizzuti Photography, Pop Cultured, Red Antler Apothecary, Sweet Pig Letterpress, The Tune Loft and Vinyl Destination line the “street,” ending in the independent movie theater Luna.

In the center of the Mill’s “street” is Coffee and Cotton, a cozy eclectic café with a creative menu and a seductive vibe. Dows Soda Fountain is an old-fashioned counter joint; belly up to the counter and you feel immediately as if you have entered a bygone era—and in a way, you have. Dows is modeled after the first soda fountain where Gustavus D. Dows, the youngest of 21 children, invented a new drink: a combination of soda, syrup and shaved ice. In addition to a raspberry lime rickey, specialty drinks include Father John’s Medicine and Moxie Nerve Food. Father John’s Medicine includes cod oil in its recipe, giving patrons a hint of what it was like to take cod liver oil to cure ailments. Moxie was invented by Augustin Thompson as a medicine and produced in Lowell. The gentian root extract it contains was commonly used in herbal medicine.

Each storefront includes architectural details sourced from across New England, often saved from the scrap heap. As Lichoulas describes it, “Over several years, the ‘main street’ came together, one shop at a time.”

When I visit a band is playing in the space just off the elevator, UMass Lowell students bend over laptops at Coffee and Cotton and members of the Lowell Chess Club play at tables set up in an empty room. Upstairs, Sutra yoga studio and Curation 250 Urban Art Gallery enjoy the high ceilings and warm natural light.

The vibe is intentional, supportive and chill. “We’re not renters here, we’re partners,” explains Rick Stec of Red Antler Apothecary. “It’s a passion project for all of us.”

From the beginning, local, responsibly grown food was part of the vision. “We love the community a farmers market brings,” Lichoulas explains. Today, North of Boston Farm and an expanding list of local farmers and food purveyors sets up shop every Sunday. Over time, healthy fresh food has become front and center in the Mill’s community design—what brings people to the mill and keeps them coming back.

North of Boston Farm owner Justin Chase has been vending at farm markets since 1981, when he was six years old accompanying his dad at a market in Dorchester. A 12th-generation farmer, he’s seen and done it all when it comes to markets. “I’ve done over 80 different farm markets,” he says, “and I’ve never seen anything like this. This is for everyone. The diversity is staggering."

Chase says market customers range from people on the billionaires list to those living on the street. He describes a community that draws power from its impressive ethnic, religious and socio-economic diversity. As an example, he cites an encounter with an elderly Cambodian-American woman in 2017. Reaching across his crop-laden table, she opened his palm and placed in it a tattered bag of seeds. “You grow these please,” she said. “I brought them back from my country.” Chase says the encounter helped him realize he’d been thinking about the market’s role in the community all wrong. She showed him the power of a trusted exchange. By bringing him seeds from her homeland, she changed their relationship from transactional to collaborative. “She was showing me the way to connect with her community by way of food.”

North of Boston Farm began growing culturally connected crops the very next season: fuzzy melon, red tatsoi, yardlong beans, bok choy, taro, galangal. Now Chase sees “UMass Lowell students getting jazzed about bok choy, and Cambodian-American elders smiling from ear to ear for blueberries and sweet corn. We’re learning from them and they’re learning from us.”

That subtle shift in understanding characterizes the working methodology of the entire Mill No. 5 operation. A Code of Conduct does exist to guide interactions, but Jim Lichoulas and his team are careful to accept only like-minded business owners and vendors. As a result, the Mill sees more and more vendors looking to sell at the market and a flood of job applicants. Unlike so many employers, Lichoulas says the Mill has had no problem with staffing shortages—in fact, he says, they have more applicants than they do jobs and retention is high.

Joan Forman owns Bread Obsession, an artisan bakery in Lexington making European-style sourdough breads, including German rye, French baguettes, Italian durum levain and French pastries, as well as bagels and wholegrain loaves. She says the fact that “the Mill No. 5 Farm Market continues throughout the year makes it quite unique. This allows our customers to purchase our bread on a consistent basis in the Lowell area.”

Mill business owners and staff remark on the supportive, collaborative working environment. Julie Whitcomb of Julie’s Happy Hens has sold at the farm market for many years “because of the interesting community that shops there, the welcoming and helpful shop owners who have come and gone but mostly are still there, and the friendly and helpful vendors who really try to make everyone who vends there successful.”

With each business deliberately chosen for their unique offerings, they create a tight ecosystem where one person’s success benefits everyone and competition is minimal. Coffee and Cotton sells breakfast sandwiches for which they buy ingredients at the farm and then the customers come down to the farm to buy vegetables. And the Apothecary gets their cards printed at the Letter Press.

But the collective spirit goes beyond the Mill. Part of the passion Justin Chase feels stems from the deepening relationship between Mill No. 5’s farming partners and the Lowell Transition Center, a neighboring emergency shelter for homeless adults. In addition to professional counseling, beds and showers, the Transition Center provides three meals a day, seven days a week. That’s where the farm comes in. After initially feeling they had to work “around” the Transition Center residents, Chase and his team realized they could work together. They started donating food—300 eggs, 50 pounds of ground beef—and then began collaborating on meal planning. More than a weekly food delivery, the relationship is becoming a community partnership.

According to the U.S. Census, 17% of Lowell residents receive food assistance. And the Massachusetts Food Trust Program designates it as a food desert. For people on food assistance to be able to obtain healthy fresh food at the market means not just nutrition, but recognition, dignity and support. All of Mill No. 5’s vendors accept SNAP, the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Chase has dreams to expand the relationship with the Transition Center in the future.

Every Sunday the farm market welcomes vendors from across the Merrimack Valley for market hours from 10am to 1pm, rain, shine, snow or holiday, mostly indoors but sometimes outside in nice weather.

Loyal customers, local farmers and artisans and business owners all come together at Mill No. 5 to create a unique market economy where entrepreneurs and makers support each other to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It’s an equation familiar to the wizards of Diagon Alley: history, hard work and a little bit of magic.

millno5.com

This story appeared in the Winter 2023 issue.