19 Union Street, 18-20 Chapel Street

Three story brick building in Federal style.
  • Historic Name: Christopher Columbus Italian Mutual Aid Society (1916-1933); Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas Club (1930s)
  • Uses: Apartment building and social club
  • Date of Construction: Circa 1860
  • Style/Form: Federal (vernacular)
  • Architect/Builder: Unknown
  • Foundation: Granite stone
  • Wall/Trim: Brick with granite sills and lintels
  • Roof: Flat roof
  • Major Alterations: Bricked up windows on north and south façades
  • Condition: Fair
  • Included in Hengen survey? No
  • Related oral interview? No
  • Portuguese owned? None identified
  • Recorded by: Gregory Gray Fitzsimons and Marie Frank
  • Organization: UMass Lowell
  • Date: July 2023

Description

This three-story brick building with a stone foundation and a flat roof was built ca. 1860 and contains little ornamentation. Its original main entrance was on Union Street, at the corner of Chapel Street. At an unknown date, an additional two entrances were constructed along Chapel Street. The building is somewhat unusual in its trapezoidal plan. The tenement retains a number of elements of its original construction, including granite sills and lintels. It is one of the earliest brick tenements in Back Central. At least two of the original windows have been bricked in and the entrances on Chapel Street and Union Street have newer doors.

History

This brick tenement appears to have been built in the early 1860s, possibly by John A. Knowles, one of Lowell’s well-known real estate speculators. Knowles sold the property to Michael J. Coleman (1830-1868), who was born in Ireland and worked as a spinner at the Hamilton Cotton Mills, and later the Prescott Mills. Other residents in the tenement were of Irish descent and were wage earners with many employed in the textile mills. In 1889, one of Coleman’s two daughters, Clara (1856-1920) married James J. Roarke (1858-1895), an upholsterer and also of Irish parentage. Roarke and his wife purchased the tenement, residing there and renting the other apartments.

By 1915 Union Street residents included a number of Portuguese, Polish, and Lithuanian immigrants in addition to Irish-American families. The Back Central neighborhood also was home to the city’s largest concentration of Italian immigrants. In 1916 the Christopher Columbus Italian Mutual Aid Society, one of two Italian fraternal organizations in Lowell, purchased the Union Street building from the widow Clara Roarke. Among the leaders of the society was president Dominick Bernardini, who owned a house on Kinsman Street and worked in a box-making factory. (The Bernardini family and relatives ran a fruit store at 383 Central Street.) In addition to the society’s club on the first floor, the organization rented apartments in the upper floors of the tenement.

In 1933 the City of Lowell took the building for unpaid property taxes. For a few years Marietta Donohoe owned the tenement renting the apartments and leasing the club space to the Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas (DLKV) Society, one of two Lithuanian clubs in the city. This society purchased the building from Donohoe in 1938. Two Portuguese families and one Lithuanian family lived in the tenement by 1940. Frank Silva, a salesman in a local fish market resided with his wife, Rose, and two daughters in one apartment, and Frank Bettencourt, a bobbin shop worker, his wife Bernadina, a weaver, and two children lived in another apartment. (The Losnik family, from Lithuania, headed by Benjamin, a carder in a woolen mill, and his wife, Eva, three daughters, and two relatives, lived in another apartment.) By the late 1940s the DLKV Society moved to Central Street and the tenement appears to have been used strictly for apartments. In more recent years Jack Nguyen, from Andover, Massachusetts, owned the property.

Sources

  • Massachusetts census, Lowell, 1865.
  • Federal census, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1880 & 1940.
  • Lowell city directories, 1906, 1916, 1926 & 1936.
  • “Plan Celebration of Columbus Day,” Lowell Sun, October 10, 1923.
  • Property deed, Knowles to Coleman, February 26, 1863, book 34, pages 228-230, Northern Middlesex Registry of Deeds.
  • Property deed, Coleman to Christopher Columbus Italian Mutual Aid Society, December 26, 1916, book 564, page 295, Northern Middlesex Registry of Deeds.
  • Property deed, City of Lowell Taking of Property, February 14, 1933, book 828, pages 529-531, Northern Middlesex Registry of Deeds.
  • “Lithuanian Convention Held Here,” Lowell Sun, March 21, 1949.