As a lifelong resident as well as a legislator, City Manager Kevin Murphy has witnessed Lowell's struggle to maintain a viable downtown business district.

The demise of department stores like Pollard's, Bon Marche and Cherry & Webb, combined with the popularity of retail malls, has left Lowell and other older cities continually scrambling to fill that void.

While Lowell has succeeded to some degree in attracting the middle class to make the downtown their home, it still lacks that one major entity to drive economic growth.

Manager Murphy, also a Boston College grad and football fan, has seen how some communities, like Clemson, S.C., have capitalized on their proximity to a large university.

Lowell doesn't have a college football team filling an 80,000-seat stadium on Saturdays. However, it does, under the leadership of UMass Lowell Chancellor Marty Meehan, have a dynamic university that continues to expand on the periphery of the downtown.

At the same time, there is Middlesex Community College which already has a major downtown presence.

So when Manager Murphy said at a recent meeting with Sun editors that his top priority is to make Lowell a college town, it sounded like an overly ambitious goal. To do that, students would need a reason to venture downtown.

Which means attracting retail and entertainment outlets catering to those students' needs.


And that's what the manager, with the help of both institutions of higher learning, says he intends to do.

Murphy said his administration already has begun to engage both UMass Lowell and MCC, seeking the types of businesses students would like to see downtown. With the right retail mix, these students would need travel no farther than the Merrimack Street corridor.

The manager said he's appointed a member of his economic-development team as point person in this quest to make the city center become a college town. We hope all the city's major stakeholders, like the Lowell Plan and Greater Lowell Chamber of Commerce, will join in this effort.

Murphy might be in the right place and that right time. UMass Lowell has undergone a significant building boom under Chancellor Meehan, adding both state-of-the-art academic facilities and student-friendly dormitories.

That has undoubtedly helped attract the type of high-quality students UMass Lowell seeks. A vibrant, college-student oriented downtown would likewise make UMass Lowell a more desirable school to attend.

Yes, this is an ambitious undertaking, but one we believe is well worth taking. The downtown needs an economic catalyst, and those thousands of college students at its doorstep present a golden opportunity.