FROM TOOLS to TWILIGHT
photographs of McKittrick Industrial Supply by Jeff Caplan
“FROM TOOLS to TWILIGHT” - McKittrick Industrial Supply was a historic Lowell, Massachusetts based business that supported the mills and their machinery during the height of textile production Lowell. The business was founded in 1901 and was purchased by the McKittrick family around 1920. Over the decades it evolved in to one of the area’s most comprehensive hardware stores, but to the dismay of many, closed its doors in January of 2018.
As a Lowell native, my relationship with McKittrick’s evolved over the years much like the Mill City has. It started when I was a child as I would peer out of the backseat passenger window of my father’s Oldsmobile Cutlass while drove by the buildings and storefront on Fletcher St.
As a teenager, skateboarding and the acceptance in to the subculture brought together an eclectic group of kids from the surrounding towns in the 1990s. Through that subculture I became friends with one of the grandsons of the McKittrick family. I remember our group of friends stopping by the store to grab a tool or a bolt to fix our boards, and then continuing on to our skating destination.
As an adult I was living in close proximity to the well known and respected hardware store. I was given the opportunity to photograph the business and the three buildings that housed McKittrick Industrial Supply. The images were taken from August 2017 through March 2018 as they liquidated the stock and eventually closed their doors.
Photographs depicting a fully stocked store lead way to imagery of empty stock rooms and left over details of a business that once was. When I returned to photograph the buildings after the liquidation, a sense of loss could not be avoided. Gone were the lively voices of the employees and customers that normally echoed through the creaky old wooden floors. The coats were no longer hung in the back room, the big product catalogs were not present, and there was nobody sitting in the raised up pulpit type desk in the store.
As our landscape changes around us, it’s important to reflect on progress and the good and bad that it brings upon us. Neighborhood institutions like McKittrick Industrial Supply are sometimes caught in that wake, and are unable to surface again for a myriad of reasons. Appreciation of the past as we plan for the future should be an important part of that progress.
