“To me, leadership is what it’s all about,” said George Eliades, a former chairman of the Lowell Historic Board. “You need people who will take charge.”

And business needs “certainty,” he said, a certainty of course that cannot change in a month or a year.

That was the message of a group of people from Lowell who visited Lewiston on Thursday to talk about how they turned around their city.

“There is no letter in ‘Lowell’ that’s not also in ‘Lewiston,'” Eliades joked. “Think about it.”

Lewiston has long been compared to Lowell, which became the first place in America where mass production was practiced.

After World War II, the city began to crash. By 1980, most of those massive mills along the Merrimack River were empty. Unemployment surged to the high teens. Crime grew.

Its grim past was hinted at in the Oscar-nominated film, “The Fighter.”

“It’s dark,” Eliades said. “But you know what? There isn’t a city that doesn’t have its dark side.”

At its worst, young people left and never returned, Eliades, a Lowell native, said.

“The best thing you could get for high school graduation was a ticket out of Lowell,” he said. “That’s how bad things got.”

Now, the city is a model of rebirth.

About 80 percent of the millions of square feet that once belonged to looms is now occupied by high-priced condominiums, apartments, artists’ lofts, office space, retail shops and even a little manufacturing.

Surrounding the former mill buildings is a canal system that is now part of a National Historic Park. In the canals that once powered the mills, people can take boat rides. Trolleys transport tourists among the park’s sites.

“We have rangers, those people with the Smokey the Bear hats,” Eliades said.

He credited the transformation to a singularity of purpose. The effort was led by the late Paul Tsongas, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Most Mainers know him for his Democratic candidacy for president in 1992.

Tsongas managed to get the federal government to work with the city, investors and the banks. He managed to secure aid from the federal government that paid 20 percent of rehab efforts.

And he worked with the city on such efforts as integrating design rules that took down billboards and ensured that new construction modeled the best of the old, from the windows and the doorways to the signs that hung in front of businesses.

“It’s regulated in a way that’s beneficial to everyone,” said Peter Aucella, the assistant superintendent of the historic park and a former Tsongas worker. Few people complained about the regulations. More complained that they weren’t strictly enough enforced, particularly on their neighbors, he said.

Much of the work aimed at restoring the larger buildings that were spared the urban renewal wrecking ball of the 1960s and 1970s. 

“We had our share of demolition, but it’s amazing what we have intact,” Aucella said.

With each restored building, the city becomes more attractive, he said.

“You’re making the city a place that’s attractive, a place that you want to be,” Aucella said.

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