DOWNTOWN

"Follow along to the center of the town, the Square, where at noon everybody knows everybody else." -- The Town and the City

The Lowell Public Library (1) (clik here//) is a fine place to begin a walking tour of Jack Kerouac's Lowell. Today it's called the Pollard Memorial Library, after Samuel S. Pollard, a prominent Lowell politician, but the library looks the same as it did when Jack Kerouac scoured the shelves in the 1920's and 30's.

In Maggie Cassidy and Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac writes of skipping school "at least once a week" to read Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, William Penn, and scholarly books on chess. "It was how I'd become interested in old classical looking library books," he writes in Maggie Cassidy, "some of them falling apart and from the darkest shelf in the Lowell Public Library, found there by me in my overshoes at closing time."

It's a short walk from the library to Lowell High School (2) (/), and one can imagine Kerouac returning to school from the library just in time for the last bell. By nearly all accounts-classmates, teachers, even his own writing--Kerouac was a shy but popular student. A standout in track and football, and a fine outfielder on the baseball team, Kerouac also earned A's and B's in his classes. In Maggie Cassidy he mentions a Spanish course, the poetry of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, the great difficulty of physics, and "wonderful classes in some kind of pre-science fiction astronomy, with an old lady with a long stick demonstrating moons at the blackboard." Kerouac graduated from Lowell High School in 1939, three months after his seventeenth birthday.

Between the high school on Kirk Street and the Lowell Sun newspaper building inKearney Squarelies the heart of downtown Lowell (3) (/). And while Lowell has gone through many economic fluctuations since 1939, in many ways it's still possible to see downtown Lowell as a genuine Kerouac place.

In the 1920's, Kerouac's father would often bring the family to a popular Chinese restaurant in Kearney Square. In the 1930's, Kerouac hung out with friends in the Square, and in the early 1940's he worked for a time as a Sun sportswriter. More than that, downtown Lowell is a Kerouac place for the way it evokes that self-contradicting spirit of America which Kerouac captured so precisely at the close of On the Road and in the opening of Visions of Cody. Insolent and courteous, banal and curious, as fixed and evocative as a blinking neon sign, downtown Lowell continues to assert itself as a Kerouac place.

The Jack Kerouac Commemorative (4) (/), only a few hundred yards from Kearney Square, must be one of the most unique public art pieces in the United States. The opening passages from Kerouac's five "Lowell novels," as well as passages from On the Road, Lonesome Traveler, Book of Dreams, and Mexico City Blues are inscribed on eight triangular marble columns. The arrangement of the columns and the surface stones form a kind of Buddhist- Christian mandala. The symmetrical cross and diamond pattern of The Commemorative is a meditation on the complex Buddhist and Catholic foundation of much of Kerouac's writing.

Created by Houston artist Ben Woitena, and dedicated on June 25, 1988, The Jack Kerouac Commemorative was constructed with the cooperation of city, state, and federal agencies. Lowell poet Paul Marion, a cultural affairs director for the Lowell Historic Preservation Commission, was instrumental in guiding the project through its many stages. Stella Sampas Kerouac, the author's wife, agreed to the placement of Kerouac's text.

The poet Allen Ginsberg was also an early supporter of the project. "It would remind everybody that there once was a soul," he told a Lowell Sun reporter in 1986, two years before The Commemorative was dedicated. " Kerouac was raw, real, and universal. He was very courageous about his life and he was extraordinarily humble."

Jack Kerouac would be familiar with the site chosen for The Commemorative. A twelve-story brick and concrete warehouse once stood on the site, a building Kerouac described as "the great gray warehouse of eternity." Next door to the warehouse was B.F. Keith's Theater, a vaudeville house and cinema. A small alley ran between the warehouse and Keith's Theater, leading to the mill buildings behind The Commemorative where Kerouac's father worked for a time as a printer.

Bridge Street leads from the downtown to the neighborhood of Centralville, but before it crosses the Merrimack River the street is caverned by the Massachusetts Mills, on the right, and, on the left, the Boott Mills (5) (/). The mills are a reminder that Lowell is a working-class city, established as a business venture. By harnessing the power of the Merrimack River through a carefully engineered system of mills and canals Lowell quickly became one of the largest centers of textile production in the world. The architecture of the Boott Mills complex mirrors the growth of Lowell--its nine mill buildings were built between 1835 and 1900.

The constant demands to expand and increase productivity encouraged immigration to Lowell, and by 1922, the year Kerouac was born, Lowell's population reached 125,000 people--75% of that total either first or second generation immigrant. The French Canadian population numbered close to 30,000. Many French Canadians came to work in mills like the Boott. Others, like Kerouac's father (who came to Lowell from the St. Lawrence River Valley of Quebec by way of Nashua, New Hampshire), possessed a particular skill that enabled them to avoid work in the textile mills.

When Kerouac mentions any of the Lowell mills in his books it is most often the Boott. In Doctor Sax, the Boott is often seen in "a maze of haze sorrow," where the red chimneys sway in "the dreambell afternoon" or, at night, the windows shine "like a lost star in the blue city lights of Lowell." Kerouac's descriptions of the Boott are often amorphous, and insubstantial, as if the redbrick mills are only clouds in a fiery sunset. It's interesting to match Kerouac's descriptions of the mills with depiction of work in his novels. Kerouac's characters may have jobs, and we may see many people on their way to or from work, but the joy of life lies elsewhere. "Everything belongs to me because I am poor," he wrote in Visions of Cody. "Dicky and I covered these millyards.," he writes in Doctor Sax, "and agreed millwork was horrible."

Jack Kerouac's complex vision of America often inspires many young Americans to set off "on the road" But Jack Kerouac's complex vision ofAmerica, Like Whitman's, was vast enough to contain contradiction. It's possible to see all these contradictions in a walk through downtown Lowell.

Jack Kerouac's Lowell is a joint project of the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! Committee, sponsor and organizer of the annual Kerouac celebration in Lowell, and by the Jack Kerouac subterranean Information Society, publisher of DHARMA beat, the magazine of Jack Kerouac activities, organizations and publications. To find out more about these organizations write to:

Lowell celebrates Kerouac!
P.O. box 111
Lowell, MA 01853-1111

The Jack Kerouac subterranean Information Society
P.O. Box 1753
Lowell, MA 01853-1753