Bridge St. was “Spectral” to Powell and Kerouac

By Brad MacGowan 

Editor’s note: Brad MacGowan, Lowell historian and board member of by Annie Powell, will collaborate with Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! on a talk commemorating Kerouac’s 103rd birthday at Pollard Library on Saturday, March 8 at 2 PM. This is one of an occasional series focused on the overlap between Annie Powell and Jack Kerouac from the years 1922 and 1936. Both are interred within a few feet of each other at Lowell’s Edson Cemetery. The title of the presentation, “spectral-in-my-mind Bridge Street,” is quoted directly from the pages of Kerouac’s 1956 novel Visions of Gerard. by Annie Powell would also like to thank Brad for his research and writing of this fascinating presentation.

A middle-aged Annie Powell and a young Jack Kerouac walked the same streets of Lowell in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It seems that a section of Bridge Street, from Kearney Square to the Merrimack River, held a certain fascination for both of them.

Annie’s photos and Jack’s words seem to give this short stretch of road a metaphorical and spiritual meaning that is now lost as we wait in traffic in either direction.

In Visions of Gerard, Jack wrote:

They go rattletrapping in the strange comic French movie contraption down past the City Hall and for want of shamelessness go sneaking through the back streets to avoid the great Main Kearney Square where all Lowell’s in the lights—The clock, the Chinese restaurant, the Number One soda-fountain, the trolley stops, the big stores, the newspaper—They go instead around by Kirk street and down a railroad switch alley for the mills, across spectral-in-my-mind Bridge Street where stands the great grey warehouse of eternity and into the little alley that runs between it and the stagedoor side entrance of the B. F. Keith’s theatre.

Jack’s Book of Dreams shows us that Bridge Street was in his unconscious mind as well:

(had a tic there of the warehouse on Bridge Street but the front of it as seen from Bridge at about the railroad crossing and canal and dreams there of rainy-mist nights when I take long walks from Kearney Square to Centralville, always that route, my shoes wetcrunching gritbles in the sidewalk of Lowello dream ah—)

Kearney Square in these visions was Earth—solid, terrestrial. But, as we move toward the river, things become more spectral, impermanent.

Looking toward Kearney Square, people are solid, there is a special dinner, and the very small sign on the building says “Protected.” No one is looking at the camera.

Toward the river, things are different.

Images of humans are more ghost-like. Rooms are rented by the day. A man peers out at the camera from a doorway. Restaurants serve a quick lunch. A horse-drawn cart coming into downtown is barely visible.

And today, right across Bridge Street, where the “great grey warehouse of eternity” once stood is the site of Jack Kerouac Park.

 There is much more to say about Jack’s “spectral-in-my-mind Bridge Street” writings and Annie’s Bridge Street photos. But in the meantime you can visit Jack Kerouac Park at 75 Bridge Street and tell us about it.

Archival images courtesy UMass Lowell Center for Lowell HIstory, City Engineers Collection. Kerouac Park photo by Brad MacGowan.