Kerouac's Bridge To Be Replaced

"A man carrying a watermelon passed us … he was just on the boards of the bridge … rewarded by the bridge of eve and sighs of stone—the great massive charge of the ever stationary ever yearning cataracts and ghosts … Suddenly the man fell, we heard the great thump of his watermelon on wood planks and saw him fallen … I got there I saw the watermelon man staring at the waves below with shining eyes." —Jack Kerouac

Every year, fans of American novelist Jack Kerouac visit a bridge in Lowell, Mass., that the novelist describes in his 1959 novel Dr. Sax. The ailing 1896 Textile Memorial/University Bridge won’t be there next year if city and state officials move forward with plans to replace it with a new bridge.

Though the need for a new bridge has gone uncontested, devotees of Kerouac, a Lowell native, are fighting to preserve the existing bridge as a pedestrian walkway. However, officials at the National Park Service's Lowell National Historical Park and Lowell Historic Board argue that keeping both bridges would compromise the preservation of the historic canal and walkway beneath the structures. Designs for the $27.3 million bridge were completed last month, and construction is planned for next spring.

Originally known as the Moody Street Bridge, the industrial steel expanse stretches across the Merrimack River, linking downtown Lowell to what was once the Lowell Textile School campus (now the north campus of the University of Massachusetts Lowell). The bridge was renamed the Textile Memorial Bridge in 1947 to honor Textile School students who had been killed in World War II.

Kerouac's novel Doctor Sax, one of five he set in Lowell, describes a young man and his mother crossing the bridge late at night and watching a man who was carrying a watermelon die there.

"There are Kerouac pilgrims who come to Lowell, and everybody says, 'I want to see the Watermelon Man Bridge!'" says Stephen Edington, president of community group Lowell Celebrates Kerouac. "It's one of [the narrator's] first encounters with death, and the theme of death and the transiency of life is one of the main ongoing themes in all of [Kerouac's] novels."

After years of harsh weather, the structural components of the bridge were eroding in 2002, when it failed an inspection and was forced to close for several months.

"The cost associated with managing the traffic impact of that were tremendous; the city had an enormous bill for police details, and we had to do a lot of rerouting of traffic," Lowell Assistant City Manager Adam Baacke says. "It was a really big problem." The city spent $750,000 to repair the bridge at the time and another half million a few years later, but it wasn't enough. Plans for a new bridge were proposed in 2004.

Peter Aucella of the Lowell National Historical Park, part of the National Park Service, says the city honors Jack Kerouac's legacy with public art installations, tours, and the yearly Jack Kerouac Literary Festival, held every October, but when it comes to the bridge, most residents are indifferent.

"There have been a few locals who have brought it up on a couple of occasions, and basically it's gotten no traction at all," Aucella says. "Somebody writes about a location in a book—does that mean the city is going to run its traffic in a different direction? Suffer through more years of construction? At some point, the city needs to do what it needs to do to be able to function."

Former National Park Service employee and Lowell resident Michael Wurm teamed up with Edington and others to form a small Save the Bridge coalition in 2007, when he learned of the city's plans. The coalition held protest walks, distributed petitions, and enlisted the help of a researcher to uncover the bridge's history. When the group heard University of Massachusetts Lowell Chancellor Marty Meehan was interested in preserving the bridge, members were optimistic and scaled back protest efforts, Wurm says. Now that demolition plans are proceeding, Wurm says the group plans to get back to work.

"The city of Lowell has wanted to walk away from that bridge; there was just no interest [in saving it]," Wurm says. "The immediate knee-jerk reaction is, 'It's a danger, just get rid of it.'… We know people come from around the world, literally, and across this country to visit the places associated with Kerouac, and this bridge ranks high, but it's been the black sheep of the family," he says. "I just don't want us to lose this."

The city would have retained the bridge as a pedestrian pathway had it been able to find a person or group willing to take responsibility for the structure, Baacke says. It was the National Park Service, he says, that opposed keeping the existing bridge, and the city followed its lead. Environmental and technical concerns also played a role in the decision, Baacke says, as a replacement bridge is exempt from many of the environmental permitting steps a secondary bridge would require.  

Read more about threatened historic bridges