In October, the New England American Studies Association convened its annual meeting in Lowell. The three-day gathering included talks and panel discussions, as well as business meetings of the Association. I was invited to be part of a panel discussion on Friday, Oct. 16. Following is an excerpt from the essay I presented as part of the panel session. Among other things, the essay mentions this blog and community blogging in Lowell, so I thought our readers may enjoy it. To read the rest of the essay, click the link. —PM

New England American Studies Association Annual Meeting

“The Post-American City,” October 16-18, 2009

Lowell, Massachusetts, Friday, Oct. 16, 10.30 am, Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Lowell National Historical Park

“Contemporary Urban Engagements”: A Panel Discussion with John Wooding (UMass Lowell) and Peter Taylor (UMass Boston), moderated by Michael Millner (UMass Lowell)

“I’ve Come to Look for America”: On Foot in a National City

By Paul Marion, UMass Lowell (c) 2009

In her book The Lure of the Local, cultural analyst Lucy Lippard writes: “The intersection of nature, culture, history, and ideology form the ground on which we stand – our land, our place, the local. The lure of the local is the pull of the place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation.” 

Lowell keeps surprising me. Last month Lowell in the form of Lowell National Historical Park was selected to represent Massachusetts in a new 50-state series of 25 cent coins, quarters, to be issued by the U.S. mint over the next many years, four states per year. The Lowell quarter is due in 2019. Nonetheless, it’s a striking piece of news. In a public poll, Lowell National Historical Park came in second to Gloucester and its bronze Fisherman as the people’s choice to represent the state. Gloucester was disqualified by the U.S. mint because it does not have a federal historical site – national park, forest, or recreation area – which is required for the coin set. We’re 30 years into the national park in Lowell and some folks still don’t grasp that we are on the same list as Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Gettysburg, and the Statue of Liberty.

Lowell is an American icon. Any decent U.S. History textbook mentions Lowell. And because of the National Park the city has been elevated for easier viewing and examination. Since 1957, when Jack Kerouac exploded like his fireworks in the literary sky, Lowell has been pulled into public view by Kerouac’s trajectory – an arc across the U.S. and around the world, and across generations now.

Some people still say Lowell is the first “urban” national park, but that’s not quite true. For example, Boston National Historical Park (1974) and Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco (1972) pre-date Lowell, established in 1978. But Lowell is distinct in that the whole city and its entire history (and pre-history) are the province of the Park rather than specific heritage sites or open spaces. Although the federal government owns only five buildings in Lowell, the Park Service is expected to tell the whole story of the city as a microcosm of urbanization and industrialization. I sometimes describe it as a cube of economic, social, and cultural history bounded by the city’s geographic limits but unbounded in a sense at the bottom and top. At the bottom is the natural history that gives us the river that gives us the human settlement; at the top it’s open ended: post-industrial, maybe post-urban, maybe post-American in the words of this gathering.

This is my place, and I’m more conscious of the National Park and city as a whole because of my work and writing. I keep looking for the “big” America that Lowell contains. I continue to be fascinated by the fact that this is my city and that it holds the place it does. And like a good practical New England ethnic Yankee, I can’t help thinking about what that means and what good it does and can do. The environmental magazine Orion this fall published a special feature about “walks” written by people from around the world. The editor says, “The walk is a universal narrative device for exploring a diverse sampling of cultures and places, ideas and environments . . . it features the movement of one or more persons on foot through a particular place and some manner of dialogue that unfolds either between characters or in the narrator’s own head.” I walk to try to understand the city.

Our long-ago neighbor Henry Thoreau made much of his walking, but like a lot of other aspects of Thoreau his walking turns me off a little because he seems so intent on one-upping the next guy. He boasts, “I have met but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks – who had the genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who moved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land . . . .” “There goes Hank again,” the neighbors might have said. “He thinks he’s smarter than us.” Thoreau wants to engage nature. I want to engage the urban organism in all its parts, natural, built, and human. Thoreau seems to want to go so far in to nature that he escapes society and achieves some kind of cosmic blend with joy-flavored, atomized plasma. He’s there and not there. I don’t want to lose touch with everything in my peripheral vision. I don’t think my work here is done.

Lowell is an urban laboratory, and I’m doing things that I hope will help me understand what’s really going on and what this place has to offer its inhabitants and people beyond. I’ve been blogging this year in an experiment in community writing. Four main contributors to a local blog, www.richardhowe.com (that’s h-o-w-e), are trying to capture “history as it happens” in a project called Lowell 2009. I’ve posted several times after taking walks in the city. But I’ve been writing about walking almost since I began writing poems in the mid-1970s. I will read two examples after I wrap up my remarks here.

I had an unexpected response to one of my walks last April, when my wife, Rosemary Noon, and I led a guided walk around Lowell’s public sculpture collection. I hope you get to see a few of the ten pieces of contemporary sculpture around the downtown. One of our band of walkers was Greg Page, who writes a blog called The New Englander (appropriate for this annual meeting). He’s a civil affairs office in the National Guard due to be deployed to Afghanistan next year. He lives downtown and embraces city life. He remarked upon the impact the sculpture walk had made on him—allowing him to see things he’d missed, making “the too familiar visible,” as Archibald MacLeish said Robert Frost’s poetry did for us. And Greg connected the experience to his recent reading of Thomas Rick’s book about the Iraq War, The Gamble, in which Rick’s describes the shift in policy from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s strategy to Gen. David Petraeus’ approach in 2007, summed up like this: “If you want to get to know an area and its ‘human geography,’ you have to get out of your vehicle and you have to walk the streets.”

Greg titled his post that day, “Petraeus-Odierno Meets Marion-Noon.” When we met at the National Park Visitor Center for the walk, Greg wrote that “we were getting ready for a dismounted patrol on our all-weather personnel carriers—we were going on foot.” I look for America when I’m out on the Lowell streets. I’d like to read one of my “walking posts” from last February. It’s titled “One Week Until March” (PM, 2-22-09, richardhowe.com)

“I had an old walking partner this morning as we made our way from downtown west up Merrimack Street. The weather was end-of-winter mild, but still cold enough to keep the ice set on sidewalks. Although precipitation was forecast, a mix of snow and rain, the sky held its blank look. We passed City Hall and the public library, which act as civic counterweights to the Auditorium on East Merrimack and mark one edge of the central business district. Watching a TV news report about President Obama’s visit to Ottawa earlier this week, I noticed a resemblance between Lowell City Hall and the central tower of the Parliament building in Canada.

 “For-sale banners draped the fronts of the former St. Jean Baptiste, later Nuestra Senora del Carmen, church and St. Joseph’s Hall across the street. It was good to see the Father Garin statue still in place outside the former church. Other than a couple of 1970s-era murals, the area doesn’t have much public art for uplift. (On the return leg of our walk, we swung past Harmony Park near St. Patrick Church. The Revolving Museum team and neighborhood friends have done a lot to reclaim the small park, restoring the Southeast Asian-themed tile mosaic and adding elements like a wooden figurative sculpture and the temporary ball wall made of soccer balls, basketballs, tennis balls, footballs, and other balls rescued from the canals.)But back to the church complex — a dramatic example of how cities change over time. In 1896, the 19,000-member parish was the largest French Canadian-American parish in the Archdiocese of Boston. With his fellow Oblate priest Lucien Lagier, Andre Marie Garin had begun his work in Lowell with a mission for French-speaking Catholics in the basement of St. Patrick Church in 1868, when the Franco population was less than 1,500 (Thanks to parish historian Richard Santerre for these facts.)

“We meandered through to Salem Street via the passageway at the former St. Joseph’s Hospital (renamed the Holden Center) and tried to get over to Fletcher Street through the old hospital parking lot only to find ourselves fenced in. It did give us a great view of a stand-out mint-green house on the side street that we wound up taking to get to Fletcher. We proceeded along the North Common, passing the small shop with the sign DONUTS STEAMED DOGS, which neither of us had ever entered. There’s a whole sociology of food in those three words. Anyone walking around the city will be struck by the number of small businesses and how many of them are untried by a typical resident. There’s a barber shop on Market Street that could be relocated as is to a history museum for the quality of its interior design. The walls are a phenomenal record of Americana, local and national, with a strong Frank Sinatra thread. The images on the walls make the place a time machine.

“Any northeast city looks gritty by the end of February. We’ve had a harsh winter. Outside some pubs the snow has melted to reveal months of cigarette butts. Shrinking icy snow banks are rimmed in black. Plastic bags decorate bare trees. We’re on the verge of mud season. Even on a gray day the gold dome of Holy Trinity church shines out of the middle of the Acre.”

In his song “America,” Paul Simon sings: “So we bought a pack of cigarettes,/And Mrs. Wagner’s pies,/And walked off to look for America.” It’s the way it has happened so many times before. Native peoples wore out footpaths in the Eastern woodlands. Jack Kerouac walked off to look for America before he got in a car. Thoreau “traveled widely in Concord,” on foot. The pioneering families often walked behind their wagons going west. The Lowell mill-workers walked along the new canals on Sunday afternoons. Sustainability advocates now talk about walk-ability and active-living cities. A quick online search brought me to neighborhood walking sites in Chicago, Fort Wayne, Albuquerque, Rochester, Valparaiso, Brooklyn, Dayton, Omaha, New Orleans, Kirkland, and others. With a community organizer as President, the time seems right to find where we fit on foot, to “dismount” as the soldier Greg Page writes. Maybe the Post-American city is right underfoot all the time.