Jack Kerouac and Annie Powell: both on the road past Al’s Lunch

By Kurt Phaneuf and Bernie Zelitch

How did this forsaken eatery unite the creative worlds of photographer Annie Powell and writer Jack Kerouac? Courtesy of the Henry Ford Museum and Newspaperarchive.

Al’s Lunch, a picturesque diner in the heart of Lowell’s Little Canada, was too fleeting to make the public record. Nevertheless, it lives through a famous home-grown writer and an under-appreciated immigrant photographer.

We’ve been casting for connections between Jack Kerouac (1922–69) and Annie Powell (1859–1952) that may have occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. Al’s Lunch provides one small but curious nexus between Powell’s 1935 image and Kerouac’s first published novel in 1950. Given the frequency with which new connections between photographer and writer are emerging, new information about them has been added to one of the walking tours given by the annual “Lowell Celebrates Kerouac!” (LCK) festival scheduled for October.

The greasy spoon’s likely namesake was Albert Turner (1906–68). He and brother Emile Turner (1904–63), both second generation French Canadians, operated a bar at 166 Aiken Street. The prefabricated diner was delivered to Aiken and Cheever Streets (along the Northern Canal) sometime in late 1934 or early 1935. Any business partnership they may have had ended as the diner, on property owned by Proprietors of Locks & Canals (PLC), went up for sale. Albert soon opened a variety store nearby, and Emile transformed Castonguay’s carpentry shop across Aiken Street into Turner’s Cafe. He remained in the bar and restaurant business until his death in 1963.

On April 23, 1935, the British-born Powell, then seventy-five and six years a widow, helped package the sale of the abandoned structure. Working on a clear Tuesday with temperatures from 41–56 ℉ (PLC records), she commemorated its favorable downtown location placing the City Hall tower on the left. She rendered the building with flattering light, and made the diner stand out by lightening the edges in the darkroom. Both Powell and Kerouac would have appreciated the opposing declarations: “STEAKS AND CHOPS” and “FOR SALE.”

The broker on the sign was auctioneer and real estate agent John C. Percival & Co. Around that time, Emile Turner and competing brokers apparently ran ads offering to sell or move the structure, all with an unknown outcome.

Powell’s photographs would have been ordered by PLC as part of a campaign to find a new tenant to resume rent. PLC kept an acetate copy of the original glass plate negative and a print. An additional print was sent to Jerry O’Mahoney Diner Co. in Elizabeth, N.J. The company would have manufactured, delivered, and likely financed the structure with installments still due. They were also national brokers for the resale of diners (or “lunchcarts” as a preferred term of the time), so they may have taken on the additional role as cobroker.

That day, Powell took a second photo of the carpentry shop across Aiken Street soon to become Turner’s Cafe. We know from Powell’s outtakes she had great affinity for composition and likely was on site for several hours to set up. So there is a reasonable chance that thirteen-year-old Kerouac, a student at Bartlett Middle School, was a witness to her efforts. Located adjacent to some of Kerouac’s favorite walking routes through Little Canada, Al’s Lunch was roughly two blocks from Kerouac’s old parochial school (St. Joseph’s), church (St. Jean Baptiste), and after-school hangout (playmate Arthur Louis Eno’s grandparents lived across from St. Joseph’s) on Merrimack Street. He explicitly refers to the eatery in his debut 1950 semiautobiographical novel, The Town and the City (TC), a book that addresses Kerouac’s Depression-era childhood and the waning financial fortunes of his family. In this passage, Kerouac’s father Leo (fictionalized as George Martin) follows his established morning ritual in the face of pending business closure:

He [George] realized how funny it would seem to get up in the morning and not drive down and park the car by the canal and the railroad tracks, have breakfast in Al’s lunchcart (our emphasis), and then come in the shop to his cluttered desk and his galleries of type, and say good morning to Edmund and old John, and then watch Jimmy Bannon come in at eleven all weaving, twitch-drunken and tortured, and then to work there all four of them in grinning joy.

“Jimmy Bannon” is a stand-in for Leo’s real buddy, Charles Connor (1902–61), a local political pundit and publisher of the Lowell Optic newsletter which Leo printed at his Spotlight Print shop on Bridge Street. The Spotlight sat across from another popular lunchcart, Paradise Diner, adjacent to Eastern Canal and two mill complexes (Boott Mills and Massachusetts Mills) near the railroad tracks. Though The Paradise was likely the inspiration for the diner in the above passage, “Al’s lunchcart,” Kerouac often switched the names of people and places in his hometown novels to ensure a measure of anonymity for his subjects. Less than a mile west of Bridge Street, Al’s Lunch– straddling another canal feeding another textile mill, Lawrence Manufacturing Co.– would certainly have been part of Kerouac’s photographic memory bank of Little Canada lore and imagery. A central trope in Kerouac’s writing is the Great Flood of 1936 and the changes it brought into the lives of so many Lowellians. The metaphorical overlap and nearly simultaneous historical erasure of Al’s and Spotlight Print—the latter damaged by the “six feet of water” that had “filled [Jack’s] father’s printing plant”—would have been irresistible to a writer known as “Memory Babe.”

Given Kerouac’s love of music, the name “Al” may have had additional meaning to him (as well as to the Turner brothers) through its use in the popular Depression-era song, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Interestingly, one of the characters in TC is named “Al” though he certainly didn’t operate a Little Canada greasy spoon. Modeled after William Maynard “Bill” Garver (1898-1957), a heroin addict and small-time thief with whom Kerouac had become acquainted during his subterranean explorations in New York City, this “Al” represents one aspect of the titular “City” Kerouac intended to contrast with his small “Town” Lowell upbringing.

A touchstone in Kerouac’s expansive memory, the diner’s exact location makes appearances in several other of his works. For example, Kerouac writes in his phantasmagorical coming-of-age novel Doctor Sax (1959)

One night long ago, in the thirties, in the height of the Depression a young man who was walking home from the mills at midnight, down by the canal at Aiken near Cheever (our emphasis) in Little Canada, headed home to Pawtucketville to a wretched furnished room over the Textile Lunch…

The overlapping references to the mills, the canal in Little Canada, and another greasy spoon (the Textile Lunch on Moody Street in Pawtucketville) is clear. The site even provides the backdrop for a rare moment of levity in Kerouac’s touching elegy to his older brother, Visions of Gerard (1963), in which “Emil” (Jack’s father Leo) rides to work in a motorcycle sidecar with his print shop partner “Manuel” (former business partner Manuel Santos):

[Manuel and Emil] go careering up Aiken thru the tenement streets of Little Canada and cross the canal bridge (our emphasis) and along to the high Medieval granite walls of St. Jean de Baptiste church (where Gerard was baptized), then left on Moody Street along busy storefronts, then right, to Merrimack Street, with its trolleys and busy cars…

A previously-unpublished sketch Kerouac wrote in 1944, possibly in preparation for TC, supports the notion that the lunchcarts of his youth in the area of Moody, Aiken, and Cheever Streets were fertile inspiration. In Self-Portrait (2024), editors Paul Maher and Charles Shuttleworth have made available for the first time Untitled: He Walked Towards The Funeral Home. The sketch starts out on “River Street” (actually Merrimack Street) as hung-over narrator Michael Daoulas (Kerouac’s pseudonym) walks to the funeral home (Tremblay’s) for the wake of his uncle George (Joseph Kerouac), only to find he’s an hour early. Embarrassed that he hadn’t spent the previous evening with family and guilty at having caroused with old boyhood friends instead, the narrator seeks distractions and decides to explore some of the nearby Franco-American haunts of his childhood. Michael eventually winds up in an unnamed diner, taking in its sights, sounds, and smells before eating a large breakfast of ham and eggs and crêpes suzette. The rich sensory experience of people and place triggers an epiphany before the text ends abruptly. By the time that sketch was composed, most of the diners in Lowell had gone through changing business models. Interestingly, “Arthur’s Paradise Diner” still operates on Bridge Street.

It’s likely that Kerouac knew Powell, as he says in the opening paragraphs of TC, “[at] the center of the town… everybody knows everybody else.” His oeuvre contains over seventy “photographer” references. Although it’s unlikely Powell inspired any of them, she might have caught Kerouac’s eye for vivid, memorable, and eccentric characters. She was elderly but spry, well dressed with wide-brimmed hats yet imposing behind a bulky tripod and camera. Her speech was probably near-incomprehensible due to her provincial Yorkshire accent. Also, Powell inserted herself into Kerouac’s circle. She sought commercial opportunities to sell images, including at the daily newspapers where Kerouac had friends, and may have rubbed elbows with Jack’s printer father. She often convinced locals to model in her photos, finding ample sites and subjects in the Kerouac family neighborhoods of Centralville and Pawtucketville. Some of Powell’s most fascinating photos were snapped just a few feet from Kerouac family homes.

Source material suggests that Powell was both a reader and strong in mind and body. She likely read about Al’s Lunch in the The Lowell Sun serialization of The Town and The City during the summer of 1950. She may have even attended Kerouac’s one-and-only book signing at downtown Lowell’s Bon Marché department store on March 14 of that same year. It’s fun to speculate that her close neighbor on Harris Avenue, Francis Sargent, was also there. “Sarge” was a well-known sports editor for the Sun and had worked with Kerouac when the latter was a cub sports reporter for three months in 1942.

Though some might argue that we’re making too much out of a tenuous thread linking a single Annie Powell photograph and a snippet from one of Jack Kerouac’s longest novels, we’re convinced that the creative process and the enigmatic ways such creativity can influence us should be approached with both delicacy and broad-mindedness. Whether Powell’’s photo was just another freelance job in a largely unheralded career, and “Al’s Lunch” was just another “jewel center” in Kerouac’s vast, imaginative storehouse, we do know this: two seminal Lowell creators have left us evocative traces of a rich, mysterious, shared legacy we’d do well to explore with open eyes and hearts.

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Our joint walking tour is Saturday, Oct. 11, at 10:00 am.

Kurt Phaneuf is a retired high school English teacher and adjunct literature professor from Central New York. A student and writer on all things Kerouac for over 40 years, he is also a longtime participant in Lowell Celebrates Kerouac’s annual fall festival, leading and co-leading a number of festival tours.

Bernie Zelitch is founder and executive director of the by Annie Powell charitable nonprofit. Formerly an investigative journalist, he is a songwriter, historian, and member of the Photographic Historical Society of New England board of directors.