The Kerouac Commemorative Has Become a Sore Spot

By Steve Edington

[This article originally appeared as an editorial in The Lowell Sun on September 24, 2025. Visit the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac website for the full schedule of events.]

This coming October 9-13 Lowell Celebrates Kerouac (LCK) will present our 37^th Annual Jack Kerouac Festival. The first one was held in the summer of 1988 with the Dedication of the Jack Kerouac Commemorative. LCK was the organization that created the Commemorative and then went on to produce an annual Kerouac Festival in all the following years.

One of our Festival events is the Commemorative at the Commemorative, held on Saturday morning. We use it to recall the lives of people associated with Jack Kerouac and LCK who have passed away in the previous year, and to hear some of Kerouac’s words as well. This has become one of the mainstays of the Kerouac Festival over the years.

The Commemorative is also one of the stops we make on the Jack Kerouac Tours we offer through our website. We get year-round requests from people who are coming to Lowell and who want to visit the many Kerouac Sites all around the city, as Jack described them in his Lowell-based novels.

As uplifting as all this sounds, and in many ways is, I also regret to say that the visits to the Kerouac Commemorative—both during the Festival and on the tour requests we get—are becoming an embarrassment. This is due to the condition of the Commemorative itself. It is in great need of repair and restoration. The marble at the base of some of the triangular obelisks that have the Kerouac passages engraved has been chipped away, to the point that one of them is covered with plywood. The white paint on the engraved letterings has largely worn away to the point that the words are hard to read. The edges on the benches have also been chipped away, due in part from their being used by skateboarders.

As this year’s Festival approaches, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac will be working with the Lowell Litter Krewe to clean up the grounds, trim the grass growing between the bricks in the patio, see that the trash cans are emptied, and the like. We are pleased with this partnership as it will make the site more presentable for this year’s Commemorative at the Commemorative, but it does not get at the larger needs as cited above.

Over the past 35-40 years Lowell has seen many positive moves to honor the life and the literary and cultural legacy of Jack Kerouac. In addition to the creation of the Commemorative and the ongoing Kerouac Festivals, there is the fine exhibit at the LNHP Visitors Center, and a Kerouac Studies program at U-Mass. Lowell. More recently, there is now the prospect of a Jack Kerouac Center at the former St. Jean Baptiste Church with singer and song-writer Zach Bryan purchasing the building for that purpose. There’s a wonderful mural on the Aiken Street side of the Church showing Jack looking up Moody Street. It has become another stop on our Kerouac Tours.

But the condition of the Jack Kerouac Commemorative, as already noted, is an unfortunate sore spot amid these laudable Kerouac-related achievements. Our—Lowell Celebrate Kerouac’s—attempts to address the situation have been a bit like watching a ping-pong game when it comes to determining who is responsible for what.

Both the City of Lowell and the Lowell National Historical Park have some skin in the game when it comes to the care of the Commemorative and the adjacent Kerouac Park. The purpose of this writing is not to play a blame-game, but rather to reach out to any and all of the parties who are in a position to address this situation so that the Commemorative can be restored to the way it looked when it was dedicated in the summer of 1988.

To end where this piece started, in early October hundreds of Kerouac aficionados from around the country, as well as from several other countries, will be coming to Lowell to celebrate and honor the life and work of Jack Kerouac. We’ll clean up the Commemorative as best we can for them. Our hope is that for our future Festivals the Commemorative will take on an appearance that will truly be a worthy tribute to Jack Kerouac.

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Steve Edington is a thirty-year member, and a past President, of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac. He is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, New Hampshire.