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Lowell, Massachusetts street, January 1941
We stride to school... past the YWCA, the canal bridge, the entrance street to the great cotton mills with all up down the morning-rosy cobbles the tight serried Colonial doors of a mid-nineteenth-century housing block for textile workers celebrated in some of Dickens' memoirs, the sad crapulous look of old redbrick sagging doorfronts and almost a century of work in the mills...
Railroad cars and factory buildings, Massachusetts, January 1941
I walk along the long sunny concrete rale of the millyards in the booming roar of the windows where my mother's working, I am horrified...
...late red Sunday afternoon in Lowell, on the Boott Mills the great silent light shrouded the redbrick in a maze of haze sorrow, something mute about to speak lurked in the sight of these silent glowing mills seen on dumb-Sundays of choked cleanness and odors of flower...
Industrial area in Massachusetts, January 1941
Smoke whipped from clean chimneys of Lowell. Now at Worthen, Prince and other old milltown streets as my feet shot me past I saw the redbrick faded into something cold and rose -- unspeeched -- throat-choking -- ...
Skating, Massachusetts, December 1940
The whole sky unforgettable, heightened by the dry ice of weather's winter glare, air rarefied pure and blue, just as it appears at such hours over the redbrick...
Over the the roofs was that blue, magic Lowell blue, that keen winter northern knifeblade blue of winter dusks so unforgettable and so cold and dry, like dry ice, flint, sparks, like powdery snow that ss'ses under doorsills ---- Perfect for the silhouetting of birds heading darkward down their appointed lane, hushed ---- Perfect for the silhouetting presentations of church steeples and of rooftops and of the whole Lowell general, and always yon poor smoke putting from the human chimneys like prayer...
...Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground's frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June ---- Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers -- they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice...
Industrial town in Massachusetts, January 1941
Everything went on as usual in the city itself -- except that it was always changing, like me -- though the chagrin of the ruddy dusk up on Paddy McGillicuddy's street in the Acre on the hill was mighty the same every time -- and something eternal brooded in the sad red chimneys of the mills, ah these heavenward Empire knobs of a great civilization in a valley. The Kingdom of Lowell was bounded and tended thereto...
Industrial town in Massachusetts, January 1941
...hand to eyes, gazing at the white clouds passing on by, those perfect Tao phantoms that materialize and then then travel and then go, dematerialized, in one vast planet emptiness, like souls of people, like substantial fleshy people themselves, like your quite substantial redbrick smokestacks of the Lowell Mills along the river on sad red Sunday afternoons...
Detail of industrial building in Massachusetts, December 1940 or January 1941
Factory buildings, Lowell, Massachusetts, December 1940 or January 1941
...the giant orangebrick smokestack rose to the stars, a little black smoke came out...
Photos by Jack Delano from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress
Jack Kerouac: "We stride to school...", "Smoke whipped...", "Massachusetts Street...", "Everything went on...": from Maggie Cassidy, 1953 (published 1959)
Jack Kerouac: "I walk along...", "late red Sunday..." "The whole sky...", "the giant orangebrick...": from Doctor Sax, 1952 (published 1959)
Jack Kerouac: "Over the roofs...","hand to eyes...": from Visions of Gerard, 1956 (published 1958)
Jack Kerouac: "I walk along...", "late red Sunday..." "The whole sky...", "the giant orangebrick...": from Doctor Sax, 1952 (published 1959)
Jack Kerouac: "Over the roofs...","hand to eyes...": from Visions of Gerard, 1956 (published 1958)
