LOWELL — The last year has brought significant movement toward the goal of developing the Jack Kerouac Museum and Performance Center in the former St. Jean Baptiste Church on Merrimack Street, and the group driving the effort has a clearer plan of how they want to shape the building while preserving the history it represents.
The building is now owned by country singer Zach Bryan, who purchased it last spring for $3.4 million with the specific aim of transforming it into the Kerouac Center, a move motivated in part by Bryan’s love for world-famous Lowell author Jack Kerouac. Bryan took it a step further earlier this year when he purchased the original draft of Kerouac’s “On the Road,” which Kerouac wrote on a single 120-foot-long scroll, for a record $12.1 million.
In the same auction of the estate of late Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, Bryan purchased a similar scroll of “The Dharma Bums” and a number of other letters and belongings of Kerouac’s.
The goal for those items will be to eventually have them brought to the future Kerouac Center to be put on display, but before that can happen the building needs a lot of interior work, a new addition, and at least $25 million to fund the entire project.
To help spur interest and collaboration with the effort, the Jack Kerouac Estate and Kerouac Center proponents have been showing officials the inside of the building, and how they plan to reshape it while keeping the core of its character alive. That included a tour by U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan Tuesday morning, which she said was her first time inside the building.
After leaving her tour, Trahan called the structure “beautiful.”
“It is a building that must be restored. The interior is more beautiful than the exterior. Whenever you can develop a property that has such cultural significance for our city, it is just special. It just adds to the fabric of Lowell, so I am excited about seeing the opening of the Kerouac Museum and welcoming performances by musicians who have been inspired by Jack Kerouac’s work,” said Trahan.
Trahan did not discount the possibility of federal funding being used to help with the project, but said she found it an unlikely prospect under the current makeup of Congress.
“Our community project funding … is constrained with the Republican majority. The only things that are really getting approved are infrastructure type projects, which we have been successful in bringing to Lowell,” said Trahan. “But when we originally brought them back it was much broader than that. We could help the Lowell Community Health Center, we could help a nonprofit working on affordable housing. I look forward to when we have the majority, and we can reconstitute that process to be impactful to projects like this one.”
After Bryan purchased Kerouac’s items from the Irsay Estate, Kerouac Estate Director of Marketing and Business Development Sylvia Cunha said the estate’s board met and began coming up with different fundraising initiatives that seek to incentivize donors by making them “actively involved,” in the project.
“You can ask anybody for a donation, but everybody is hitting hard times right now, so if they are going to donate it has to be something where they are a part of it,” said Cunha.
She described the “312 Initiative,” named for Kerouac’s birthday of March 12, through which donors may be able to have a vote on certain parts of the project. Another fundraising effort has already taken shape in the form of a partnership between the Jack Kerouac Center and the revived Lowell Spinners, and other initiatives are being worked out, Cunha said.
The design of the project has undergone some changes. Core aspects, like a Kerouac Museum and concert hall, still remain. Design choices like grand staircases have been taken out of the drawings, but other things have been added, like a recording studio in the building.
Cunha said the goal is to get the center done in three years, but she noted that timeline may depend on outside economic factors and the state of the world at large. Still, when the project is finally finished Cunha expressed confidence it will bring positives to the surrounding neighborhoods.
“We want it to mean something to this community. This whole area is going to change, and it is also going to bring jobs to the area,” said Cunha.
While the church itself will need renovations inside, the project is also going to include a whole new addition to the building, which Kerouac Center Director of Construction Tom Clark said was included as “a functional requirement,” for the rest of the project to work.
“We’ll have all the [Americans with Disabilities Act compliant] access to all the different levels … So we knew we needed to create a structure that let us have an elevator and communicating staircase, but you want everything in a good design to be multi-function,” said Clark. “That building now gives us the ability to put some museum components with the building, a bookstore, our kind of primary entrance to the building for the community to get down into the basement.”
Because of the historic nature of the church as it is today, there cannot be signs placed on the exterior. The new addition will not carry such a restriction, Clark said, allowing them to better advertise what the church will have turned into.
The addition will also be the likely home of the scrolls and Kerouac artifacts purchased by Bryan, Acre Action Neighborhood founder and Kerouac Center supporter Dave Oullette said.
“It has to be in there. It has to be humidity and temperature control, and with the cost of it, the money that is spent on all those archives, it needs to be very secure,” said Oullette. “It has usually been packed away, and this will be one of the only times you will be able to come as a person, get a ticket and walk through to see the scroll. The ordinary person, which Jack Kerouac was, will be able to actually see his writings, instead of just the scholars.”
Oullette and Cunha both noted how the church has been their main goal for the Kerouac Center’s location because of the meaning it had to Kerouac himself. St. Jean Baptiste Church was the Kerouac family’s church. He served there as an altar boy, and it was the location of his funeral in 1969.
“I’ve never done this before. It’s heavy, like it’s heavy when somebody’s legacy is a part of it, because you don’t know what he would have wanted,” said Cunha. “But this is his neighborhood, and I would hope to think he is happy we are re-energizing this neighborhood.”
Original article
Comments