Book: (Robert Kanigel) Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (2016)
When the light of one life passes through the prism of a good biography, you can see the constituent colors of that life and of the culture in which it was lived. Irrepressible as a high school student, Jane never made the honor roll, and had little interest in going to college after all that. Yet her contributions to our understanding of the world around us have been compared to those of Charles Darwin because, as with Darwin’s, they were based on direct observation “in the field,” with little if any related academic preparation. Like Darwin, she observed and thought creatively about what she saw. She would become renowned as a writer and as an activist.
She was born on May 4, 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania into a family of English, Irish, Scottish, and German ancestry. She was Jane Butzner back then. Her mother was a nurse and her father a physician. The Butzner children were all a bit mischievous and special. Later, after Jane married Bob Jacobs, their own family, first in New York City and later in Toronto, also made the honor roll for vitality. Bob, an architect, came up with ideas such as a telephone booth in their living room. It’s said that he played second fiddle to Jane, and was quite okay with that.
Jane and Bob had met in March 1944 and married in May, two weeks before D-Day. By then Jane was a professional writer receiving outstanding reviews for her work first on the staff of a technical journal and later at the Office of War Information.
After the war, she freelanced at first, then joined the staff of Amerika - a big, glossy publication produced in the United States and translated into Russian so that Soviet readers could learn about the United States. It was part of a cultural exchange worked out by US ambassador Harriman and Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, designed to reduce the tensions between the communist east and the capitalist west. The Soviet publication for American readers was Soviet Life. Yet the tensions escalated. Communism appealed to many Americans. FBI scrutiny of possible “sympathizers” was common, especially for anyone in government service.
Jane came under scrutiny, despite her opposition to communism. From 1943 to 1951, she’d belonged to a public workers union that supported at least some communist elements “as did virtually all liberal organizations at the time,” she wrote in her response to her inquisitor. She was proud of the support for women’s rights and independence even among her ancestors, and emphasized that America’s innovative dynamism depended upon its acceptance of contrarian ideas and the right to express them. She abhorred the communist system exactly because of its tendency to dictate from above and kill the independent thinking of the Soviet citizen. Jane’s response was followed by silence from the inquisition, probably because they had been left with “no option but to agree” (as her brother John, a lawyer, said many years later when he reread the “foreword” to Jane’s eloquent response).
In 1952, largely because the publication was moving to Washington, DC, and she wanted to remain in New York, Jane resigned from Amerikaand became a staff writer for Architectural Forum, another “big publication.” Her new beat was all about modern architecture. By 1955 she was 38 years old, happily married with two children and a third on the way. She was professionally successful but not a famous iconoclast. The work that made her famous was about to begin.
Her article on changes taking place in Philadelphia appeared in Architectural Forum in July 1955, expressing enthusiasm for how that city had shown an “embrace of the new” and yet this had “by some miracle not meant the usual rejection of whatever is old.” Then came disenchantment. Edmund Bacon, the city’s master urban planner and an enthusiast of modernism, gave her a guided tour of Philadelphia. He lauded the grand vistas and tall buildings that would transform the city, replacing its “slums.” When Bacon showed Jane around and laid out the new vision for her, she asked “Where are the people?” The vitality of the city was gone.
Her scepticism was encouraged by William Kirk, in a series of guided tours through East Harlem. He emphasized Harlem’s vitality, and that it was threatened by modernist urban planning. By 1956, when she was asked to give a ten-minute talk at Harvard, she had passed the tipping point. Standing in for Doug Haskell, her editor and enthusiastic supporter at Architectural Forum, she agreed to the assignment on short notice only on condition that she would decide what to talk about. In those ten minutes she became “the star of the show” for many (but not all) of the prestigious participants - urban planners and architects and well-known writers on those topics.
After that she was very much on the radar of people in the know. The road from there to the publication of her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961 had many speed bumps but few stop signs. William Whyte recruited her to write a major article for Fortune magazine, “Downtown Is for People,” but her first draft provoked heated opposition – including from C.D. Jackson, the publisher. At a meeting to work through the difficulties, Jane gave a detailed rebuttal of the criticisms. After the meeting Whyte said that Jackson “thought he’d hit a buzz saw.” Her article, at about 6,000 words, was published in Fortune in April 1958. It characterized the much-heralded downtown redevelopment projects as “spacious, parklike, and uncrowded…. They will have all the attributes of a well-kept dignified cemetery.”
Financial support for writing the book came from the Rockefeller Foundation. With several chapters devoted just to the use of sidewalks and another to the uses of neighbourhood parks, the first part of the book was entitled “The Peculiar Nature of Cities.” Part Two, “The Conditions for City Diversity,” included a chapter devoted to the need for “mixed primary uses,” and others to the need for small city blocks and the need for aged buildings. Part Three, “Forces of Decline and Regeneration,” looked at how these things underwent changes with time. Part Four, entitled “Different Tactics,” had six chapters concluding the book with Chapter 22, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” in which she made reference to scientific modes of thought. Specifically, she pointed out that thinking about a city called for an ability to deal with systems of organized complexity – essentially like those in the fields of biology and medicine.
Her activism grew from efforts to exclude automobile traffic from Washington Square Park in the 1950s. Children were involved in getting signatures on petitions. This and other tactics were improvised and versatile, and it worked. Jane became recognized as a master strategist, defeating the plans of the powerful Robert Moses. Later still, in 1962, she was persuaded to join an even bigger fight, against the Lower Manhattan Expressway, another Robert Moses scheme. Again Moses lost, and the tactics included a song “Listen, Robert Moses” by a then-unknown singer, Bob Dylan.
Both her activism and her writing (including other iconoclastic books such as The Economy of Cities, published in 1970) would continue. She and her family secretly fled to Canada on June 21, 1968. Jane opposed the Vietnam War and her son Ned was approaching the age of 18, when he would be subject to the draft - obligatory service in the US armed forces - and liable to be sent to Vietnam. They found their way to Toronto, and eventually to a house on Albany Avenue where Jane lived from 1970 to her death in 2006. In the last decade of her life she was a widow, but never without plans for another book.
She was a visionary, a writer and an activist. She was always brimming with fresh ideas. She changed the way we think about the city. Like Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, an enthusiastic portrait of Paris in the 1920s, the work of Jane Jacobs makes me think about Calgary.
In Calgary we play Keller-Einstein games to come up with fresh ideas, and we can bring that playfulness to our Jane’s Walks on the playing field of our very own city. Hello, Stranger! You can keep your own journal of new people you meet and what you learn. Sharpen your powers of observation, use your imagination. Calgary is a great Canadian City, and we’re enhancing its vitality. If that isn’t a moveable feast, what is?
