Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (18 page)

   CHAPTER 8   

TRUSHCHOBY

T
HE COVER SHOWED TWO
small girls in little dresses and black patent leather shoes, ribbons in their hair, faces aglow, squeezed close together, standing on the seat of a playground swing as it flew up against the deep indigo sky. Here was
Amerika
, issue number 29, reaching its Soviet readers probably in the summer of 1949, delivering its buoyant message of America. The issue’s lead article was titled “New Horizons in the Architecture of the U.S.A.” It was written by Jane Jacobs, and it was thick with images of American buildings and structures, set out on the broad American plain, all expressing American health and vitality: Cozy clapboarded houses. A southwestern pueblo. Dams, grain silos, and electric transmission towers. Chicago School architecture from the late 1800s. And, of course, that larger-than-life hero of American architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, with “Fallingwater” and others among his architectural triumphs; one shot shows him beside an early model of the Guggenheim Museum, years before its iconic helix would rise over Fifth Avenue in New York. The following issue of
Amerika
, with part 2 of the article, showed a modern school, a modern hospital ward, open vistas and unobstructed views, an upper-middle-class suburban living room—all fireplace, sofas, great glass windows—inviting us to step through its sliding glass door and, cocktail in hand, settle down into the new postwar America.

But Comrade Kusakov, associate member of the Academy of Architecture of the USSR, was having none of it. In his
Izvestia
piece, Kusakov wrote off one building praised in Jane’s article as “
an ugly flat, steel box,
architecturally dead and joyless,” described Wright’s school and experimental community, Taliesin, as “a monstrous variation of prehistoric cave dwellings and modern shacks.” But it was not
architecture
so much that inspired his righteous Communist wrath. Rather, it was part of the built environment that Jane had hardly touched on at all—namely, American housing conditions, the facts surrounding which “expose completely the liars on the editorial staff of the magazine
Amerika.
”

In American cities, he charged, six million apartments and houses were slums. In New York alone, half a million people lived in slums. “Poverty districts” consumed more than twelve square miles of Chicago. Out in the country, half a million people lived in trailers. There, for all the world to see, was “the ever increasing housing crisis which the cities of America are experiencing.” American capitalism “dooms the majority of the population to a negative existence and death in ill-smelling cesspools, in slums deprived of air, sunlight, and trees or shrubs. The colossal, ever increasing death rate in the slums of American cities is a devastating verdict on the ‘American way of life’ and on that misanthropic ‘culture’ from which it is born.”

America
did
have a housing crisis; for all the propaganda bluster of the
Izvestia
article, that much was true. A casualty of almost two decades of depression and war, much housing was in disrepair; a third of the nation’s homes were said to lack complete plumbing systems. During the war, shipyard and war factory workers were content to simply find a place, any place, to live; no one was building or rebuilding. One critic would picture postwar slums as “a heritage of the building booms of the 1890s” and early twentieth century, the old properties decaying ever since. In 1949, American newspapers were reporting on a new federal bill that would provide for public housing and slum clearance; some of Kusakov’s statistics were drawn from the debate surrounding it.

No matter that the Soviets were in worse shape. As the embassy cultural affairs officer Ralph Collins observed in commenting on the
Izvestia
attack, most housing in Moscow, shabby, old, and crowded, would be deemed slums by Americans. “It is obvious,” he wrote, “that
‘slums’ means one thing to Americans and another to Russians.”
A slum wasn’t just a slum?
A hopeless mess of dark, dirty, dilapidated housing unfit for human habitation? That wasn’t plain enough? Well, maybe not. In forwarding a translation of the
Izvestia
attack and Collins’s analysis to Marion Sanders in New York a few days later, M. Gordon Knox, the American
embassy in Moscow’s first secretary, suggested that the Russian reaction to Jane’s articles could be seen as “
flattering” to
Amerika
—in that they had been noticed. Still, Kusakov warranted a response. “Let’s see,” he enjoined Sanders, “if we can’t clear up what a slum is.”

“Izvestia on our architecture piece really
made us cringe,” an
Amerika
staffer standing in for Sanders wrote Knox a few days later. “Jane, particularly, is unnerved by being tagged a mendacious capitalist writer. I’m used to it.” But, he assured Knox, they would go ahead with what soon they were calling “the housing story,” trying to cover points Knox had raised. Interview a housing authority official in New York, Knox had suggested. Perhaps set out,

by cubic meter of space, by plumbing facilities, what lodgings are of minimum standards and what would be condemned. Factors such as fire risk and danger of collapse could be spelt out specifically…What are the regulations for how many people can sleep in one room, for how many people can use one toilet, etc. The result, I suspect, will be that Russian readers will think the condemned houses [in America] are luxury liners.

By early February,
Amerika
had a draft of the article they could send the embassy in Moscow. “The article on the Slum by Jane Jacobs is a
courageous, careful, and, to me, highly successful” one, wrote Knox to John Jacobs, who was apparently standing in for Marion Sanders. “It packs a ‘punch’ and makes a point, and I congratulate Jane.” Of course, then he went on to offer two pages of suggestions. For example, Jane had confused things by saying that housing might satisfy minimum standards yet be “slums anyway because they are ugly or discouraging to morale.” He couldn’t buy that: maybe the great Hearst estate in San Simeon, California, was ugly and, were he living there, it might damage his morale, “but it ain’t no slum.”

By March, following more back-and-forth between Moscow and New York, Knox had received the changes, which, he wrote back to Sanders, now back in the saddle in New York, were “acceptable here.” The translation had worked out well, too. They’d worried, he explained, “that the article might contain the Russian word
‘trushchoby’ on every page, which is the word the Soviet press constantly uses in describing the horrible American slums.” But though the translators hadn’t been coached
on the point, he went on, the dreaded word appeared only once. This, in cold war terms, was something of a triumph.

Jane’s piece, appearing across ten pages of
Amerika
in August 1950, was titled “
Planned Rebuilding of Run-Down Urban Areas”: “The working day is done. In large and small cities people stream out the doors of offices, factories and shops and fill buses, trams and the subways that will take them home. Parking lots, filled during the day with private automobiles, empty out, and rush hour begins…Everyone is going home.” But what kind of homes? Ninety-seven percent of Americans had electricity, 95 percent lived one family to a house or apartment, which averaged five rooms each, not including the bathroom.
But
, Jane allowed, “average” figures inevitably mean that “a lot are below average.” A fifth of American houses needed rehabilitation, lacked bathrooms or proper ventilation, or otherwise failed to meet minimal standards. It was these, and what was being done about them, that her article was about. Comrade Kusakov had pointed up America’s housing problems? Well, Jane was showing how America was tackling them.

It was a serious and factual piece, scant on color and rhetorical flavor with probably more meat and muscle than most American readers of
Life, Time
, or
Reader’s Digest
would have swallowed, thick with facts and figures, case studies, history all the way up to the 1949 housing act. How did a “lagging district” or “run-down neighborhood” in America get that way? Some just grew old and worn with time. The decline of others, paradoxically, owed to periods of outsized prosperity during which aggrandizing industrial or shopping districts impinged on them. And just what were proper housing standards? In America these differed by locality; the city of Baltimore, for example, required that windows could come to no less than 10 percent of floor area, and that a bedroom could occupy no fewer than eleven cubic meters. Even the smallest apartments had to have plumbing with at least one sink.

Jane introduced her readers to the Danish social activist Jacob Riis, author of
How the Other Half Lives
, who in the late nineteenth century explored the slums of New York, campaigning against unsanitary housing. At one point, as she told the story, Riis set himself up at a crosswalk in the notorious Five Points neighborhood known as Mulberry Bend, flanked with back alleys with names like Bandit’s Roost and Ragpickers Row. “Mulberry Bend,” declared Riis, “must disappear”—which largely through his influence and publicity it did, becoming a park.

As might be expected, Jane’s long article ended on a bright note. “Neglected, dilapidated houses, as residents of American cities now see, have started to disappear,” though of course, she admitted, “they cannot disappear in a day.” But the grim, too-familiar history of old neighborhoods filling with wave after wave of immigrants or other impoverished newcomers, was no more, she concluded. For example, “neglected Chicago districts, reconstructed today, will never be vacated and re-settled as before. They will disappear; they have already disappeared.”

The article’s illustrations contributed as much to the message as its text: futuristic apartment complexes, slums erased, a new American cityscape replacing them. It opened with a full-page photo of an “obsolete building” being dismantled by a crew of rugged workmen, the steel skeleton of a proud new high-rise towering above and behind it. In before-and-after illustrations of Baltimore, readers saw a decaying inner courtyard, littered with rubble, scraggly wooden fences falling apart, giving way to a cleaned-up ball court, the rear faces of the old buildings freshly painted and stuccoed.

In all this—in Jane’s survey of the problem, her explanation of its roots, and her review of measures taken to remedy it—she expressed conventional strategies and sensibilities she would later question or disparage. One source of urban decline, as we’ve heard her say, was residential buildings left amid shopping and industrial districts; zoning laws to keep them apart had come too late to prevent this unhappy mixing—a mixing she’d come to celebrate. Better site layout and building practices had made it possible to use for the building itself only 10 to 15 percent of the site, the rest given over to sports facilities and open space; proportions like that, she’d later argue, represented a negation of the traditional city. And, she was saying now, bad neighborhoods had best be made to disappear, simply disappear. Jane’s article on slum clearance was solid, thorough—and completely of its time.

Let’s see if we can’t
c
lear up what a slum is?
Knox had asked, and now, a year later, Jane had taken a shot at it. But for Jane, this seemingly narrow question would slip out of its original borders, become something big to chew on, broaden into one of the biggest questions of all:
What, really, was the Good Life?
After two decades of economic depression and wartime constraints, Jane, like many other middle-class Americans, now enjoyed the luxury of being able to settle back and consider new living choices and opportunities. Her choices would differ from those of many of her friends, many of her family members, many other Americans.

—

Jane and her brothers and sister were
settling down, having kids, the first generation of baby boomers. The youngest of them, Jane’s brother Jim, was the first to marry, and soon he and his wife, Kay, had a daughter, Jane, born in 1946. Betty, in an on-again off-again relationship with Jules Manson—a union mediator and academic, smart, handsome, a fine dresser—finally married him early in 1947, giving birth later that year to a daughter, Carol. John worked with Uncle Billy in Fredericksburg; their mother, Bessie, now almost seventy, had sold the family house in Scranton and moved down to Fredericksburg, where she lived in a nice house on Sunken Road and let out rooms for students at nearby Mary Washington College. Jane and Bob’s first son, James Kedzie Jacobs—Jim—was born in 1948, a few months after she and Bob had moved from Washington Place to a dilapidated former candy store on Hudson Street, a broad north-south street a few blocks back from and parallel to the Hudson River.

A too-hasty glance might have suggested that Jane, Bob, and their young son had moved into a slum. Theirs was a
three-story house, reputedly built by a sea captain for one of his two daughters in 1849, situated in one of the gnarliest areas of the West Village, the adjacent streets back from the Hudson piers full of decaying warehouses and light industry, a cacophony of noisy trucks, populated by rough-hewn seamen and longshoremen. The upper two floors had been an apartment, and into them the Jacobses moved while trying to resurrect what had been a first-floor candy store that sported Canada Dry and Phillies Cigars signs out front, rusted sheet-metal fittings, and a bullet hole in the frosted glass left over from some gang fight predating the Jacobses’ arrival. What passed for a backyard was a garbage dump. The whole place was overrun by rats—“big ones,” Jane would say many years later. Even later, in the mid- and late 1950s, with the house filled with Jane’s children and sometimes visiting relatives, the place was often cold in winter, being heated largely by the fireplace in the living room, which was often banked by dawn, the house left cold; one visitor remembers needing seven blankets to keep warm. The house was loose-chinked enough that, even set back from a window, a magazine page could sometimes be seen fluttering in the draft. Of course, there was no air conditioning; they used wet washcloths to keep cool during the hot New York summers. The house demanded all their money, energy, and time. They rebuilt the foundation and installed
new, industrial-grade windows. The street side of the house was in such bad shape that they had to tear down some of it and reface it. Bob’s father kicked in some money to help with the repairs, but they ended up doing much of the work themselves. Jane and Bob had bought the house, son Jim estimates, for $7,000, which even in 1947 dollars wasn’t much.