Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (2 page)

But these many years later, the subject of the book you are now reading is not cities, urban planning, or urban design. It’s not a book that sets out to gather upbeat stories of rejuvenation and revitalization from the urban front lines. It does not take the reader by the hand and guide her through resurgent Station North in Baltimore or gentrified Williamsburg in Brooklyn; through old warehouses and office buildings made into homes, or downtowns set a-bustling again. Or exult in the reassuring drops in crime in New York and other cities. Or enjoy the vision of city-busting urban highways torn down in Boston and San Francisco. Each of these, seen through the right lens, can be laid at Jane Jacobs’s door. And you’ll find such happy stories in this book. But they are not its subject.

Rather, this is a biography of the remarkable woman who helped make such accounts possible. This book looks back, to a time when the rare upbeat report of city life was buried beneath stacks of press releases from new suburban developments, new interstate highways linked by cloverleafs, new rounds of corporate exodus to suburban office parks. To a time when old city neighborhoods were being erased, high-rise housing projects erected in their place; when slums were slums and everyone knew exactly what they were, or thought they did; when anyone who wanted to live in the city would have been seen as just a little weird. To a time into which Jane Jacobs strode, looked around her, and helped the rest of us see through new eyes.

During the last half of her life and since her death at the age of eighty-nine in 2006, she has inspired a devotion whose intensity one is tempted to greet with a lifted eyebrow. She’s been called “
the most influential urban thinker of all time,” ahead of Frederick Law Olmsted, Lewis Mumford, Robert Moses, and Thomas Jefferson. She’s been called
“genius
of common sense,” “
godmother of urban America,” an “urban Thoreau,” and “
the Rachel Carson of the economic world.” One of her books,
Systems of Survival
, was deemed “as
bitchily observant as a Woody Allen film.” In turn, one Woody Allen film was described as “
channeling Jane Jacobs and her complaints…about the alienating scale of modern architecture and postwar urbanism.”
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
was likened “to the paper
Luther nailed to the Schlosskirche Wittenberg four centuries earlier.” A man who described himself as a Jacobs groupie traveled to her residences in New York and Toronto, saying that for him, a “city geek,” “this was
like a trip to Graceland and Tupelo, Mississippi.” In an essay, “The
Society of Saint Jane,” Mariana Mogilevich wrote how, after Jane’s death, “not surprisingly, no time at all was wasted in beginning the canonization process.” When the Occupiers occupied Wall Street, the economist Sandy Ikeda asked, “
What would Jane Jacobs do?” And when Stewart Brand, originator of the
Whole Earth Catalog
, the counterculture bible of the 1960s, was asked who he’d like to be other than himself, he picked Jane Jacobs, a “
one-lady Venice, fifteenth century. As good as it gets.”

Individually, these attestations might be intriguing, but collectively they give us pause: you can admire Jane Jacobs, as I do, yet grow weary or suspicious of such a heaping-up of adulation; our understanding of any real human being doesn’t profit from such hyperbole. For the moment we needn’t decide whether Jane Jacobs really does qualify as “
Mrs. Insight,” or whether she ranks as the most influential urban thinker of all time, or attains only a lower, merely human standard. Indeed, as we’ll see, plenty of revisionist thinking questions one or another facet of Jacobs’s legacy. But we can find in such lionization at least one firm fact: that among thousands of architects, urban activists, city planners, economists, city dwellers generally, and champions of independent thought, Jane Jacobs is seen in just such larger-than-life terms; that something in what she said, or how she said it, inspired not cool, respectful admiration but ardency and awe; that many emerged from her books, or from hearing her in public, as fans or acolytes.

What makes this phenomenon all the more confounding is that Jane Jacobs couldn’t boast those superficial extras that can contribute to public reverence. For one thing, she was not a man. She was not rich. She did not reach public recognition of any magnitude until she was pushing fifty. She was never beautiful. She was not even memorably
unbeautiful;
for long stretches of her public life, she was a pudding-faced old lady in ill-fitting jumper and sneakers. Her voice, which in its timbre could verge on squeaky, conveyed no hypnotic majesty. She didn’t wholly avoid television interviews or other publicity on behalf of her books or the social issues she championed, but she didn’t normally reach out for it, either. After the success of her first book, she would say, she had to decide whether to be a celebrity or to write books, and opted for the latter. How, then, we are left to wonder, did so many come under her spell?

They came under her spell, I think, almost solely through her words. Her words expressed ideas. And those ideas had a quality and resonance that were new and fresh and thrilling. They were memorably put, in distinctive aphorisms, in brick-like agglomerations of evidence and fact, that added up to a sense of irrefutable
rightness.
For many readers, too, what she said seemed to stand up for them. Maybe you thought you didn’t want to march off to the suburbs like everyone else, that it was satisfying, or fun, or fascinating, to live amid a million strangers in an anonymous city, and here was a lady who thought so, too, who understood, and who helped you
see
your city, and maybe yourself, in a new and liberating way.

But there was more: her words conveyed a stance, a sensibility that to many were marvelously attractive and compelling. Her language was lucid, but you don’t get a hold on people by being merely lucid. It was disruptive, too—combative, even bitchy. And defiantly independent, yet suggesting that it was all just common sense in the end, and that maybe anyone could be like her.

There’s a scene in the classic Academy Award–winning 1940 film
The Philadelphia Story
, where a tabloid press photographer, played by Jimmy Stewart, and Tracy Lord, upper-class to her toenails, played by Katharine Hepburn, are both thoroughly smashed, with maybe the makings of romance burbling up between them.

“You’re quite a girl, aren’t you?” says Stewart.

“You think?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Thank you, professor, I don’t think I’m exceptional.”

“You are.”

“There are any number like me. You ought to get around more.”

Of course, every frame of film, every word uttered by Tracy Lord, every look and gesture, every syllable of her Main Line accent, adds to
the conclusion that if anyone is exceptional it’s her, and that to deny it is either willful faux modesty or evidence she’s out of touch with herself or with the effect she has upon others.

Almost sixty years later, something like this scene was enacted with Jane Jacobs. It was 1997 and a Canadian interviewer was asking her why there were so few iconoclasts like her. Oh, but there were: “You
must move in different circles than I do,” says Jane. “Most of the people I know think for themselves, they really do.”

“But you’re a brilliant woman and you attract those sorts of people.”

“No, I’m not that brilliant,” Jane replies. “I’m really slow. I run across them [iconoclasts] all the time. I’m a very ordinary person.”

And it’s just as false coming from Jane Jacobs as from Tracy Lord.

Of course, Jane has the good grace to add, “But I’m articulate.”

—

Jane Jacobs’s words did not reach her admirers solely through her writings. Many of her acolytes knew her not through
Death and Life
, or her lesser-known books, but through her work as an urban activist. To them, especially during the 1960s and early 1970s,
that
was her day job. One time, city authorities wanted to run a road right through the park where Jane’s kids played. Another time, they wanted to write off her whole Greenwich Village neighborhood as a slum, bringing it under Urban Renewal’s dark, unlovely sway. Then they were going to all but lop off the whole bottom of Manhattan Island with a big expressway and, it looked like, destroy her whole way of life.

What else could she do but try to stop it? So she stood up and spoke at public meetings. She wrote forceful, sometimes angry letters. She had friends spy on city authorities. She helped organize protests; once, she managed to get herself arrested, and had four felony indictments thrown at her. Neighbors would come by for strategy sessions around her kitchen table, deciding on what facts and figures to gather, or how to maneuver some city official to come around. Jane wasn’t the one to go around collecting signatures. Most often, she was the master strategist, often the public face of protest, getting up at public meetings to harangue the planners, or the developers, or city officials, or whoever else was the enemy this time. Most of the time, she won, as she did in fighting the New York planning czar Robert Moses to a standstill, defeating his Lower Manhattan Expressway; “Jane took an axe to Moses and killed him,” her longtime
editor, Jason Epstein, would say. And when her neighbors weren’t a little put off by the sheer impudence of her urban battle strategies, the fierce single-mindedness with which she waged her wars, they loved her. That was how they remembered her—as protector and defender of the neighborhood. When she became famous and the magazines and newspapers needed something to call her they depicted her as “the
Barbara Fritchie of the Slums,” or as a “
Madame Defarge leading an aroused populace to the barricades.”

So prominent were some of these battles—they loom in collective memory in part thanks to books and articles that almost reflexively pair her with Robert Moses, her David to his Goliath—that they make it sound like this is what she
was
, that here, in this work on behalf of her community, was the real Jane Jacobs: organizer, activist, radical, a woman of the people who’d risen up out of the gritty city streets to fight city hall. She
was
all that, and though she never quite said so, she must have derived satisfaction from it. More often, though, she went on the record to say some something like this: “I resented that I had to stop and devote myself to fighting what was basically an absurdity that had been foisted on me and my neighbors.” To listen to Jane, it all made for an interruption from her
real
work.

Indeed, each time she was through battling one civic opponent or another, it was not as if she sought out the next dragon to slay; rather, like Cincinnatus, the statesman who relinquished the scepter of leadership after defeating each challenge to Rome, Jane returned to the work she’d been forced to give up during the crisis of the moment. Now, once again, she’d mark off hours away from her family, instruct her husband and children to let no one in to see her. And there, amid her books and notes and typewriter, she’d resume the close reading, the hard thinking, the endless laboring over words and ideas, that made her one of the premier intellectual figures of the twentieth century.

—

After
Death and Life
, Jane wrote many other books, which got respectful hearings, significant readerships, critical hosannas, and had their own fans. She wrote particularly of economics, specifically about what makes for economically healthy cities and regions; these, a little idiosyncratic, have brought no consensus within the larger economics community as to whether, as some say, they represent real genius, or are quirkily irrelevant.
Other books headed off in wholly uncharted directions. She edited a book about her great-aunt and her adventures in Alaska. She wrote a children’s book. She wrote more philosophical works, structured as Platonic dialogues.

You could say these books were all on different “subjects,” based on different bodies of fact, their author flitting from one to the other. But you could also look at them as bearing on a single overarching subject: Jane told the story of how one day when she was a child, sitting with her father on the front porch of her house in Scranton, their conversation wandered to the oak tree in their yard. “
What is its purpose?” asked her father. It was a rhetorical question, of course. He was going somewhere with it, its answer embodying something like a philosophy. The tree’s
purpose?
What purpose did it need, really? It was
alive.
“I made of the answer,” Jane would recall, “that the purpose of life is to live.” She said as much to her father. “Yes,” he said, “that tree has a great push to live—any healthy, living thing does.”

It’s natural to view
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, as a book about cities, but it might better be seen as a book about death and life. The same really goes for the entirety of her work, as a chorus and conversation about life in glowing contrast to decay and death. Referring to
Death and Life
, she’d say she was never particularly interested in pushing one particular ideal city. Rather, “
I just wanted to know how to keep the life” in it going, “which in my mind is the purpose of life.” The epigraph to the book includes a quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: “Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.” An article she wrote during World War II about jobs opening up for women fairly hums with the happy clatter of machines and industrial vibrancy. Jane watched her father restore sick people to health. She was brought up on accounts of her uncle Billy’s lusty energy, of her great-aunt’s charge into the Alaskan bush. She was distraught at the decline of Scranton, and at how a hamlet in backwoods North Carolina she visited as a teenager had declined over the years. What impressed her most about the life of great cities was not just their diversity, but their energy. It was as if, all through her own life, she sought the conditions men and women needed to make good and vital lives.

When she was wrapped up in the Girl Scouts as a young teenager, Jane belonged “to what my friends and I thought was the
finest Girl Scout troop in Scranton, Pennsylvania.” But it got too popular, too big, and the
powers-that-be decided to establish a second troop, meeting in the same church, only at a different time. Jane stayed with the original troop, but soon experienced it as “boring and lackadaisical.” So one evening, she and a friend dropped in on the other troop. “What a contrast!” she’d remember thinking; it was all enthusiasm, older girls helping the younger ones, the whole “jumping with life.”
Life
—measure of all things.
Life
—roots reaching for water, leaves reaching for the sun, cities exploding with vitality, businesses booming, economies flourishing, ideas aborning. Read enough of Jane Jacobs and you see these same themes and images running like a river all through her work. No need to understand why cities decline, she counseled, only why they prosper: “
The most elementary point is the most startling. There are no causes of stagnation. There are no causes of poverty. There are only causes of growth.”