Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (27 page)

Finally, though, Charley and his friends had enough of the old city and met with a bow-tied, waistcoated, and wise elder gentleman who showed them how cities had turned out so bad. How might they make their lives better? New skyscrapers, maybe? No, no, the townspeople objected, as we see their houses start to mushroom into high-rises. They wouldn’t want to live in
them.
What about their gardens, their pubs?

Inevitably, it is made to seem, they converged on the idea of a new town, on a new site. “First thing we all agreed on was to separate industry
from dwelling houses,” Charley remembers. Yes, said their new leader: “Industry here…Residential areas there, with not more than five minutes travel from home to work.” The great idea was realized. We see little factories sprout up; the wind, of course, always sweeps the smoke away. We see Charley himself running a bulldozer. Open spaces, parks, playing fields, flower gardens—paradise. “And so,” Charley remembers, “we moved right in.” In the end, we see him back on his bike, in the present. “I’m telling you, it works out fine.” And as he cycles offscreen, he points to the viewer. “Just you try it.”

In real English towns embodying Howard’s ideas, like Letchworth in 1903 and Welwyn in 1920, and then in Radburn, New Jersey, and urban enclaves like Sunnyside Gardens in New York during the 1920s, thousands did try it, or something like it. Then, after World War II, in countless variations and permutations of the Garden City movement and inspired by similar impulses in suburbs across England and America, so did millions more.

Howard reached out into the countryside, Le Corbusier reached up for his towers-in-the-park. But both streams of modernist thought turned their backs on the confused jumble of the city street, the jangle, noise, and thrill of the city as generations knew it. Both redistributed its parts—homes, offices, factories, parks, stores—into discrete parcels, separate and distinct. Both echoed the lesson of a postwar world of bombed-out European and Japanese cities: Clear out the rubble. Build anew.

Certainly there was plenty of rubble to clear. Since she’d first visited New York in 1928, Jane had seen for herself the toll of years on the American city—in crumbling old-law tenements in New York; brownstones in Brooklyn and row houses in Baltimore and Philadelphia carved up into cramped apartments for war workers; poor blacks escaping the Jim Crow South crammed into overpriced, under-maintained slums. The Depression and the war made for two long, debilitating decades of stagnation and neglect during which no one, it seemed, had the time or money, or after a while the inclination, to fix up the old city.

All across these years, modernist dreams, too, had been placed on hold. But now, with the guns stilled after World War II and every sign of buoyant prosperity returning—automobiles taking on the Forward Look, air travel granting mile-high vistas—modernism reasserted itself. Something close to a social consensus emerged, one rejecting the old, ragged past, proposing to scrape it away, often literally, and replace it with a swept-clean, squared-away future: superblocks of Corbusian
towers in town and great, green park-like tracts in the new suburbs. In both cases, the street, the heart of the old carcinogenic city and its evils, would be erased. And these sensibilities came on now with such ferocity, as if embracing the urgency, scale, and force of the war itself, that this New Truth could appear self-evident: no need to mend the postwar world’s tattered social and physical fabric; best to obliterate it and start over.

To work at
Forum
during these heady midcentury years was to breathe in this intoxicating new modernist spirit. And, why not? What could be more natural, more seemingly inevitable? The slums Ed Bacon had presumably erased in Philadelphia meant a better world. So did Lincoln Center. So did housing projects going up in the cities of America. They were
good
, better than what they replaced. How else to see things? Since when was all that was shabby and old better than what was coming up new? Why, it was practically a contradiction in terms. Was any old horse-and-wagon better suited to us today, more desirable, than a new automobile? Then in what impossible, upside-down universe would you
not
want to tear down an aging slum of nineteenth-century tenements and put up a new apartment complex designed to make life easier, airier, and brighter? Under what topsy-turvy logic would you not want to leave behind the fetid streets of the old neighborhood for a new world of leafy green? These questions had such obvious answers they were silly even to ask.

And yet they were something like the questions Jane
was
asking. She was suggesting that modernist planning was not in all ways, certainly, and maybe not even in most ways, good for Philadelphia and East Harlem, that it hurt them; that the prevailing thinking of her day didn’t work. She argued with her colleagues, but, she would admit, “I
didn’t bring them around to my way of thinking.” Not right away, anyhow. “The editors of my magazine, of
Architectural Forum
, believed in all this urban renewal stuff. And I saw who their heroes were.” Heroes like Ed Logue, urban renewal czar of New Haven, Connecticut, who, to listen to Jane, thought that “the best thing that could happen to San Francisco would be another earthquake and fire.” Her editors
liked
Logue and his vision of cities wiped clean and rebuilt from scratch.

Peter Blake, who worked at
Forum
all through the 1950s and later became its editor, would observe that Jane Jacobs’s message was “
shattering to those of us brought up on various neat and seductive dogmas and diagrams of the Modern Movement.”
Dogmas.
Like a religion.

But Jane had lost her faith, and was saying so to anyone who’d listen.

—

One Saturday evening in February 1958, Doug Haskell attended a
party with architects and other creative people. There he talked with a man named Chadbourne Gilpatric.

Gilpatric had a great job. His title at the Rockefeller Foundation was “associate director of humanities and social sciences,” but really what he did was talk with smart, accomplished people about the things that mattered most to them and give some of them money. A Harvard graduate remembered by a classmate as “a philosophy student of
flashing charm and audacity,” he socialized, lunched, traveled, brought people into the office, talked, and listened, forever on the prowl for projects worthy and interesting. Then he’d write up memos in his professional diary, which ultimately filled book after book. And from time to time they led to grants of tens of thousands of dollars that changed people’s lives. Gilpatric must have been very popular.

Among Gilpatric’s own special interests was urban design, which he felt was unstudied with anything like the critical and reflective focus it needed. American cities were a mess. Barracks built during the war to house navy-yard workers had become housing warrens for the poor; slum clearance projects failed to eliminate slums; and on and on. These were many of the same issues, of course, that had led Holly Whyte into his
Fortune
series. Now Gilpatric was feeling his way into what the Rockefeller could do to bring light to these dark, unwieldy problems.

Chadbourne Gilpatric of the Rockefeller Foundation
Credit 15

At the party, Haskell, too, deplored the almost unseemly lack of critical thinking about urban design, but added, as Gilpatric recorded, that “one of the few able and imaginative people concerned with this domain is Jane Jacobs, on his staff.” She had just completed a big piece for
Fortune.
“She might be a person worth talking to soon.”

By this point, in late winter of 1958, Jane figured large at
Forum
, her ideas, like them or not, seeping into the intellectual air of the office. Back in November, Haskell had written to his top staff about how “Jane Jacobs has been talking about an
approach to city pattern which I think we should discuss.” Her approach disdained large-scale land acquisition, planning, and bureaucracy. It said no to the superblock, the greenbelt, and the satellite town—all staples of postwar thinking. In doing so, Jane was “dauntlessly going in the face of some 75 years of tradition in city planning.” Haskell felt her ideas merited a serious look; perhaps they’d want to give her “a big hunk of space for exposition and debate. I can imagine it would make many an existing planner furious at first, just as my own temptation was to be furious.”

On April 25, fresh from what someone at
Forum
had termed “
Jane’s blockbuster on the superblock” in
Fortune
and the hosannas it had inspired, Jane wrote Haskell with a suggestion for
Forum
’s January 1959 issue. How about an article—a sizable chunk of the issue, she made it sound—devoted to “
What Is the City?”

What is it really made of, how does it really work, what has worked well in it in the past and what has not, how has the postwar rebuilding of it, both public and private as well as a mixture of the two, been working out and what does this tell us—and, from everything we can learn and put down about what the big city is, and does, what are the implications for its future planning?

I think there is no more important subject for us to do, if not in January, sometime soon.

“
Wow!” Haskell wrote back three days later. But: “Could we not put this one down to more modest dimensions?”

Well, no
, it would turn out,
we couldn’t:
What Jane had to say about cities might be many things, but of modest dimension it was not.

Years later she would tell how she tried to interest
Forum
in a four-article series about city streets. As Gilpatric later summarized a version of this idea, or an evolution of it, one of the pieces would be devoted to how self-policing by street users minimized crime; a second was on neighborhood scale; a third on inter-group mixing; a fourth on the implications of the street for urban planning. Before writing even a word, simply in its declared focus, Jane was already running counter to the prevailing idea of her time, that “the street was an evil place, the
street should be expunged in favor of superblocks and underground and above-ground things.” Haskell respected Jane, had spoken glowingly of her to Gilpatric. But as for her colleagues generally at
Forum
, Jane would say, they were “kind of appalled that I wanted to do this.”

Still, she’d add, “
I would eventually have persuaded them to do those four articles.”

Maybe yes, maybe no. But in the end she didn’t have to persuade her colleagues because, as she went on to say, “in the meantime some [other] people got interested in these ideas.” And soon she wasn’t writing four articles for
Forum
, she was writing
The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

—

It was April 20, 1958, a few days before she’d broached her “What Is the City?” idea to Haskell. Jane was giving a talk, devoted to New York’s future, as part of a dinner panel at the New School for Social Research, an alternative university in the Village. She lambasted several of her sworn enemies, such as Lincoln Center—though now with a depth and detail missing from her
Fortune
article. And, of course, Robert Moses, New York’s master planner, who was trying to run a highway through Greenwich Village.

But there was something new here, too. Her talk played out not alone in dark and muted colors, but in bright ones, expressing a dream and a hope for city life. Consider, she said, the interdependence of a great city, its networks of mutual support and—this in an almost hallucinogenic jazz riff—its bizarre, unexpected minglings:

This criss-cross of supporting relationships means, for instance, that a Russian tearoom and last year’s minks and a place to rent English sports cars bloom well near Carnegie Hall, or that on the same block the Advanced Metaphysicians and the Dynamic Speakers and the Associates of Camp Moonbeam have all discovered they can fit sympathetically into the studios that do well for music too. It means that the Puerto Rican Orientation Club of East Harlem finds a place it can actually afford in a beat-up tenement basement—an unprepossessing place but a place of its own, beholden to no one, and thus it can flourish. This criss-cross network means that the textile companies of Worth Street move uptown from a quiet, uncrowded place into the maelstrom of the garment district because they see a higher logic in being closer to their customers.

New York was a mixed-up mess of a place, that was its glory. But let no one think there was an end to it. There never would be. Jane told a story we’ve heard before, of how when she first came to New York, at age eighteen, she’d worked for a clock manufacturer she believed would one day fit out the whole world with clocks; after a week or so, she realized it would never happen, it was an unending job. The same went for rebuilding a city. It was “tempting to want to fix it in such a way that things will get finished and stay put and that’s that…But New York,” she said, “is like the clock business; it is never going to get finished. This should not really be discouraging to anybody over the age of eighteen.”