Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (29 page)

In fact, though Gans knew the West End intimately—his field work there would culminate in his classic,
The Urban Villagers
—he was less familiar with the North End, the next neighborhood over, a jumble of tenements and chockablock old buildings that went back to the American Revolution, including Paul Revere’s house; to many an eye, it looked exactly the way a slum ought to look. He doesn’t remember much of the tour he gave Jane except that it was superficial; “I must have shown her the settlement houses, the restaurants.” As for the West End, Jane
didn’t seem interested; only the North End seemed to be on her agenda, maybe because she recalled it from her New England trip of 1938, when it impressed her as
“a district taking a terrible physical beating and certainly desperately poor.”

Now, though, she came away “amazed at the change” there, with dozens of buildings rehabbed, crowding reduced, apartments warmed with fresh paint and pretty Venetian blinds. “
I looked down a narrow alley,” she’d write later of her trip, thinking to find there the old, squalid North End of her memories. “But no: more neatly repointed brickwork, new
blinds, and a burst of music as a door opened…The streets were alive with children playing, people shopping, people strolling, people sitting.” The North End would emerge from
Death and Life
as urban folk hero in old brick. Even by late 1958, just back from her Boston trip and advising Gilpatric of her progress, she was all aglow over it. Recorded Gilpatric: “
Mrs. J’s most exciting discovery was in the north end of Boston, essentially in the Italian area, which continues to be regarded as a ‘slum.’ In fact, Mrs. J finds it one of the most attractive, animated and interesting sections she has come upon in a long time.”

All this early research was crucial, supplying just the texture of fact and impression Jane needed. But it took time, more than she’d allowed. The writing itself had progressed but fitfully. After lunch with Jane in June, nine months out, Gilpatric concluded that she “has run into
a lot of unexpected problems and that she has finished less writing than [he, Gilpatric] had expected.” In a letter about a month later Jane enlarged on her difficulties: Three months of research had stretched to four and a half. Then, another month and a half to sift through all she’d gathered. Every time she talked with someone, she was left awash in ideas, about aspects of city life she’d not considered or had previously written off as insignificant: What happens when a city “unslums”? Is a densely built city automatically overcrowded or unsafe? “
On almost everything I had thought about I found relationships I had not taken into account.” Everything was harder to make sense of than she’d bargained for, full of fascinating, but time-eating, “discoveries.”

Never having attempted to write a book of this sort before, I did not anticipate the difficulties I was going to get into in organizing and writing. It is far different from writing and organizing articles, and how different I had no conception until I waded in. In retrospect, how over-optimistic I was about the writing!

—

In her letter, Jane didn’t include among her difficulties the siren call of East Harlem—a project she’d become involved with there, that contributed to her time crunch.

Back in 1955, Union Settlement had been invited to run a community center in one of the big new projects, George Washington Houses, across 104th Street from the row of brownstones that was its headquarters. It
wasn’t long, however, before Kirk and his colleagues
realized they knew little about these new objects in their midst, the big housing projects. To them, whose institutional life had since the late nineteenth century been built around East Harlem’s familiar five-story tenements and the life bubbling up from them, these new alien things represented terra incognita. With a grant from a local foundation, they undertook a study of the project. At its helm, under Bill Kirk, was a social worker named
Ellen Lurie.

A 1951 graduate, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, of New York University, Lurie, then just twenty-five, would go on to a flame-bright career as community organizer and champion of integrated schools in East Harlem and around the city; a New York City public school is named for her today. She was deeply ethical, charismatic, exacting. “If you’re working on behalf of poor people,” a colleague, Ron Shiffman, would remember her saying, “you can’t be slipshod in anything you do.” Indeed, even the earliest outline of her study plan for
George Washington Houses in January 1956 showed a seriousness and depth of engagement beyond her years. Through interviews with residents, Lurie proposed to explore the communities they had come from, child-parent relationships in the project, how the project influenced friendships. She asked such questions as, “Are there restrictions to community life inherent in project living?” “Are we trying to employ middle-class concepts of community life in an economically low-class neighborhood?”

In the end, Lurie’s study served like a medical probe set into the necrotic tissue of the project, putting numbers, data, and insight into the concerns Kirk had intuited from the street. Its depiction of social disconnection was, as Union Settlement would admit, “
sobering”—indeed, too much so to publish: “Urban rot is more than merely a physical deterioration,” Lurie’s report concluded. “The morale and spirit of the people in the project have not been emancipated from the slums.”

It was probably early in 1956 that Lurie met Jane. The two women were fourteen years apart in age. Lurie was more caught up in people and their needs, Jane in broad ideas. But they got to know and respect one another. Some of Lurie’s early insights had flavored Jane’s Harvard talk. Lurie would explicitly acknowledge Jane’s help on the Washington Houses study. Jane encouraged Lurie to write a piece for
Forum
and would quote her at length in
Death and Life.
Now, in late 1958, the two women had a chance, just possibly, to remedy some of the pathologies Lurie’s study had laid bare.

Two years before, yet another huge housing project,
DeWitt Clinton Houses, had been earmarked for the neighborhood. It was to encompass 104th to 106th Street, Park Avenue to Lexington, and house 750 families in eighteen-story buildings—more of the same, in other words, for East Harlem. But in December 1958, three months into Jane’s Rockefeller grant, the New York Housing Authority, responding to an “urgent request” that summer from Union Settlement, agreed to briefly put its plans on hold and consider design alternatives to it. “
We realize,” Bill Kirk wrote the housing authority, “that our request to proceed in this way is unusual,” as indeed it was, a rare halt to the bureaucratic clock. The group behind Union Settlement’s petition consisted of Kirk, the longtime neighborhood activist Mildred Zucker, Ellen Lurie, and Jane Jacobs.

On January 15, 1959, Jane and the rest of the group met with architects from Perkins & Will, the firm presided over by Kirk’s old friend Phil Will, which had agreed to work up, pro bono, an alternative design. In early February, plans and drawings in hand, they made their plea to the New York Housing Authority. Jane was at the helm, making their case.

“
We are convinced,” they said, that much of the social pathology of East Harlem’s projects owed to “the physical design of the buildings themselves and their grounds. They are ill suited…to the needs of the families who must live in them and to the neighborhoods of which they are a part.” The projects disregarded the communal and cooperative elements of city neighborhoods, and undermined “the constant, casual and varied human contacts” that enriched life in the old slums. As planned, DeWitt Clinton represented a “bankrupt stereotype.” That the housing authority should “continue to travel the path of social erosion” seen in Washington Houses was “unthinkable.”

In their alternative proposal, most of the site would be given over to low-rise courtyard structures that let parents keep an eye on their children. It encouraged interplay with surrounding East Harlem streets. It provided for open space, but avoided “meaningless and isolated malls and lawns which experience shows will be shunned.” It didn’t try to mimic the classic tenement streetscape but did hold to one unlikely feature of it: half a century after the last generation of walk-ups in New York, Perkins & Will proposed four- and five-story walk-ups for families with children; that is,
no elevators
, in disregard of the federal housing code, which the group saw as “unrealistic” and insensitive to New York City experience. Climbing stairs, while not ideal, was better than the well-documented
blight of vandalized, crime-ridden, breakdown-plagued elevators afflicting most high-rise public housing projects.

No way was such a design going to be built, of course, and it wasn’t; the New York Housing Authority promptly turned it down. Something
close to the original design went up, and it was as if this brief East Harlem Spring had never happened. But it had, and Zucker wrote Phil Will with thanks. For this neighborhood “dominated by
tall, angular, monotonous and massive public housing projects, withdrawn and separated from the rest of the community by broad, untouched lawns, your fresh approach offers new hope.”

It was a noble experiment. And yet, from the narrow, necessary perspective of Jane’s grant deadline, it was a distraction. The meetings she’d attended on behalf of the alternative design, the documents, press releases, and correspondence she’d helped prepare, the presentations she made, all took time that didn’t go toward her book. All her working life, Jane had been an employee, subject to office discipline that, whatever its annoyances, helped shape and structure her workday; her children would recall how she kept reliably to a ten-to-six schedule. Right now, though, Jane was more the independent artist, freelancer, or entrepreneur—on her own clock, hers to decide how to use her time. And in late 1958 and early 1959, across at least three key early months of her Rockefeller grant, her
time and energy were drawn off by East Harlem. The DeWitt Clinton alternative brought her close to some of the themes of her book. But it was
not
the book. And though she didn’t mention it in her correspondence with Gilpatric, it contributed to her angst in the summer of 1959.

—

Jane had not one patron to whom she was accountable, but two: Gilpatric, and Jason Epstein, who had signed up her book when he was still at Doubleday, then brought her with him to Random House. In his correspondence with her, Epstein was less formal and more supportive than the man from the Rockefeller. In her first few letters to him, Jane signed herself Jane Jacobs, over a typewritten Mrs. Robert H. Jacobs Jr. But that soon gave way to just Jane; and then, “love, Jane.” The two of them would develop a personal and professional relationship spanning almost half a century, ending only with Jane’s death. They’d travel together, would be in and out of each other’s houses. “I just liked being with her,” Epstein would say. “
I never had a closer friend.” They talked about
everything—politics, books, ideas. But not much of personal things. And certainly nothing of, say, sports, which “would be like hanging out with Darwin and talking about football.” It was a friendship almost “frozen in time,” says Epstein, little changing with the years. And it was there from almost the beginning.

So in early summer of 1959, it was Epstein, more than Gilpatric, who got the clearest signals from Jane about how troubled she really was. He’d not heard from her, he wrote on June 22, “since your last
rather unhappy phone call.” A week later, she sent him the latest version of the book’s outline. Oh, just glance at it and throw it away, she suggested, “and
think no more about it until I have something to show you,” meaning actual manuscript—not
about
the book, but the book itself. Why this gesture at all? “Well, I have a vague idea you ought to have some notion of what I think I am doing anyway. Also I do get an overwhelming feeling, on occasion, of being a hermit and wishing to break through with some communication, however fragmentary, to the outer world.”

Epstein wrote back promptly, and in probably just the way Jane needed most. Yes, the outline was what she’d led him to expect. “
I have every confidence that you will turn out a book that we will both be proud of and I think I know exactly how black your moments of despair must at various times be. But it is out of such despair that great books are written.”

Jane’s understanding of her own book was still fluid and uncertain; just three weeks after submitting a fifteen-chapter outline to Epstein, she sent a
twenty-chapter outline to Gilpatric with a whole new Part II and unfamiliar chapter titles like “Incubation of Enterprises and Culture,” and “The Pitfalls of Too Much Success”; she was still foundering. In a letter to Gilpatric on July 17, she reported she was “now coming toward the end of Part I,” though she knew it needed rewriting. She’d written some fifty thousand words, but planned to winnow it down to thirty thousand, the difference a measure of how far she had to go with it.

Jane was originally supposed to be almost finished by now; she wasn’t even close, maybe a quarter the way through. She’d gone through much “trial, error, and bafflement,” she wrote Gilpatric, but now seemed to be “working myself clear of it. I have been learning by doing, I guess.” But now she needed money. In the same letter, she submitted a statement of expenses; assured Gilpatric that Epstein had told her not to worry, that she should just keep writing; and noted that Doug Haskell was okay about extending her leave. Still, her unease was palpable:

I am rather dismayed at requesting from you more money, after your initial and generous grant, and am chagrinned that I have consumed some of this money and time in trial and error that I should somehow have been bright enough to avoid, and yet was not able to avoid. I hope you will be able to give sympathetic consideration to my request, and both for this consideration and for all the help you have already given me, I am very deeply grateful.

Gilpatric apparently read into Jane’s letter that she was thinking of abandoning the project altogether. No,
under no circumstances, she wrote him back. But she might have to postpone it, go back to
Forum
for a year, save up money, take out a loan. She didn’t want to do that. “Without wishing to sound immodest about it,” she went on, “I feel very deeply that it [is] important for this book to get finished and published.” City rebuilding, which was taking place so fast, was “based on faulty thinking and misguided notions…We are copying failure.”