Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (30 page)

Caught up in her ideas, alone with her typewriter, worried she hadn’t the resources to finish this book that had become her life, Jane could seem in the grip of a religious fervor, possessed of a new urban Truth it was her duty to confer on the world. “In my book,
I am not rehashing old material on cities and city planning. I am working with new concepts about the city and its behavior. Many of these concepts are quite radically opposed to those accepted in orthodox and conventional planning theory.” If the old ways persisted, ahead lay only “the social, economic and visual disintegration of the city.”

And no, her ideas weren’t the outpourings of an over-fertile imagination, she assured Gilpatric. She’d tried them on others. The times, intellectually speaking, were ripe for them. Most ideas of urban blight were “based on symptoms, not causes, with demonstrably foolish myths invoked to explain the symptoms…This is the kind of thing I am up to, and it is hard work, but I cannot think of anything I could do which might be more useful to my times.”

Her plea won Gilpatric over. He agreed to her request that she need not prematurely submit to him unfinished drafts, that she just continue in her own way. And he agreed to consider her request for more money.

Around July 29 he called Jane, told her as much, but asked for some names to corroborate her story. Jane came back with Whyte, Haskell, Bill Kirk, Eric Larrabee, the editor of
Horizon
, and a few others.

Haskell wrote Gilpatric, “I guess we’ll
have to give her what she needs in order to create a book that will be really incisive and probably quite wonderful,” though he suspected he’d probably disagree with much of it.

Whyte wrote that he believed Jane’s was
“a
great
and influential book” in the making.

On September 28, Gilpatric wrote Jane that they were giving her another $8,000. She had a second chance. Thank you, she wrote him back, she was doing better now.

I’m averaging a chapter a week, instead of the slow and discouraging chapter a month of the spring and summer, and doing better writing to boot. This is a satisfying feeling, and sometimes exciting. I look forward to the day, which now begins to seem in sight and to be real to me, when I’ll have a manuscript to show you. There’s still a lot of work to do, but it is a pleasure to be doing it. I just could hardly bear not to be doing it.

Although for a while, Gilpatric worried Jane might abandon her book, there was never a chance of that: Jane could
hardly bear not to be doing it.
Words and ideas, expressing them, shaping them—that’s what Jane Jacobs did, and had done, for most of her working life. And now she was favored by the most fortunate of circumstances, one every writer dreams of: she had the time and money to charge ahead with a big, fat book on what seemed to her the most important subject in the world. “She knows,” Holly Whyte wrote Gilpatric, “that this is
her big chance to hammer out what she has so long wanted to say.”

Later, some would call
Death and Life
the work of an amateur. Jane had never gone to architecture school, never studied planning, had no degrees. She had designed no buildings, planned no urban districts, conceivably never once wielded T square and triangle to scribe a straight line. She hadn’t come to professional maturity at the elbow of a Mies van der Rohe or a Louis Kahn. She hadn’t redrawn the streetscape of Philadelphia like Ed Bacon, or of New York like Robert Moses. In the 1950s she’d learned to read drawings from her architect husband;
that
, you could say, was the extent of her “studies.”

Of course, by the time Jane gave her Harvard talk in 1956 she
did
have credentials of a sort: She had lived in the middle of New York City for
a quarter century.
Iron Age
had sent her, while still in her twenties, to Philadelphia, Washington, and other cities. Her articles for
Amerika
on architecture and slum clearance had forced her to confront some of the same issues she would face in
Death and Life.
At
Forum
, she had visited city after city to file her long, detailed reports; she read drawings, visited construction sites, absorbed planning documents, interviewed architects and every sort of urban expert. All this had been her professional duty.

But the whole preceding paragraph, with its recital of Jane’s “credentials,” while true enough, supposes that her fitness for writing
Death and Life
rested on her experience of cities, period, and pays no heed to her abilities as a writer. And yet it was as writer that she identified herself all along, and always would. As she began
Death and Life
it was twenty-four years since she’d come to New York and written her first articles for
Vogue.
Since then, she’d done every sort of editorial work, work demanding clarity, accuracy, deep understanding, compositional finesse, and sometimes rhetorical flair. She was no Hemingway or Robert Frost; hers was a different sort of writing, nourished and constrained by the facts of the world, every word aligned with what she’d learned or knew to be true. Everybody understood, or thought they understood, what novelists and poets did. And everyone knew of professors ready to propound at a moment’s notice on their credentialed area of expertise. But Jane was like neither of these more familiar classes of men and women who put words to paper professionally. She was a writer, but of a different kind, one that scarcely had a name.

Certainly grammar and spelling—Jane was an almost preternaturally perfect speller—were the least of her skills. She could frame ideas and express them, as she wished, in fifty words or five thousand. With every writing problem, she looked three ways at once: Toward a body of knowledge and fact. Toward her reader and what he or she “needed” in order to keep turning the pages. And toward her own inner self and its expressive needs. Without a firm grip on the first, the subject matter, she’d be spouting nonsense. Without regard for the second, her reader, she could write sentences, paragraphs,
tomes
, that were perfectly accurate—and perfectly boring. Without the third, without mining her inner landscape for diamonds of meaning or feeling, she’d deny herself her whole reason for writing in the first place. Jane had learned (though not, as we’ll see, infallibly) to review her own work at every stage with hard, cold, critical eyes that spotted infelicities of expression and sloppiness of thought, and
go back and make them right; at one point she’d write Gilpatric about the “
good, cold-blooded mood” she looked forward to bringing to the final manuscript.

At
Forum
, she had stepped onto new intellectual terrain. But she had been doing that all her working life—moving from ignorance of a subject to confident insight, absorbing new bodies of fact, ideas, and contexts, commanding them so well she could write about them gracefully. She had delved into economics with Robert Hemphill; the legal and philosophical currents of the American constitutional system with
Constitutional Chaff;
high-temperature brazing and powder metallurgy at
Iron Age;
every sort of subject, cities among them, at
Amerika.
Unlike her Columbia professors, who staked out one or two corners of intellectual life, no single territory, no one
subject area
, was Jane’s own; architecture and planning were simply the latest in a long line. To take almost anything in the great universe of people, places, and ideas, scientific and human, current and historical, and make fresh, lively sense of it—
this
was Jane’s theater of expertise. She may not have conceived her art, or craft, or whatever it was, in quite these terms, but she would doubtless have recognized herself in them.

By January 1960, she seems to have hit her stride, her desperation of six months earlier now mostly gone. “I am
working away quite happily,” she wrote Epstein, “with intermittent bafflements and problems.” She was on the nineteenth of what she now supposed would work out to twenty-two chapters. Much rewriting lay ahead, and “this is still going to take time, but nothing is as bad as those blank sheets of paper.”

Four months later, Jane finally got to Gilpatric the first five chapters of
Death and Life.
He had some quibbles, he replied on May 19, but “
if the remainder of the book has this richness and vigor, it should have very important effects. More power to you.”

—

Jane didn’t normally write about herself. And yet, peppering
Death and Life
were tidbits of her life’s experience that, while supporting her ideas, were also apt to connect with readers. Read it and you learned, for example, that Jane had gone to the same West Eighty-sixth Street dentist for fifteen years; that a favorite art gallery stood near the fish market she patronized; that she’d once had a friend who thought babies were born through their mothers’ navels; that after her Harvard talk, where she
stressed the need for small neighborhood shops, she’d begun getting mail filled with plans for corner grocery stores—“
sweetly meant inanities,” she’d call them—as if that’s all she’d said at Harvard.
Death and Life
could be challenging. It dealt with ideas, sometimes formidable ones. But these glimpses of her personal life gave it a sometimes warming intimacy.

One particular first-person stretch of
Death and Life
would linger in readers’ memories,
attach
itself to them. It came near the beginning. Jane was talking about how busy sidewalks, crowded with people, enhanced safety and performed other functions by furnishing “eyes on the street.”

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. The order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simpleminded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers.

Jane sweeps up the wrappers. The hardware store opens. Longshoremen off for the day gather at the White Horse Tavern or the Ideal. “Character dancers come on, a strange old man with strings of old shoes over his shoulders, motor scooter riders with big beards and girl friends who bounce on the back of the scooters and wear their hair long in front of their faces as well as behind.” Across several pages, the day winds down. “The night workers stop now at the delicatessen to pick up salami and a container of milk.”

Then, finally, “the deep night ballet,” which Jane knew best “from
waking long after midnight to tend a baby and sitting in the dark, seeing the shadows and hearing the sounds of the sidewalk.” Finally, the sound of a bagpipe skirls in the February night, “and as if it were a signal the random, dwindled movements of the sidewalk took on direction,” a crowd developing around the music maker.

When she started on
Death and Life
in 1958, she’d write years later, “
I expected merely to describe the civilizing and enjoyable services that good city street life casually provides—and to deplore planning fads and architectural fashions” that undermined it. That wound up as Part I of her book, “The Peculiar Nature of Cities.” Following an introductory first chapter and representing about a third of the book, it ranged across five chapters:

2.  The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety

3.  The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact

4.  The Uses of Sidewalks: Assimilating Children

5.  The Uses of Neighborhood Parks

6.  The Uses of City Neighborhoods

The uses of this, the uses of that, first one subject, then the next. Three chapters on
sidewalks
? Just what sort of book was really winding through Jane’s typewriter? In one letter to Gilpatric, she’d said it was aimed at “the general interested citizen,” not the specialist. But what might such a creature, this good citizen, want or expect from it? In what sense, if any, was Jane writing a “popular” book? It was not some heartfelt memoir. It did not boast scenes studded with brisk, slangy dialogue. There were no gang wars. No glittering soirees. No erotic couplings in fifth-floor tenements, city lights sparkling through the windows. But if it didn’t have elements like these going for it, what
did
it have?

What it had going for it, in the first place, were good guys and, especially, bad guys. Among the intellectual villains were Ebenezer Howard of the Garden City movement; and Daniel Burnham of City Beautiful, which grew out of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago; and especially that towering evil genius of modernity, Le Corbusier, and his Radiant City. Jane lumped their ideas together, emphasizing their kindred elements rather than their differences—Radiant Garden City Beautiful—as the product of thinkers who couldn’t think about a city without imposing neatness, order, and sterility.

There were villains-of-place, too—streets, neighborhoods, and districts that Jane saw as failures. For example, Benjamin Franklin Parkway, in Philadelphia, with its lineup of grand cultural monuments—“impressive” but bland, all but dead on arrival. Or Chatham Village, a Pittsburgh neighborhood, which she wrote off as hopelessly homogenous, lacking anything like a healthy public life; or the Elm Hill Avenue section of Roxbury, in Boston, which suffered from the Great Blight of Dullness, Jane’s most damning epithet.