Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (34 page)

Christmas at the Jacobs house had its own rhythms. Christmas cookies meant not just the cookies themselves but the family ritual of producing them in the hundreds, the kitchen littered with trays of them, shapes stamped out with cookie cutters, in countless sizes, styles, and recipes; as Jane herself would say, “We would go crazy.” And, of course, there was
the annual ham to prepare. Each year, Jane would buy a new datebook to record doctors’ appointments, social events, and the like, one small enough to stick in her own Christmas stocking. And first thing each year she’d open it to the back and enter, as almost ritual incantation, the same words: December 22: soak ham…December 23: boil ham…December 24: bake ham.

Come vacations they’d pile into the car, if you want to call it that. It was one of those evolutionary dead ends in the history of the automobile that, like evolutionary dead ends in the natural world, was more interesting than most. It was called a Multipla, made by Fiat, a miniature van introduced in 1956, smaller than a VW Beetle, that looked about the same coming or going, powered by a tiny, four-cylinder engine that took most of a minute to get the car up to highway speed; they bought it new in 1958. “A delightful lemon,” Jim calls the car. In family lore, its fuel pump was forever going on the fritz, which meant frequent, seemingly endless waits in service stations. When that happened, or just on long drives out to Shelter Island, on the eastern tip of Long Island, the children needing to be entertained, Jane would make up stories. One of her characters was an industrious little boy named Peanut, so tiny he could fit into a hat, who was always getting into scrapes. Jane could spin out these stories—maybe kid photographer Peanut sliding down the weasel hole, or Peanut escaping from the evil carnival barker—as long as it took to fix that damned fuel pump, or traverse those endless tracts of Long Island, or until the children fell asleep.

   CHAPTER 14   

THE PHYSICAL FALLACY

B
Y THE TIME
her book came out, Jane Butzner Jacobs of Scranton, Pennsylvania, had lived in New York for twenty-seven years, virtually all of it in Greenwich Village. Her jobs had typically taken her up to Midtown. Her familiarity with East Harlem was of recent vintage. Of vast tracts of Brooklyn and the Bronx and the other outer boroughs, she was ignorant. Yet with publication of
Death and Life
, all her insights and impressions of New York, about how it worked and what it meant, her opinions and prejudices, would stand beside all those who’d ever tried to say something fresh about the city: E. B. White’s love letter to the city,
Here Is New York
, in 1948. Alfred Kazin’s Jewish Brownsville, in
A Walker in the City
, from the late 1940s. Joseph Mitchell’s cast of outlandish neighborhood characters in
The
New Yorker.
Novels, essays, poetry: “
How funny you are today New York / like Ginger Rogers in
Swingtime
/ and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left.” Dark or bright, gritty or grand, the Manhattan skyline inimitable, the poorer quarters seen with affection, horror, or shame. The city squeezed into a character or elevated to a symbol, each a way to see New York. And now Jane’s own strong feelings for the city, long sublimated in her magazine articles, or surfacing only in table talk with friends, were to join the great conversation. With publication of her book, she would step from an almost entirely private life onto a larger public stage, to be seen, appraised, and judged.

—

January 1961. Jane was cutting it pretty close. She had all of a week before she was supposed to return to her job at
Architectural Forum.
“
I want to get as much as I can done on clearing up points, rearranging some chapters, cutting excess adjectives, sentences & paragraphs,” she wrote Epstein’s assistant Nathan Glazer on the 24th, in the same letter in which she looked ahead to her martinis. She appreciated his upbeat response to an earlier submission, she said, “because I have a very hard time knowing how it is coming off, & vary from exhilaration to despair and dejection.”

Soon after she’d finished it, she showed the manuscript to Elias Wilentz, longtime proprietor of that Beat nexus, the Eighth Street Bookshop. “It is
truly a great, important and impressive book,” Wilentz wrote Epstein. It would sell well, he predicted, and not just to planners and architects; there was something
big
about it. “It should hit the same audience that bought Paul Goodman’s
Growing Up Absurd
,” a surprise best seller about young people lost in a repressive society. Jane’s book would draw a broader audience yet, Wilentz was saying, “if it is promoted not as a technical work but as an exciting revelation of city life and what makes it tick.”

Naturally, Chadbourne Gilpatric got an early copy, too, but his response, in a letter to Jane in March, was more measured than she might have liked. He judged it “
thoughtful and thought-provoking, vividly and constructively concrete…powerful in its effect, and most timely.”
But.
But the chapter on parks “could be deleted entirely without much loss.” So could the one on traffic and cars. All told, the book’s 669 mimeographed pages could be reduced “by almost half.” That could hardly have cheered poor Jane, who’d sweated and strained over every one of them. Even his closing comment—that Jane had “many reasons to feel pleased with this contribution”—seems lukewarm and too careful.

As a publishing venture, however, Jason Epstein was pleased as could be. By early June he could report that
magazines were lining up to run excerpts from it:
The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, Architectural Forum, The Reporter
, and
Mademoiselle.
Here was the kind of kickoff every publisher dreamed of. In mid-September,
prepublication copies went out to Murray Kempton, Max Lerner, J. Kenneth Galbraith, Oscar Lewis, Dwight Macdonald, Edmund Wilson, and Gore Vidal, all intellectual and cultural heavyweights of their day. Also getting an advance copy was Holly Whyte, who, in a fevered scrawl of a handwritten letter, wrote Jane in October, “
Jane—TERRIFIC!
You did it
and I can’t wait to hear the [??] and
yells and churlish comments of the fraternity. I’m only part way through it but I can see that it’s going to be one of the most remarkable books
ever
written about the city and probably the best in this century.” In parentheses, he added, “And it’s fun to read!”

But all this, gratifying as most of it must have been, came from Jane’s own tribe, from a narrow, sympathetic inner circle. For the past three years, it had been just her, with Bob and the kids, and Jason, and Nat Glazer, and, near the end, a few others who’d gotten their hands on the manuscript, all friends of jane. But after a launch party in October and the book’s formal publication, and then across the next year—during which, as we’ll see, she was caught up in tumultuous fights on behalf of the West Village and against the Lower Manhattan Expressway—Jane and her book were at last rocketed into the big world.

—

“
Hers is a huge, a fascinating, a dogmatically controversial book,” wrote Orville Prescott in the
The New York Times
, “and I am convinced, an important one.” He thought it was overlong, “but much of it snaps like a flag in the fresh wind of her new ideas and challenging statements.” That was November 3.

Two days later, the
New York Herald Tribune
weighed in: “
It is a considerable achievement to have written a book that will irresistibly overturn the preconceptions of generations of city-planners, as Mrs. Jacobs’s book will surely do.”

On the 10th, Jane was featured in
Time
magazine,
Death and Life
described as
a passionate, well-documented book that was already shaking up the planners. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the writer conjured up his own
Time
-inflected Jacobsean city, down to “the shriek of children scooting in the streets, the clamor of crowded living; the neighborhood butcher’s, where the housewife can leave her door key…and the strangely silent Sunday morning sweet with the smell of freshly washed streets.”

In
Commonweal
on December 22, Edward T. Chase led off his review, “How seldom one comes upon a new book of
unmistakably seminal importance like this one…This is a dangerous book. Dangerous to vested interests: to all our city planners, to almost all our architects.”

Declared
The Wall Street Journal
, “In another age, the author’s
enormous intellectual temerity would have ensured her destruction as a witch.”

Those who loved the book reached for superlatives. Edwin Weeks, editor of
The Atlantic Monthly
, wrote to Jane on January 29, 1962: “Reading it is like opening
a window of January air in a room laid heavy with academic discussion…It is the best package of fresh, vigorous thinking that I have come across in a long, long time.”

Almost overnight, Jane was
a hot ticket. Everyone wanted her to write for them. Something on the new architecture in Midtown Manhattan?
Partisan Review
queried her. No, she replied. She got a telegram from
The New York Times Book Review
wondering whether she’d do a seven-hundred-word review of
The Intellectual vs. the City:
CAN SEND GALLEYS NOW FINISHED BOOK WILL FOLLOW PLEASE REPLY SOONEST
. She replied that same day: No, she couldn’t do it. “Now that you have foiled the bulldozer invasion of the Village,” John Fischer wrote her from
Harper’s
, referring to a civic battle she’d led, “do you have the time and inclination for some writing? If so, I have a couple of ideas I would like to discuss with you.” On December 27, William F. Buckley, the young editor of
National Review
, wrote her, attaching the favorable review of Jane’s book it would soon carry, and wondering whether she’d do a piece on Lincoln Center for him. Sorry, she couldn’t; by now she was back at
Forum
, she explained, and “all my writing on cities or on architecture is committed to my own magazine.” Mostly, then, she was saying no. But surely it was nice being asked. The whole world of New York publishing had suddenly opened up to her—suddenly, that is, after twenty-seven years in New York.

Early February found her at the Museum of Modern Art for a panel called “The
Laws of the Asphalt Jungle,” a reference to the novel and noir movie of a few years before. Jane faced two of her longtime antagonists, Edmund Bacon from Philadelphia and Boston’s chief planner, Ed Logue, who was “as cautiously caustic as Bacon is cheery,” in the words of Jane’s former colleague at
Forum
, Walter McQuade, who covered the event for
The Nation.
“Mrs. Jacobs is understandably a little tired of making speeches,” McQuade noted; she declined the rostrum, preferring to sit at a table by the side. But when it was her turn, he wrote, Jane “butchered both professional planners.” She dismissed a vaunted Bacon project as “dull and droopy.” She called Logue’s claim that no bulldozers were aimed at the North End simply false. As McQuade reported, she “soon had the audience laughing sardonically.”

But Bacon and Logue came back at her. What, exactly, was Mrs. Jacobs
for
? Bacon wanted to know, earning “a wave of nervous clapping” in the
auditorium. Logue castigated Jane for wrongly picturing his redevelopment proposal as an assault on the North End. Not so, he said; the proposal actually took in a much wider swath of Boston. Then he turned personal. The evening before, he’d ventured into the West Village himself and found it not at all the urban paradise Jane had portrayed. He saw few “eyes on the street,” most stores closed by 8 p.m., paper littering the street, buildings ugly and unkempt. If you wanted a model for the next urban America, this wasn’t it.

But she’d not picked the Village as a model, or as anything exceptional at all, Jane shot back, but rather “because it was a good average area of no outstanding quality” that happened to embody her values of diversity and urbanity. That it was
not
a model was just the point.

Valid riposte or not, notable now was that a few months after publication of
Death and Life
, Jane was not just firing arrows but was the target of them. Her “ballet of Hudson Street” was on its way to becoming a classic, yes—but now she could be fairly labeled, as she in fact was by one reviewer, “
the enchanted ballerina of Hudson Street, with a chip on her shoulder.” Thrust into the larger world, she would have to live with the attention, misunderstanding, and hostility public figures face. Some critics made fun of her for loving Greenwich Village too much. Some leveled heavy, thoughtful intellectual artillery at her. Some took easy potshots. Some twisted her ideas out of shape. Some faulted her for being too dramatic or categorical. Some allowed that in
Death and Life
she’d made something fine and good, only to fault her for not making it finer and better.

Early in 1962, Jane was on the road,
visiting Pittsburgh, Miami, and Milwaukee, touring neighborhoods, giving interviews, batting out
bons mots
, recounting experiences she’d had with the host city while researching her book—and sometimes, as in Pittsburgh, getting into trouble with the hometown faithful.

In late January, press releases announced Jane’s forthcoming arrival in Pittsburgh for a week of lectures and tours beginning in mid-February. She was to speak at luncheons, talk to students, sign copies of her book. “An invigorating week was anticipated,” community organizer James V. Cunningham wrote after it was over: “fresh ideas, stimulating discussion, bracing debate, constructive controversy, a shot-in-the-arm for the [city’s] renaissance effort.” Arriving at the airport “buoyed [and] confident,” Jane “was whisked off on a tour of the city.” To a medical center, to
rehabbed row houses on the South Side, housing projects in the northern section of the city, neighborhood renewal projects in the East End.