Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (35 page)

And what did Pittsburgh get for its hospitality? Well, reported Cunningham, “many a sniff and snort.” Middle-income apartments known as Spring Hill Gardens, the product of an earnest effort to integrate an all-white neighborhood, were, said Jane, “disorganized, as bad as can be, a highly suburban box development.” The Northview Heights public housing project was “bleak, miserable, and mean.” Another neighborhood plan she’d seen was “homogenized, dull, unimaginative,” certain to do nothing for the community but lead it downhill.

These opinions did not unfailingly please her hosts. “The lady is unenlightened,” a Spring Hill Gardens resident was quoted as saying. “Why didn’t she come inside and see our attractive homes?” A local citizens’ renewal council came away “stunned, confused, and angry” at Jane’s charges. In an open letter to her in
The Pittsburgh Press
, the city housing administrator gave Jane a little of her own medicine. “You must have heard of the old adage that a half-truth is similar to a half-brick, because it can be hurled further.” Well, Jane’s book—he called it “a novel”—proved the point. Mrs. Jacobs called Northview Heights bleak? Well, of course—they hadn’t even landscaped it yet! She should return once they were finished, when pretty walks would “lead from home to home through lovely resident-maintained lawns and gardens, under shady trees, to pleasant playlots and community recreation rooms.” Besides, compared to “the crowded, narrow, dangerous, dirty, rodent- and bar-infested streets in Downtown New York—and the Greenwich Village area in particular, which you call more ideal—Northview Heights, to many thoughtful citizens, would seem a veritable paradise.” Jane didn’t
get
the social costs of disease, poverty, and crime—and never would “by star-gazing from the second floor window of a Greenwich Village flat.”

The lectures she gave that week in Pittsburgh didn’t earn huzzahs, either. After one, “The Citizen in Urban Renewal: Participation or Manipulation,” the lobby bubbled over with disgruntled listeners. Sure, as Mrs. Jacobs said, you shouldn’t allow yourself to be manipulated by the city or anyone else. But that was a little thin. People wanted specifics. And two ex-Chicagoans were there to point out that the packinghouse neighborhoods in Chicago that Jane extolled were known to exclude black people.

At lunch the next day, Jane backtracked, said she’d been misquoted about one neighborhood she’d brushed off. Maybe, she was asked, the
neighborhood should hire an independent planning consultant? No, she replied, there wasn’t a decent planner in the whole country. They all got “the same bad training.”

Well, said a Pittsburgh urban renewal leader once Jane was back in New York, local bookstores having sold out of her book, “it wasn’t a clean fight, but she made ’em mad and she made ’em think.”

In time, a new round of reviews of
Death and Life
began coming out, not from newspapers now but from professional journals, including those of planners and architects. Some were buoyant: “
I am filled with delighted admiration for her skill and courage,” wrote Eugene Raskin, professor of architecture at Columbia University. “The appearance of her book should be the occasion for the only urban function she fails to mention—dancing in the streets.” Some reviews, though, were downright wicked in a way I suspect Jane, were she not their target, might have appreciated. A reviewer for
American City
made Jane’s enthusiasm for Boston’s North End sound silly: “Here, apparently, is the full flowering of the American Way of Life,” where European tourists could come to learn about American democracy. “Let [Soviet premier Nikita]
Khrushchev see the North End and he would immediately stop that nonsense that communism will bury us.” He also mocked a scene in
Death and Life
where a child falls through a glass storefront, severing an artery, but is rescued by concerned Villagers. For Jane, this was “eyes-on-the-street” in action. For the reviewer it was about that “mysterious, unidentified stranger [who] emerges from the circle of peering eyes” to save the child, then disappear.

“
What a dear, sweet character she isn’t,” Roger Starr once said of Jane. When
Death and Life
came out, this outspoken future New York City housing commissioner and editorial writer for
The New York Times
, whose views placed him squarely in the Robert Moses camp, reviewed it for a planning newsletter. He began with his own boyhood memories of an early Hollywood star named Grace Moore. Her films, as Starr remembered them, were set in idealized cities “noted for the quaintness and charm of their older buildings and for the absence of dirt, poverty, noxious fumes, and political or racial turmoil.” He’d long forgotten this
Mooritania, as he called it, until he read
Death and Life.
“Jane Jacobs, I discovered, lives there. In her part of Mooritania, people dance instead of sing…but she describes her folksy urban place on Hudson Street (Manhattan) with such spirit and womanly verve that she has made a considerable
number of readers believe it really exists.” How, in Jane’s vision, he asked more seriously, could we “find our way back” to Mooritania? “We must forswear any serious interest in sunlight, clear air, quiet streets, open space, and give obeisance to the good fairies by bending the knee to no other gods before diversity, noise, and crowding.”

Jane was getting beaten up. But fair is fair: her book’s vivid colors made it memorable, but also easy to lampoon.

—

Just as Jane was finishing the book, in December 1960, Jason Epstein had written her that Lewis Mumford’s
The City in History
was in galleys; “your book and his, when they are both published, will approach each other
like two Japanese wrestlers.” Mumford won the first round; his book beat out
Death and Life
, also nominated, for the National Book Award. That, however, wasn’t the end of their bout.

Since hearing Jane at Harvard, Mumford had been one of her most influential admirers, helping to get her taken seriously by those who mattered, including the Rockefeller Foundation. But five years later, toward the end of 1961, when he finally read the book he’d helped into the world, he was livid. She had called his
The Culture of Cities
“
a morbid and biased catalog of [urban] ills. The great city was Megalopolis, Tyrannopolis, Nekropolis, a monstrosity, a tyranny, a living death. It must go.” Mumford, said Jane, was so far gone as to see well-off people who chose to live in high-density urban enclaves as inhabiting slums, but “too insensitive to know it or resent it.” The very afternoon he finished reading
Death and Life
, Mumford began composing a rebuttal. But then months passed, nothing yet appearing in print. “
I held my fire…for a whole year,” he wrote a friend, “but when I got down to write I discovered that the paper burned.” He felt, wrote Donald L. Miller, Mumford’s biographer, that Jane “had gone at him with hate in her heart.”

Finally, Mumford let loose. He’d hoped to take three long articles to mount his attack, but his editors at
The New Yorker
prevailed on him to limit it to one and tone it down a bit.
Tone it down?
“
Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies for Urban Cancer” began on page 148 of the December 1, 1962, issue, amid Christmas-season ads for panettone and gin, went on for page after page, columns of text flanked by ads all through the fullness of the magazine, for eight thousand words; read it out loud and you’d be at it for an hour.

Mumford started out reasonably enough. He offered some history, told of Jane’s emergence at Harvard, gave her her due. Then he reached the book itself: “From a mind so big with fresh insights and pertinent ideas, one naturally expected a book of equally large dimensions.” And yes, Jane Jacobs, that “shrewd critic of dehumanized housing and faulty design,” was still there. But joining her now was “a more dubious character who has patched together out of the bits and pieces of her personal observation nothing less than a universal theory” of big cities. Much of it rested on “faulty data, inadequate evidence, and startling miscomprehensions of views contrary to hers.”

Lewis Mumford, at first Jane’s enthusiastic champion, later her vituperative critic
Credit 19

She sentimentally overvalued Greenwich Village. She overlooked the endless square miles of nearly identical houses spread across New York’s outer boroughs that lacked the diversity she valued in the Village. How to credit her ideas when they were contradicted at every turn? A single walk through Harlem ought to have been enough to correct her pet notions, since most of her urban ideals were fulfilled there. The same went for eighteenth-century London, which likewise satisfied them yet was a “nest of violence and delinquency.”

Mumford, who wore his city roots proudly—“
like a chestful of combat ribbons,” writes his biographer—was infuriated that Jacobs dared try to wrest from him the more-urban-than-thou mantle. “I speak as a
born and bred New Yorker,” Mumford wrote. He’d lived in all sorts of neighborhoods and all sorts of housing, which he proceeded to list, right there in the review, down to a “two-room flat over a lunchroom” in Brooklyn Heights, “with the odor of stale fat filtering through the windows.” No, he hadn’t much liked that, though the area had laundries, florists, and groceries enough to qualify for the Jacobsean urban pantheon.

For most of the decade before 1936, Mumford had lived in an out-of-the-way corner of New York City known as
Sunnyside Gardens, in Queens. This was a community of starkly simple two- and three-story row houses, set off from the surrounding street grid, reached by greenery-lined walkways, making for a superblock all its own. While different in detail, it couldn’t help but remind you, even down to its name, of all the suburban garden apartment developments that would come later—leafy, graceless, and squat. At the time, though, it made for an ambitious experiment, a piece of Garden City
in the spirit of Ebenezer Howard just a subway ride from Manhattan. It was Jane’s portrayal of the Garden City movement—crude, distorted, and almost comical, in Mumford’s view—that was one reason her book incensed him so. Now, in
The New Yorker
, he noted his time in Sunnyside Gardens. It was “
not utopia,” he allowed, “but better than any existing New York neighborhood, even Mrs. Jacobs’ backwater in Greenwich Village.”

In her distaste for planned communities like Sunnyside, it seemed to him, Jane abhorred any wisp of order. No wonder she opposed those gifted pioneer planners, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, who bestowed on Sunnyside its harmonious homogeneity. In holding up diversity and dynamism as supreme good her thinking was sadly myopic.

Her simple formula does not suggest that her eyes have ever been hurt by ugliness, sordor, confusion, or her ears offended by the roar of trucks smashing through a once quiet residential neighborhood, or her nose assaulted by the chronic odors of ill-ventilated, unsunned housing.

Jane Jacobs simply couldn’t see the ecological disaster the modern city had become. And that was “something worse than oversight,” Mumford declared; “it is willful blindness.”

When his review appeared, an acquaintance at
The New Yorker
reassured Jane, “Your book seems to have
driven Mumford into schizophrenia—Father Mum’s Sweet and Sour Pickles. I haven’t checked his critique with your book but my impression is that I’m on your side more than his.” How did Jane herself feel when she saw Mumford’s piece? Years later, any wounds having had a chance to scar over, she told one interviewer, “
I laughed at a lot of it. I have a fairly thick skin.” Jane knew her book “would make people angry, perhaps especially Mumford,”
says Jim Jacobs. “I remember her saying so, with regret, before it was published. She certainly didn’t want to offend, but…she was realistic enough to expect tirades.”

“Mumford was
quite a sexist,” Jane would tell another interviewer. “He talked about my ‘schoolgirl silliness,’ and I was in my 40s!” Two decades her senior, Mumford did bear the baggage of his generation. But dip into the writings of the two of them and they are not, always and automatically, far apart. Neither had much use for Robert Moses, for example. Both realized how much cars harmed city life. And after all, wasn’t it what Mumford had heard straight from Jane herself at Harvard, and later at the New School, that had first won him to her side? “
When two people are so close together in their thinking, and so eager for influence,” observes Mumford’s biographer, they’re apt to “magnify their differences to the point of outright caricature.” They were alike in another way, too. They had both come up as writers first. Both brought to their language a distinct rhetorical stamp. Both threw verbal brickbats, and aimed well.

Among Jane’s intellectual antagonists, Herb Gans was different. He was a perfectly capable writer but a sociologist by trade, people and community his concern, and his review in
Commentary
in February 1962 raised a whole other range of objections to Jane’s book. “
I’m not sure whether you’ll like the review,” he wrote Jane on January 19, with an advance copy of it, “I’d be surprised if you did—but I hope you will think it a fair one, which I have tried to make it. I agree with many of your observations, but not with your explanations—because you have not considered the sociological factors.”