Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (36 page)

Gans, recall, was the University of Chicago–educated sociologist, eleven years younger than Jane, who’d gone into Boston’s West End to record its final days. He had reached some conclusions similar to hers, especially that working-class neighborhoods that looked a little ragtag were not necessarily slums. Jane had quoted from his work, appreciatively so. Gans was sure her book would be influential, he wrote her, and got his editor to assign him twice the usual space to review it.

In notes Gans took while reading it, he got to the heart of
Death and Life:
“
What is lively is what is good…If it is alive, it is working.” Here was Jane’s bedrock belief. Vitality and diversity trumped everything else. Of course, Gans knew, not everyone felt that way. Other satisfactions counted, too—harmony, natural beauty, order, quiet family life, for just a
few—and these, Gans all but said, didn’t figure for much in Jane’s universe. “
No child of enterprise or spirit will willingly stay in such a boring place after he reaches the age of six,” Jane wrote of Garden City–style developments in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, New York, and Baltimore that she deemed wanting. There was no room in her city, it could seem, for those lacking the personal qualities she prized.

Just such blind spots, or narrowness of vision, were what most troubled Jane’s critics. “
She doesn’t accept the existence or desirability of other styles of urbanity as well as her own and, therefore, falls into the same pattern of single-minded thinking that she loves to condemn,” noted one review in the
Journal of the American Institute of Planners.

Another, in the same issue, pictured Jane as scarcely able to believe that “anyone would choose a life style different from the one she has chosen.
She imposes her tastes and values on the city more narrowly than any planner would dare to do.” Her views of parks, for example, were hopelessly narrow. Why didn’t she “risk a trip” in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, along the Wissahickon Creek valley, and meet “people of all ages getting away from watchful eyes in the city. She would see children exploring the trails above the creek or feeding the swans.”

Catherine Bauer Wurster, among those supporting Jane’s Rockefeller grant, called
Death and Life
“
a brilliant personal diatribe,” perceptive and illuminating “within her narrow range of concern.” But—and it was a big
but
—she “simply disregards the entire gamut of middle class values related to home and family life.”

Kevin Lynch, whom Jane had quoted admiringly in
Death and Life
, called hers “
a brilliant and distorted book,” one holding out for “a very restricted kind of urban environment.” And, he went on, it “assumes that buildings and streets have a very singular power to change people’s lives.”

This point would recur in objections to
Death and Life.
After a
Saturday Evening Post
excerpt from the book appeared in October 1961, the Boston planner Donald M. Graham suggested that Jane was forever “
mixing apples with battleships, confusing the social environment with the physical environment.” They were
two different things.
Ironically, Jane had made a similar point in
Death and Life:
“There is
no direct, simple relationship between good housing and good behavior.” Good shelter was good, period; you didn’t need to justify it on the grounds “that it will work social or family miracles”—a self-deception someone had called “salvation by bricks.”

But it was just such self-deception that Herb Gans saw in her book now, too.
Death and Life
was grounded, he wrote, in three assumptions: that people want diversity; that diversity makes cities live and the lack of it makes them die; and that buildings, streets, and the like shape human behavior. “The last assumption…might be called
the physical fallacy, and it leads [Jacobs] to ignore the social, cultural, and economic factors that contribute to vitality or dullness,” blinding her to the deeper roots of urban problems.

The vibrant street life of some neighborhoods “stems not so much from their physical character as from the working-class culture of their inhabitants.” Gans was speaking of Boston’s North End, and of Italian and Irish sections of Greenwich Village. In such districts, “the home is reserved for the family,” with much social life taking place outdoors. Also, children were less kept home, and less closely supervised in their play generally, than middle-class kids, and so naturally more apt to be out on the street. Throw in a few café-haunting artists and bohemians, pepper the mix with tourists, and you were on your way toward the “highly visible kind of vitality” Jane celebrated. But it grew out of how particular people lived, not population density and the other factors Jane highlighted. Then, too, wasn’t “vitality” itself really in the eye of the beholder? Some neighborhoods might
look
less vital to a visitor but be quite as vital to those who lived in them. Here, in any case, were some of “the sociological factors” Gans felt that Jane had missed.

A few days after Gans sent her a copy of the coming review, Jane wrote him a note decrying what she called its “
old-hat stereotypes…about ethnic behavior and city life,” insisting that she’d carefully weighed the points he claimed she’d ignored. She thanked him anyway, for granting so much attention to her book, but apparently still came away wounded; Gans would report that “
she broke off relations” with him for a time. After Jane died, Gans would suggest that as a middle-class resident of the largely working-class West Village, Jane romanticized it, coming away “blinded…to the economic insecurity and the resulting personal and social problems that some of her Hudson Street neighbors” experienced. An “innocent” from Scranton, Jane “missed the dark sides of life below the middle income.”

Ellen Lurie, the young social worker who’d studied George Washington Houses for Union Settlement, and from whose work Jane drew, didn’t miss them. Some of her project residents, she’d reported, had been
relocated from their homes in the old neighborhood, some moved from other projects. Still others were “volunteers,” who’d applied for a place there, like
Mr. and Mrs. McLean and their two small children. He worked as a presser in a clothing factory. They had friends on the floor with whom they visited, played poker, watched TV. For George Washington Houses, all in all, theirs ranked as a success story.

Then there were the Larkins, who’d lived in East Harlem all their lives, grown up with Negroes, Chinese, Jews, Germans, and Irish, but whose home at 101st Street and Third Avenue had been torn down four years before. They’d been moved temporarily to another project and now found themselves at Washington Houses, mostly with Puerto Ricans and blacks for neighbors. Their kids were constantly fighting. The project was no place for them.

Among blacks who had moved from a middle-income Harlem project, the Wilsons liked their old neighborhood better. The stores were more convenient, the people seemed more intelligent. Their new neighbors, black and Puerto Rican alike, struck them as somehow lower class. The Wilsons were itching to get out as soon as possible.

And Mrs. Acosta? Why, she loved George Washington Houses. Her husband played basketball at the local community center. They had lots of friends in the neighborhood. In Lurie’s words, she “wants to live here always.”

After reading
Death and Life
, accounts like these somehow
jar.
Not for the facts they represent, or for any arguments they might bolster or undermine. It’s just that you don’t find much close attention to real people in Jane’s book. One can admire how Jane draws important truths from Lurie’s study; the trains of logic are there, certainly. But, viewed through a less obliging lens, it isn’t hard to see the ordinary people of East Harlem as less interesting to her than the insights she extracts from their lives.

Just weeks before she submitted the final manuscript, Epstein had written to her with “
a question to put before your argument: Negroes. Nat, I know, has asked you to comment on ethnic groups in general and I hope you will, but I think it’s urgent that you include, perhaps in an appendix, the Negro question, since so much of your argument depends on a solution to it.” Epstein’s reasoning was plain enough: some of the most atrocious slums were those of African Americans who’d emigrated up from the Jim Crow South. Surely a book presuming to address the problems of cities needed to address the especially urgent problems of
black people in cities. Epstein appreciated that this would “take you outside your argument somewhat,” but still…

Jane wrote back after Christmas saying that from the time she’d started her project, she’d thought about the issue; but no, it was “
a poor idea for my book.” She had reasons for this, but couldn’t just then, in the throes of completing the manuscript, take time to explain. “In the meantime,” she added, “do not cherish a hope that I will change my mind because I am very convinced and firm about this.” He might, she suggested, want to talk to Ellen Lurie, who was thinking about writing a book about East Harlem.

The next day—he’d probably not yet received her letter—Epstein wrote Jane once more. He “
was more firmly convinced than ever that the Negro question must be one of the main obstacles to your proposals.” Certainly she needed to acknowledge it. “I don’t think that you can proceed as though the question didn’t exist.” A month later, Nat Glazer wrote her, mostly on another matter, but noting, “
Jason is very worried about the fact you don’t talk about Negroes. I am convinced the character and background of the social groups making up a city contribute as much to the things you are interested in as any physical factors”—there it was, again, the physical fallacy—“and consequently I feel Jason has a point.” But maybe by then Glazer had figured that he and Epstein had lost the battle, for he added, “On the other hand, you can’t do everything.”

In a chapter on “Unslumming and Slumming,” Jane wrote that “
the discrimination which operates most drastically today is, of course, discrimination against Negroes. But it is an injustice with which all our major slum populations have had to contend to some degree.” And that was about it, so far as Epstein’s Negro question was concerned. She was not about to be waylaid by what seemed to her a distraction from the book’s main line of argument. People occupying unique social and cultural niches—well, they were simply not her subject.

Here, then, was what much criticism of
Death and Life
came down to: that what Jane focused on was brilliant; but that she was sometimes
missing
something, her focus too narrow; that the very blinders needed to avoid distraction by the inconsequential or irrelevant left her blind to other truths. Jane, in short, didn’t see what she didn’t see. And what she didn’t see, at least not with the same urgency others did, was the troubling impact on cities of race, class, and ethnicity.

—

A persistent feature of the critical response to
Death and Life
was a peculiar doubleness—voluble praise and severe misgivings set close, side by side, and hard to tease apart, like those ghost images seen on old TV sets. Think not of blandly “mixed reviews,” good and bad blended into a gray soup. No, more typically you’d have a reviewer busily pointing out the book’s failings—yet who, as if he couldn’t quite help it, or as if he’d be dishonest with himself not to acknowledge it, felt moved to comment on its passion, insight, and intelligence. A generally negative review in
The Yale Law Journal
castigated
Death and Life
for all manner of sins, yet concluded that Jane had “
touched some sensitive chords and her point of view cannot be sloughed off.” A reviewer for the
Antioch Review
lamented Jane’s “
inept introspective scholarship,” yet admitted that the book “proves one thing: Mrs. Jacobs has within her the capacity to produce a very great book, a very important book”; for him,
Death and Life
wasn’t it—yet
Death and Life
itself had made him think so! A reviewer for the
Journal of the American Institute of Planners
observed that in Jane’s analysis of Philadelphia’s rejuvenated Rittenhouse Square she “
conveniently overlooks the massive dislocation of low-income Negroes by high-income whites.” Yet he anointed
Death and Life
as “a challenge to complacency and smugness,” to “every formula and slogan of city building.” Herbert Gans’s critiques embodied this doubleness, too. A
Commentary
reader marveled at his “
remarkable appraisal” of Jane’s book—in which, having asserted that her assumptions were wrong and broadly faulting them, he could still call the work a “path-breaking achievement.”

The world had reached no settled verdict on Jane’s book; it represented too sharp a break with the past. But unlike most books published in 1961, or any year, it was not going to be forgotten.

   CHAPTER 15   

WEST VILLAGE WARRIOR

I. STREET FIGHTER

In 1963, two years after publication of
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, Jane Kramer wrote about Jane Jacobs in
The Village Voice:

People who have seen her in action at the Board of Estimate or down on Broome Street rarely forget that clomping, sandaled stride and that straight gray hair flying every which way around a sharp, quizzical face. And she can magnetize a populace into action as well as any of her archetypes…She has turned her causes into hot-potato issues, and is lately the terror of every politico in town. She has mustered public support and sympathy to the extent that now even the mayor bends to a Jacobs decree or completely loses face.

If we didn’t know any better and recalled her only as a writer, Kramer’s account of Jane Jacobs as public figure might seem unrecognizable. But since 1955, Jane had drifted into new work for which she would become as well known as for her books. It wasn’t paying work. It was not of her choosing. But, despite herself, she had become a community activist. So significant were the string of battles in which she played a major hand, and so effective was she at leading them, that together they make for an alternative portrait of her, like a photo snapped from a surprising angle, that complements, or even competes with, that formed by her life as a writer.