Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (43 page)

The car, in itself, then, was not the problem. However, “
we went awry,” Jane wrote, by replacing each horse “with half a dozen or so mechanized
vehicles, instead of using each mechanized vehicle to replace half a dozen or so horses.”
Too many
cars was the problem, cars with every provision made for them, cars taking up space, crowding out everything else. Cars
eroded
cities; this was the word Jane used, with its intimations of a good thing worn away: a street widened here, roaring one-way traffic there, parking lots, more and bigger parking lots, a bridge double-decked. And finally, as Jane wrote, “an expressway is cut through yonder, and finally whole webs of expressways.” So that in the end there was nothing left
but
highways, cars, and parking lots, once-bustling city centers worn down into nothing, reduced to “a great, thin smear.”

But in the 1960s, Manhattan remained the exception to all this.

A trio of early-twentieth-century suspension bridges linked Manhattan Island to Brooklyn. Several more modest spans across the Harlem River tied it to the Bronx and beyond. Two tunnels had, since about the time Jane moved to New York, connected it, beneath the Hudson, to New Jersey, supplanting a network of ferries. The George Washington Bridge, opened in 1931, at the northern end of the borough, made for a third trans-Hudson link. Traffic circulated up and down Manhattan’s spine along west- and east-side highways.

But, and here was the difference, little of this network actually penetrated Manhattan’s interior. That is, cars coming in through the bridges and tunnels didn’t feed into expressways but rather perfused into the city’s dense capillary street grid, leaving its twenty-three square miles, in a sense,
pristine
, the city’s fine-textured tissue relatively intact.

Since the war and on into the 1960s, car ownership had climbed in New York, as elsewhere in America. But once your car or truck got onto Manhattan Island—bound for New Jersey, say, or for a delivery in Lower Manhattan—it all but stopped, its speed through streets clogged with people, buses, cabs, trucks, and carts dropping to single digits. For Robert Moses, Jane’s antagonist intellectually, socially, politically, and every other way, the
Lower Manhattan Expressway would cure all that. It
needed
to be built, if movement and commerce in the great metropolis were to be preserved. All this was obvious to Moses; so much was so obvious to Robert Moses.

The expressway, which would run mostly along Broome Street, skirting Greenwich Village to the north and Little Italy to the south, had a long history in Moses’s plans for leaving the nineteenth-century city behind. Over the past thirty years, he had built the Belt Parkway around
the perimeter of Brooklyn, pushed the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Cross-Bronx Expressway through once-intact neighborhoods of those outer boroughs, linked the city to Long Island through the Long Island Expressway, Manhattan to Brooklyn through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. But several cross-Manhattan expressways bruited about since as early as the 1920s, including the Lower Manhattan Expressway, had so far come to nothing.

At various times, the new expressway was imagined to pass behind the buildings fronting Broome Street, or at various heights above it, as a skyway. In some schemes it was tied to housing, or maybe a school, in some even dropped beneath the street, there to be slipped in, around, and through the existing tangle of subway tracks, pipes, conduits, steam lines, and water mains. In its details, the design was forever changing. But by the time Jane got involved, it was established that LOMEX, as it was sometimes called, would be a Y-forking, eight-lane thoroughfare channeling traffic from the East River bridges across Lower Manhattan to the Holland Tunnel and New Jersey. Established, too, was that it would take with it the homes of two thousand people and ten thousand jobs—and these were the estimates of its proponents.

In October 1961, a local real estate man, Stephen Freidus, wrote the owners of buildings along the expressway’s right-of-way. Demolition and relocation being inevitable, he advised them, they’d need to “
consider [their] present space requirements.” If, as he expected, they planned to relocate soon, he’d be glad to help. Call him at the office, he urged them, or call him at home: “[I] prefer to offer my services on a 168-hour per week basis.” Mr. Freidus, it seems, was a high-energy fellow, if maybe too much so for his own good. He wrote Jane’s old nemesis, New York Department of City Planning head James Felt, of his plans, adding, “Please do not regard me as being too forward.” That was just how Felt regarded him: “
The methods that you have used distress me and do not reflect creditably upon you.” But the expressway was inevitable, anyway, Freidus might have replied.

Certainly it seemed inevitable when, in 1962, Jane was dragged into the fight against it. For the moment, she was still at
Forum.
Her book was out. She had helped hold off the urban renewal octopus in the West Village; locally, she was famous for it. “Now,” she remembers, “
I could get along only with my job and with my domestic duties and interests as a wife and mother. My, wasn’t life calming down?” And then—this
was probably early spring—Father La Mountain showed up at her door. Could she help?

Father Gerard La Mountain was the young pastor of the Church of the Most Holy Crucifix, which served a poor parish at the edge of Little Italy. The church itself, with its ornate, brick-fronted exterior tucked in between residential and commercial neighbors, fronted on Broome Street, directly in the crosshairs of the expressway. Father La Mountain faced the loss of his home, his church, and his parishioners, who by now had mostly surrendered to lethargy and fatalism. Parts of the neighborhood had already been condemned, including the church itself. People like Stephen Freidus were busy trying to make a buck out of the situation. It was a classic case of a neighborhood’s vitality sapped long before the first wrecking ball crashes down on some antique treasure of a building.

Could Jane help?

Her first reaction was no, she couldn’t.

Oh, she
wanted
to help. The expressway would be every bit the disaster Father La Mountain said it would be—for the church, for his parishioners, for Broome Street, for all of Lower Manhattan. It would all but destroy Little Italy. Its ramps and interchanges would slice through the west and east sides alike. The Village, too, was threatened; Broome Street was just seven blocks south of Washington Square. Still, “
I felt very resistant to getting into another fight. I wanted to work on my work,” the city economics book. The expressway was
not
her work.

But she relented. “Oh well,” she’d tell an interviewer years later. “Couldn’t be helped.” In the earliest stages of the expressway fight, she was uninvolved, Father La Mountain being the key figure. Likewise at the tail end, by which time she’d left New York. But during the
vital middle period, from about 1962 to 1968, Jane was in the thick of it.

Was the Lower Manhattan Expressway by now just more of the same for Jane Jacobs, like an orthopedic surgeon’s 117th hip replacement operation? After all, as she’d say later, Father La Mountain approached her hoping that “some of these seasoned fighters” from the West Village wars could help him. And he was right—Jane
was
by now a seasoned street fighter, a pro, with established methods, worked-out ideas. In a sense LOMEX would be second nature to her; there’d be hearings to attend, strategies to devise, supporters to mobilize, media to cultivate, morale to keep up. And, it seems, songs to write: “Listen, Robert Moses” spoke out against Moses’s bulldozers and highways. Its author was Bob
Dylan, living in the Village since early 1961 and still largely unknown, his first album not yet released.

Jane and the joint committee, of which she was co-chair, faced opposition from Moses, but also from much of the city’s political and planning establishment. James Felt liked to call the neighborhood broken up by the expressway Hell’s Hundred Acres—“
making us sound,” recalled Jane, “as if we believed in fire traps and dilapidation.”

Jane and other local residents showed up for one hearing in gas masks; how better to represent the soot, dirt, and filthy exhaust that would accompany the expressway?

At a rally, she got a chance to tell the popular local television reporter Gabe Pressman, “The expressway would
Los Angelize New York.”
That
got attention around New York City.

She approached Lewis Mumford for help. His coruscating recent review of her book in
The New Yorker
was being used to discredit her and, by association, the anti-expressway cause. She got him on the line and, before he could object, briskly said,
“This isn’t about
The New Yorker.
” The expressway was more important than wounded pride, his or hers. Would he write a letter of opposition that could be read at an upcoming hearing? Yes, certainly, Mumford replied. He did. It was good. It helped.

On December 12, 1962, the city’s board of estimate unanimously rejected the latest plan for the expressway. Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s announcement touched off “an outburst of cheering, hugging and kissing.” It was “the best Christmas present the people could have gotten,” said the local politico Louis DeSalvio, Jane’s co-chair. On a newspaper account of the victory that she sent her mother in Virginia, Jane scribbled, “We won! Isn’t it marvelous!” The expressway had been defeated.

—

Of course, it had not been defeated; what they’d won was breathing room. The backers of the expressway would regroup. Like so many civic battles in which Jane participated, the great, sapping struggle went on and on, across the years. It wore you down, twisted up your life, made you angry; it made
Jane
angry—which she was a lot during the mid- and late 1960s.

In July 1965, asked for permission to include her
Fortune
article in an urban renewal reader, Jane scrawled at the bottom of the original letter that no, she wouldn’t allow it. “Indeed,
the idea dismays me greatly. To
include
that
piece, in
this
context, quite falsifies my position and ideas concerning urban renewal. Please leave me out of the book.” In the end, she seems to have let
Fortune
say no for her, no doubt more temperately.

A little earlier, Jane served on a Washington, D.C.,
panel devoted to “the city and the freeway.” Speaking just ahead of her was Harold Gray, who had worked in highway transportation, his capsule biography said, “throughout his adult life,” since 1934 with the National Highway Users Conference. Gray saw in the new interstates a transportation ideal of safe, nonstop driving, unimpeded by red lights and congestion, pulling traffic off local streets, giving jobs to construction workers, paid for by those they benefited, through vehicle and fuel taxes. “In America,” said Gray, “every mother’s son aspires to own, operate and tinker with his own automobile. Motor vehicles typify the American way of life.”

“I’m going to be very ungracious,” said Jane when it was her turn. “I’m very angry. I couldn’t disagree more with the things I just heard Mr. Gray say.” Just one cliché after another. It was untrue that highway users paid the whole cost of highways. Who paid for the medical care of people mangled in accidents? And for the courts? And policemen ministering to traffic when they ought to have more important things to worry about? And air pollution? Gasoline taxes didn’t pay for any of that.

Look at the Lower Manhattan Expressway: “In New York, where I live, there’s one highway that we’re fighting that is going to wipe out 10,000 jobs…about 6000 of which are held by Negroes and Puerto Ricans who have a hard time finding jobs.” Highways benefited cities? What about Newark, which had plenty of highways, but which could hardly be said to benefit from them? As for Gray’s notion that economic development depended on “more and more automobiles—all this is a terrible, terrible idea…a colonial idea”; she likened it to sad one-crop countries that fed the mother country coffee, oil, or peanuts but enjoyed no lasting benefit. “There’s no faster way of becoming a backward city or a backward country than that.” No, she’d say, using language reminiscent of
The Economy of Cities
(still far from finished), “you have to keep developing; you have to keep adding new things,” not cling to a single crop or product, certainly not to automobiles.

The long struggle to protect the Village against sidewalk snippers, urban renewalists, and expressway builders had left Jane exquisitely sensitive, run through by a streak of dark, toxic anger. Used to be, she said now in Washington, you could debate pedestrians, cars, mass transit,
whatever, you could talk “about ideas, philosophy, honest differences of opinion.” No longer. Highway advocates, said Jane, “are not doing it honestly any more. There’s a great deal of skullduggery; I think this highway program is probably the most corrupting thing we’ve had since Prohibition.” Later, looking to the many New York civic groups that backed LOMEX, Jane would assert that some of them—she cited by name the venerable Municipal Art Society—had grown “corrupted and decayed.”

—

After the tentative victory of 1962, the LOMEX fight did settle down for a while. But in time, the expressway found new champions in the New York State Department of Transportation and Governor Nelson Rockefeller. It faced new opponents, too, including artists and historic preservationists.

Ranging along Broome Street and the area around it stood block after block of five- and six-story buildings, many going back to the mid-nineteenth century, their fancy façades made not from the usual brick, concrete, or stone but cast iron. For years they’d housed factories, their thick wooden floors bearing the weight of
sewing machines, printing presses, and lathes. Built before electric lighting, they had broad banks of tall arched windows to admit light to otherwise dim interiors, high ceilings to accommodate tangles of steam-powered overhead drive belts.

“
Lofts,” they were called in New York. And now, with the decline of manufacturing in the city and their abandonment by industry, a new breed of New Yorkers took an interest in them. Artists and sculptors were drawn to their wide unobstructed bays, abundant natural light, and high ceilings with room for large canvases and sculpture. Ideal as studios, some artists took to
living
in them, too. This was illegal; zoning codes didn’t look kindly on people living in factories. But the artists did it anyway, and by the mid-1960s, championed by the sculptor Harry Jackson, a spirited depicter of cowboys, Pony Express riders, and other Old West icons, whose studio occupied one of the Broome Street lofts and whom Jane befriended, they made for a vocal new enemy of the expressway.