Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (47 page)

   CHAPTER 19   

SETTLING IN

A
MONG BELONGINGS
crowded into the VW bus the Jacobs family drove to Toronto were Jane’s typewriter and the manuscript of the book she’d worked on through much of the 1960s, no doubt
extracted from the freezer chest in their Hudson Street basement where she safeguarded it. On Spadina Road, a sheet of plywood, legs screwed into it, served for a desk. That, together with a file cabinet, and she was in business. It wasn’t more than a week on Spadina Road, figures Jim Jacobs, before she was at work on the remaining editorial chores for
The Economy of Cities.
Its acknowledgments page was dated August 1968, two months after their arrival. The book was published the following May.

—

“
I will [tell] the story as I go along of small cities no less than of great,” Jane quoted the fifth century BCE Greek historian Herodotus in the book’s epigraph. “Most of those which were great once are small today; and those which in my own lifetime have grown to greatness were small enough in the old days.” The rise and fall, death and life, of cities and economies—this is what she had been thinking about for much of her adult life. And in
The Economy of Cities
, she had answers: for one, cities prospered by creating new work out of old. Doing the same old thing didn’t cut it. Maybe you had a big, productive coal mine or sprawling steel mill to show off, but digging coal or churning out steel ingots year after year led nowhere but to stagnation and decline. Cities withered when they stopped generating new work—as she saw occurring, even then, in the car monoculture that was Detroit.

Like
Death and Life
, the new book had a way of insinuating itself into a reader’s mind with what she had to say—with what she
dared
say. For starters, as we saw earlier, she asserted that cities predated agriculture, not the other way around—that agriculture was the product of nascent cities that had grown up around earlier hunter-gatherer settlements; this was the idea she’d illustrated with her imagined early city, New Obsidian. Yet as arresting as that was, it was but prologue to her more abiding question: Why did one city or country blossom into ruddy growth while another stagnated?

Ideas ran all through
The Economy of Cities
—big ideas, little ideas, import replacement, and captive division of labor, diversification, and differentiation. But mostly, Jane illustrated them through story, anecdote, and example. Consider Los Angeles: in the years just after World War II, the city saw a loss of 150,000 jobs in aircraft manufacturing and 70,000 in shipbuilding, along with a steep decline in Hollywood filmmaking. Yet impossibly, it boasted a big increase in jobs overall, its economy exploding after the war. What could explain so counterintuitive a result? Los Angeles, Jane argued, was successfully replacing “imports,” by which she meant not just foreign imports from Mexico, say, but everything Los Angeles needed to bring in from outside. Angelinos were producing much more of these imports, then turning around and selling them to the world.

The new enterprises started in corners of old loft buildings, in Quonset huts and in backyard garages. But they multiplied swiftly…And many grew rapidly. They poured forth furnaces, sliding doors, mechanical saws, shoes, bathing suits, underwear, china, furniture, cameras, hand tools, hospital equipment, scientific instruments, engineering services and hundreds of other things. One-eighth of all the new businesses started in the United States during the latter half of the 1940s were started in Los Angeles.

Not all replaced imports, but many did. A young engineer formerly working in the materials lab at Douglas Aircraft started making sliding glass doors for local housebuilders. Succeeding locally, he was soon the largest manufacturer of them in the United States.

Jane memorably compared and contrasted the English cities of
Manchester and Birmingham. In the 1840s, as she told the story, Manchester, the great textiles city, seemed the city of the future. Friedrich Engels, who
lived there then, indicted it for the degradation of the men and women who worked in its ranks of smoke-belching factories; “Cottonopolis,” some called it, the world’s first truly industrialized city. Birmingham was nothing so dramatic. It made saddles and harnesses, shoe buckles, buttons, glass, and, later, guns, jewelry, and everything in between. Nothing on the scale of Manchester, nothing to imprint itself on the mind of the world the way Manchester did. But, Jane delivered the verdict, “Manchester was not the city of the future and Birmingham was.” Once others had learned to spin and weave cotton, Manchester was bound for decline. Multi-skilled Birmingham, on the other hand, crucible of trial and error, adapted and grew. “Its fragmented and inefficient little industries kept adding new work, and splitting off new organizations,” some of which, in time, grew large themselves.

Maidenform, the bra manufacturer, wasn’t always big, either.
Ida Rosenthal, a New York City dressmaker dissatisfied with how her dresses hung on her customers, designed an early brassiere (though not, as Jane suggests, the
first
brassiere), which she gave to customers with each new dress. We know how
that
worked out. Dressmaking, in Jane’s terminology, was “old work.” Brassieres were “new work.” Here was the true wellspring of economic health, one most often billowing up from the small in scale, particularly in the bustling precincts of big, diverse cities, where experts and entrepreneurs, the creative and the ambitious, were thrown together in unpredictable, mutually beneficial, ways.

And what of that icon of efficiency and economy, the
division of labor, exemplified in the famous pin factory described by Adam Smith in
The Wealth of Nations
? Well, Jane didn’t buy it. “
Division of labor, in itself, creates nothing.
It is only a way of organizing work that has already been created.” Besides, it was a fixture of stagnant economies, too,

where men and women spend their entire working lives at very specialized tasks: tapping rubber trees, or herding goats, or loading bananas, or twisting fibers, or dancing in temples, or mining salt, or crushing ore, or carrying baskets of dirt for public works, or cultivating corn and beans.

You can hear Jane’s revulsion groaning up from the page. Whatever it had in its favor, division of labor did not embody or explain economic health.

What did was Jane’s heroic mantra of “one sort of work leads to another,” which she developed and enriched through numerous examples: Sandpaper leads to masking tape, Scotch tape, and sound-recording magnetic tape. A hospital’s outpatient department grows into a new home care department. Police officers, building on their own “old work,” demand bribes from illegal enterprises, organizing to collect and dole out the take; criminal, certainly, but this, too, was new work. “
New goods and services, whether criminal or benign, do not come out of thin air. New work arises upon existing work.”

Everything in
The Economy of Cities
conjured up innovators, entrepreneurs, small-scale genius bursting forth, never settling into ruts, a bazaar of little companies forever taking skills, trades, and expertise they already possessed and putting them to new use. Here was vitality triumphant, embodied in new products and ideas. The enemy was stagnation, ineptitude, minds on automatic pilot, economic death.

Much in the book was provocative—and not alone Jane’s precept that, as Jason Epstein put it, economic life “does not begin in a garden but in a city,” as in Jane’s New Obsidian. Some months before publication, Epstein sent copies to outside experts, not for three-sentence blurbs but, with due prudence, to see what credentialed authorities had to say about some of Jane’s outlandish claims. One went to the Columbia University economist Robert Lekachman, who wrote back, “As always, Jane Jacobs is
a pleasure to read. The ideas are fresh and the opinions are firm. Now whether she has produced a whole new theory or not, I am less certain.” Some of it, he said, wasn’t really so new, having been “foreshadowed” by economists like Colin Clark and Joseph Schumpeter. What he thought “important and different” about the book was “the boldness of [her] claim that innovation, growth, and progress can come only from small, almost casual beginnings.”

The University of Chicago anthropologist Robert McCormick Adams was harsher. He applauded some of what he read in
The Economy of Cities
, and said he was glad Epstein was going to publish it. But he didn’t buy all her arguments. “I think
she both oversystematizes and overgeneralizes, under the mistaken impression that the very comprehensiveness of her attack is a point in its favor.” Academics, he worried, might not lash out at the book at all but simply ignore it, issuing only “bland disclaimers that anything in her work is relevant to
them.
” Then, turning to New Obsidian, he gave it four pages of detailed criticism, citing both the particulars of her arguments and the scant scholarly superstructure
underlying them. He concluded on a friendlier note, observing that “an argumentative—and stimulating—work provokes an argument. Jacobs is surely tough-minded…enough as an author not to let any of this seriously undermine her basic conception…You are surely knowledgeable and tough-minded enough as a publisher to know a good thing when you see it.”

Asked in 1970 which of her opinions she deemed most unconventional, Jane allowed that it was her cities-before-agriculture idea. “But I think it will have become conventional opinion 20 years from now.” It didn’t, and hasn’t. At a Boston College conference devoted to Jane’s ideas in 1987, Carroll Keeley briefly disposed of cities-first as still “an open issue,” suggesting that in any case it would “
permanently nuance one’s idea of the primacy of agriculture into a much more sophisticated” model. If we peek ahead we see that scholars continue to quarrel over it today. One defense of cities-first, by Peter J. Taylor, a British geographer, came out in the
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
in 2012. His attention to it, following that of others similarly sympathetic, infuriated a trio of American archaeologists led by Michael E. Smith of Arizona State University. Jacobs’s argument was all but nonsense, they wrote in a long refutation of it, “Jane Jacobs’ ‘Cities First’ Model and Archaeological Reality.” It appeared in 2014, in the same journal that had carried Taylor’s article. For them, there was an unbridgeably wide chronological gap, thousands of years, between the first agriculture and the first cities. They weren’t challenging Jacobs’s overall contribution, they said, just this one in particular: “
We cannot…envision any scenario in which we [would need to] debate the chronological priority of cities over agricultural origins.” Others, of course, would say it all comes down to just what you mean by “city.”

But all that, as inconclusive as it remains, came much later. When it was published in May 1969,
The Economy of Cities
often stirred reviewers to their rhetorical best, as if aping Jane herself. “
Bless Jane Jacobs,” a
Time
review led off. “Lively, lucid, blunt, original, she triumphs by being mostly wrong.”

For the
New York Times
reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing under the wholly apt headline “The Death and Life of Economies,” the new book was “astonishing…
It blows cobwebs from the mind, and challenges assumptions one hadn’t even realized one had made. It should prove of major importance.”

In
The Village Voice
, Michael Harrington, whose recent
The Other America
had done much to alert the country to its forgotten poor, described himself as “
provoked, stimulated, and charmed by her insights almost as much as I disagree with her basic theory and conclusions.” All told, the book was “bad economics and good values.”

In
The Hudson Review
, Roger Sale seemed as intrigued by how the book worked on him as by what it actually said: its impact was “mysterious, in a way that makes you want to look around, to reflect on what you know of elsewhere, to read the Yellow Pages and the U.S. Census and see it all different, as if for the first time…It’s like having a
whole new world to think about.” And then (as first quoted in the Introduction), he said one of the truer things to be said of her: “There are ways to disagree with Jane Jacobs, but not as many as you might think, because on her own terms she is almost invariably right and the real questions arise when you start to consider what she has left out.”

Pointing to some of what she’d left out was, again, Herbert Gans, who had seized on what he saw as the “physical fallacy” in
Death and Life.
“In her new book,” he began his
New Republic
review, “Mrs. Jacobs
continues the search for vitality, this time to discover what makes urban economies live or die.” Again she’d written “an exciting book…But once more, I find her analysis skewed.” Jane had largely ignored the role of big corporations, or simply written them off as exemplars of stagnation. Getting too much credit, on the other hand, was the innovative entrepreneur. “Sometimes the book reads like a tract on behalf of 19
^th
-century rugged individualism.”

As in
Death and Life
, wrote Gans, “Mrs. Jacobs places a higher value on vitality than on well-being. But…imagine a one-or-two-industry city producing ‘old work’ for which demand is stable and permanent, paying high wages and taxes.” Think tires in Akron, or country music in Nashville. That might make for scant vitality but much community well-being. Single-industry towns might lack the diversity and economic
oomph
of great cities, but at least while they prospered many residents managed to lead contented lives. And wasn’t a good life…a good life? Gans, who since he’d written of Boston’s West End had written a long, ambitious study of tract-house contentment in Levittown, New York, seemed to see around and within ranges of American life for which Jane had little sympathy. For Jane, boredom was bad, stagnation was bad, always and forever, both a kind of death.