Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (51 page)

Sound familiar? Altogether, a more modest, maybe more
Canadian
, version of George Washington Houses in East Harlem, built around the same time, in the same spirit—and a failure in the same degree. Just twenty years after it went up, Regent Park was on its way to becoming what some would call “the largest Anglo-Saxon slum in North America.” Ryan James, an anthropologist raised there, would observe at a Toronto urban history conference years later that it was perfectly possible to
live a decent life in Regent Park. Certainly it was no Pruitt-Igoe. Still, in the early 1970s, Crombie and his housing head, Michael Dennis, wanted nothing like it for their new project.

The plan was to house ten thousand people on fifty-six acres of underused industrial wasteland east of downtown and north of the railroad tracks paralleling the lakefront. But best to think of
St. Lawrence, as it was named, as no “development” at all but as a skein of new cityscape knitted into the old, seamlessly worked into the existing street grid; in John Sewell’s words, it was “the new community downtown that felt like it has always been there.” Its central spine, Crombie Park, is lined by seven- to ten-story apartment buildings, their ground floors occupied by restaurants, grocery stores, hairdressers, schools. Behind them sit rows of traditional three-story townhouses. Mixed in are a few old buildings, vestiges of the area’s earlier industrial past. Well-off people live there, and not-so-well-off, in co-ops, condos, and private townhouses. New development has arisen spontaneously along its invisible edges. Thirty-five years after it went up, the local paper,
The Globe and Mail
, returned for an affectionate look back, taking the opportunity to pronounce St. Lawrence “
the best example of a mixed-income, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly, sensitively-scaled, densely-populated community ever built in the province.” Altogether, the sort of neighborhood a Jane Jacobs could like.

Christopher Klemek, a scholar of Jacobs and her work, calls St. Lawrence “
a district-scale experiment inspired by Jane Jacobs’ urbanistic principles—and influenced by Jacobs’ presence as a Toronto citizen.” Yet
Jane herself did not bring it into being. She didn’t put together the reform council whose energy ignited it. She was not herself a planner. She had designed none of the buildings. She had apparently not even attended most of the civic meetings leading up to its approval by the city. Yet in Klemek’s assessment, and as a walk through the neighborhood attests, her stamp lies upon it.

Jane lived in this house on Albany Avenue, in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood, from 1970 to her death.
Credit 25

Across Albany Avenue from Jane in 1973 lived Michael Dennis, Crombie’s housing adviser, who sought an architect for St. Lawrence. Dennis went to Jane, who suggested a young man named Alan Littlewood. Did he know anything about planning? Dennis asked her. “I certainly hope not!” Jane famously replied. Littlewood got the job, which soon morphed into that of St. Lawrence’s de facto chief planner.

An Irish architect in his thirties, Littlewood had recently worked for Eb Zeidler, where he was teamed with Bob Jacobs on a hospital project in Detroit. (Zeidler had a branch office and apartment in the old Ford Hotel building there. The two of them roomed together; Littlewood did most of the cooking, he recalls, Bob most of the smoking, offering up “perverse arguments about why smoking was not bad for you.”) Bound
for the airport in a cab, Littlewood would pick up Bob on Albany Avenue, where Jane, on the porch, invariably saw him off with a zestful goodbye hug. But one time, as the cab pulled up, Bob wasn’t there, so Littlewood rang the doorbell. “Jane answered and embraced me, saying how nice it was to meet me at last.” She was so demonstrative! Soon the Jacobses and Littlewood and his wife were friends, getting together frequently for dinner. And that might have been that, a cozy friendship kept up over the years…except that big things were brewing in Toronto.

Early in his new job with St. Lawrence, Littlewood found himself trying to navigate his way through competing visions of what, as a “facilitator,” much concerned with process, he was actually to do.
Typical bureaucrat
, Jane upbraided him one evening over dinner at the Littlewood place. Why didn’t he, he remembers Jane telling him, “get off my ass and get on with making a plan.” Another thing: he needed to stop calling St. Lawrence a “project,” she said, or rather “yelled,” as Littlewood recalls it; it was a neighborhood. “What you call a thing,” he absorbed the lesson, “determines how you think about it.” He went to bed that night “mentally exhausted.”

The next day, he stayed home from work, went back to his copy of
Death and Life.
“Like a recalcitrant sinner,” he recalls, “I knew exactly what to do. I didn’t even have to open the book,” but sat down and disgorged onto paper the site planning principles that ought to govern St. Lawrence. Homes would have normal street addresses. Public streets would run right through the community, which would thoroughly intermix housing types. Shops, schools, parks, and community facilities would be part of the mix, as would varied incomes, different developers, a royal mix of everything. He presented his proposal to Dennis, who “grilled me for an hour, as a lawyer might a hostile witness…during which I unashamedly cited Jane to bolster my [her] position.” He got Dennis’s support. St. Lawrence was on its way to making Toronto a better city.

—

Jane helped change Toronto in small ways and large and plainly relished the chance to do so. She “liked the accessibility to power,” says David Crombie. As in New York, it wasn’t just drudgery for her. “She was just as happy hatching plots against powerful people” as thinking and writing. “She really
enjoyed the activist part. The strategy, the being on the streets.”

Still, it would be hopeless to insist that it hadn’t deflected her from her writing. On December 15, 1974, Jane talked on the phone with Jason Epstein about her book. She was so badly stuck, she wrote him later that day,

I realize I have been inflicting myself with the straitjacket magazine editors used to inflict on me when I had to write captions of so many lines, so many characters per line—and all because I have been arbitrarily thinking in chapters that over-compress some things and over-inflate others, the genesis of that being an original outline which was not really suitable and which I have been measly adapting instead of overturning.

In any case, she hoped to deliver the promised book the following year. She didn’t.

A year and a half later, Jane wrote brother John and his wife,

I write a little way, and then I rewrite and rewrite, then write a little way and rewrite and rewrite, achieving a snail’s pace with a quantity of paper that would do credit to an elephant, if elephants ate paper. Anyhow, in this inefficient way I am making progress (I guess).

Love from all,

Jane

   CHAPTER 21   

FLUMMOXED

F
AMILY AND FRIENDS
saw the trouble Jane was having but were, of course, powerless to help her. In July 1976, Jane’s nephew Decker came to stay with Jane and Bob while doing his residency at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, remaining until June 1978. Later, in the early 1980s, he stayed with them again. During both periods he got to see close-up Jane’s problems with the book. “She was so flummoxed and frustrated.”

All the while, of course, she had Jason Epstein to account to. For how long could he be so patient? In August 1976, Jane wrote to him, “
When you ask about my book, you must feel somewhat as if you are making inquiries about an idiot child. I sometimes feel that way about it myself.” She’d not written to him recently, she explained, first, because she didn’t have much manuscript to show him, and second, because she came away from each day’s work “too damn tired, and when tomorrow comes I get drawn into the book again as if it were some irresistible magnet.”

This was not a pretty picture.

“
I always hit some point when I am really discouraged,” Jane would tell an interviewer later. A point where she’d realize, “I would never have gotten into this if I knew what I was getting into. And I am tempted, really seriously…to put all my research and all my awful writing I can’t bear to read myself at this stage into a big green garbage bag and put it out and be done with it.”

Jim Jacobs would recall his mother’s “huge impatience” with her slow progress. What made it worse was that, since
Death and Life
, she’d come to define herself as a writer of books almost exclusively—yet now seemed
unable to write one. “I’ve forgotten how to write,” she’d say on a bad day. “I’m remembering how to write,” she’d say on a good one. She had her tricks. “You’ve done this before,” she’d tell herself. Jim recalls her trying to all but sweet-talk her way into writerly optimism. Or, she’d dismiss herself as “silly for having this despairing pathology.” But for too long now, all the tricks and sweet talk weren’t working. Her frustrations gnawed at her. “One of her other remedies,” admits Jim, “was getting into bed and pulling the covers over her head. She did that, too.”

At one point a little later, Riley Henderson, niece Jane Butzner’s husband, noticed that the ivy growing up the back wall of the house on Albany Avenue obstructed Jane’s window, blocking the light. Too little natural light, he’d heard, could play on the emotions, and he suggested they cut back the ivy. Jane went along with the suggestion, reporting back that yes, well, it did seem to have some effect.

Early in 1977, Jane sent Epstein about fifty pages. “
I feel strongly that you’re off to a good start this time,” Epstein wrote back. “The material is full of good, strong ideas and the only real problem is your tendency to state your conclusion before you demonstrate it concretely.” He followed up with four pages of suggestions and pointed questions: “Why is Palermo impotent and what happened to make it so?”

“You should begin with the example of Uruguay rather than with the generalization about supply regions.”

“What are Bardou’s people doing after 1870?” he asked in reference to a French town whose tribulations Jane had described.

“Why is Soviet productivity low?”

“It would be good to know more about Ethiopia. How and why did it collapse economically?”

In the end, Jane’s book was finished. She would dedicate it to Epstein, “who has waited so long for it with good humor and good counsel.” It was a 232-page book perhaps better appreciated as 500 or 600
paragraphs
, each long and intricate, densely argued, richly textured, thick with fact—and a struggle to get it right. It took her more than a dozen years, a period shot through with her adjustment to Canada, the distractions she faced from her unaccustomed perch close to power in Toronto, the growing-up of her children, their travels and adventures, and the death of her mother in 1981. Much of that time, she was mired in an intellectual and emotional swamp, muddled as to just what she wanted to say or how she wanted to say it.

Which, in varying degree, in fact, is how she was with all her books.

—

Depending on how you count,
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
was Jane’s third, fourth, or fifth book. It was her third major work conceived afresh. But it was her fourth, if you included her compilation,
Constitutional Chaff
, from back in 1940. Or her fifth, if you included a short book,
The Question of Separatism
, that grew out of lectures Jane delivered in 1979 and was published the following year. After the separatism book, and then
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
, Jane wrote a deeply serious book titled
Systems of Survival
, which took the form of conversations among friends; in it she developed the idea of two distinct moral systems working in tandem to keep civilization civilized. Next, Jane took her great-aunt Hannah’s manuscript from a half century before, about her adventures in Alaska, and brought it back to life, with reworked text and added commentary, as
A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska.
In
The Nature of Economies
, she returned to the dialogue form to explore nature as a source of principles for economic development. In
Dark Age Ahead
, published two years before her death, Jane warned of some of the malignant directions in which modern society was headed. Along the way, she also wrote a slip of a children’s book,
The Girl on the Hat
, a collection of stories adapted from ones she’d told her own children years earlier.

None of these books left the lasting mark or enjoyed the commercial success of
Death and Life
, with which, inevitably, they’d be compared and in whose shadow they stood. But mostly, they sold well enough, got respectful attention, earned good reviews, are still in print, and sometimes won literary prizes.
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Dark Age Ahead
proved a best seller in Canada. Just as some Jane Austen fans champion
Emma
, say, or
Mansfield Park
, over
Pride and Prejudice
, each of Jane Jacobs’s books had its adherents. “
There is a fight to be had,” reports Mary Rowe, a friend of Jane’s from later in her life, over “which of her volumes is the most important.” One of Rowe’s colleagues picked “
Dark Age Ahead
, hands down.” Rowe’s own favorite was
Systems of Survival.
Each book had its own history, its own role in Jane’s intellectual development. And as she came to be recognized for books that weren’t pop sociology, weren’t academic treatises, weren’t in every way “literary,” but were, indisputably, like no one else’s, she was sometimes asked to reflect on just how she made them and how, more broadly, she worked.