Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (55 page)

Jane at her ease, age eighty-one, in a photo taken for an article in
The Globe and Mail,
headed, “Jacobs Embraced as Economic Guru”
Credit 26

This, of course, wouldn’t have troubled Jane one bit.

A few years after winning the Nobel, Robert Lucas came out with a volume of essays devoted to economic growth. In one of them he made much of a 1961 novel, set in Trinidad,
A House for Mr. Biswas
, terming it V. S. Naipaul’s “
great novel of economic development.”

Mr. Biswas is the grandson of indentured servants come to Trinidad from India. His ambition as a child is nothing more than to become a cattle herder. But by novel’s end he’s managed to carve out—painfully, insecurely, tentatively—a middle-class existence for himself and his family in Trinidad’s capital city, Port-of-Spain. “His talents are modest,” writes Lucas, “but his unwillingness to accept the limits of each current
situation as permanent, to make the best of it, turns out to be his strength.” Crucially, Mr. Biswas lives in a place and time that offers him options, where

a man with a little literacy could move from rural to small town to Port-of-Spain jobs, jobs where he could interact with people who could teach him a little more. Somehow Biswas survives, marries, supports a family after a fashion, and succeeds in passing on to some of his children this sense of living in a world with possibilities.

Reading
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
, I was struck by similarities between Higgins, North Carolina, and a small island of my acquaintance off the west coast of Ireland, the Great Blasket. The book I wrote before this one,
On an Irish Island
, told the story of this island and the tiny, Gaelic-speaking community inhabiting it. The island lived off fishing and a few fields of potatoes and oats. For several hundred years it changed little. But beginning before World War I, its reputation as a haven for the Irish language, and as a culturally vibrant community, rich with speech and song, began to draw linguists and writers from London, Dublin, Oslo, Paris. These urban intellectuals instilled in the islanders a sense of their own cultural worth and encouraged them to record their stories, which emerged in a group of books known as “the Blasket Library.”

Around the same time, however, the island, never home to more than about two hundred, began losing its young people. Increasingly, they left for the mainland or, more often, for America, where they settled in Massachusetts. The islanders heard regularly from their brothers and sisters of the economic opportunities in America; the island offered them none, nothing but the rude, constrained existence they and their forebears had lived for centuries. The coming of commercial fishing trawlers to their traditional fishing grounds only made things worse. “
We have determined at last to leave this lovely Island,” one native islander wrote in 1942. Visitors “would never believe the misfortune on this Island no school nor comfort, no road to success…everything so dear and so far away.” By 1953, the last islander was gone and the tiny village of stone houses on the slope of hill facing the mainland was on its way to ruin.

The Great Blasket was cut off by a narrow, navigationally tricky strait from the mainland, by three hundred miles from Dublin, and by three
thousand miles from America. Higgins, North Carolina, was cut off by mountains, bad roads, and poverty even from nearby Asheville, much less larger cities. Both inhabited astonishingly beautiful natural settings. Both had their interesting folkways, their unique charms. But in the end, both were places that people left, wanted to leave, or had to leave.

From the ruins of the Great Blasket one might pause a moment and, as I wrote in my earlier book, contemplate pleasures the villagers enjoyed and that modern lives—too fevered, insubstantial, or inauthentic—deny us. But if clear-eyed Jane told the Blasket story, I suspect, she’d lay quite different emphasis—on the island’s want of opportunity, on how it failed so cruelly to offer “a world with possibilities.”

   CHAPTER 23   

WEBS OF TRUST

I. JANE AND COMPANY

It might be natural to imagine Jane as wholly independent, a woman all her own, off in her study by herself, reading, thinking, and writing. And yet, she was no recluse. She had plenty of friends. People were always in and out of the house—which, for all Mary Malfara’s efforts to keep it tidy, was never overbearingly immaculate. Family meant a great deal to her. She was not oblivious to what people thought of her. She’d achieved much, in New York and Toronto, working with and through others. Intellectually, she was similarly stitched in. The notes and acknowledgments in her books are thick with names. She could be reached, she could be influenced, in person and in print. She was a social animal. Sipping a cocktail, sharing her thoughts, enjoying the attention of her friends, she could be very happy.

Alan Littlewood, the architect whom Jane befriended in the 1970s and who played so key a role in the St. Lawrence project, tells of parties at Albany Avenue in the 1980s and 1990s: arrive at seven, Gibson’s gin and onion martinis soon flowing, son Jim the bartender. The drinkware was what Littlewood, who was partial to crystal, calls “odds and ends,” nothing elegant, maybe picked up at Honest Ed’s, the local discount emporium; “she took pride in being unaffected.” There’d be cheese and pâté, small talk over drinks, Jane sometimes reminiscing about New York. “Then Jane would disappear to finish off dinner,” which Littlewood recalls as (too) often pork.

By the time everyone sat down to eat, it might be 8:30 or 9, an air of expectancy in the room: “People would be waiting for Jane to start.” Who would draw her into conversation? Or else,
“What is Jane going to say next?”
Some provocative question might get her going, or some story. And then she’d be off. “You can’t deny being in the presence of a great personality,” Littlewood says today, shaking his head. “You can’t deny your own awe.”

She could talk about anything, and did. Only religion seemed to stymie her or leave her cold. “Jane was visibly agitated by references to the Bible…I never found a way to talk about it” with her. “I never found a way to penetrate her defenses.” Any other subject, though, was fair game. She’d never retreat. About all you might exact from her was the admission that, yes, she might “need to consider that point of view.” Jane could seem egoless—but never, says Littlewood, when it came to debate. “She certainly had an ego, a pride, when it came to her point.”

For a time in the late 1980s, Lucia Jacobs, daughter of Bob’s cousin John Jacobs and his wife, Katia, lived with Jane and Bob. Doing a postdoc at the University of Toronto, she shared the top floor with Burgin, who was in from British Columbia just then, helping brother Jim with the high-tech battery business he was starting up. For Jane, says Lucia, argument was “pure blood sport”; the culture of the family revolved around it. The idea was “to come up with something original and then argue for it.” One time she and Jane got into a dandy fight over, of all things, the word “sibling,” which Jane viewed as hopeless jargon. “That word should be expunged from the dictionary,” Jane said; you’re better off using “brother” and “sister.” For five hours, in Lucia’s recollection, it went on like that. “It was a great fight. We both wanted to get to the bottom of it. It was fun.”

It wasn’t always fun, but it was always spirited. Jane was “a no-holds-barred fighter.” She never made anything up, yet “she never had to do any research,” it seemed to Lucia. “She just knew things.” She’d introduce some line of argument saying, “In ancient China…” and you’d be confident that’s how it was in ancient China. Jane’s friend from across the street, Toshiko Adilman, reports that Jane knew all about hockey pads and how they were made. “She had knowledge of obscure things.”

Jane, by then in her seventies, didn’t talk much about sex, recalls Lucia, but Uncle Bob did. He relished the occasional risqué joke, seemed to enjoy indulging his appetites generally. Once, she remembers, he sat
down to a quiche larded up with maybe a half pound of butter, devoured it, then pleaded for more. It was Bob who’d made the Jacobs house the original and memorable place it was, stocked with his design flourishes; “Jane didn’t have a bone of that.” They were a perfect match, devoted to one another. Women, it seemed to Lucia, sometimes need a brother more than the more clichéd father figure. “And that’s exactly what Jane and Bob had” in each other. Sometimes Lucia would catch them in the morning, making each other roar with laughter.

None of this is to say that Jane and Bob, or Jane and anyone else, for that matter, were evenly matched in those kitchen-table debates. “No one else in that family,” observes Lucia, “had intuitions [like hers, even as] they had no shortage of opinions.” The brutal truth was that the others were “pale imitations of Jane.” She was the “hearthfire” of their extraordinary family, “the only genius.” Still groping for the apt metaphor, Lucia describes the household as “a beehive, with Jane the queen bee.” In some ways, it made life tough for the rest of the family. “It was like living with Zeus.”

Ultimately, says Lucia, “I needed oxygen.” She was embarked on a conventional academic trajectory — today she is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley—and Jane “was a little dismissive of the path I was taking:
If you had any guts you wouldn’t need that
,” meaning colleagues, conferences, campus ivy. Plus, the family had its kitchen-table-centered ways to which Lucia, working long hours at the lab, couldn’t entirely adapt. “I wanted to come home at 11 p.m. and eat peanut butter sandwiches.” When she announced she was moving out, Jane put on “a very brave face:
‘Oh. Of course. Too bad.’
” But Lucia’s antennae told her Jane was hurt.

Jane
hurt
? Whether she was or not, they’d probably never have talked about it. Feelings were not something Jane was inclined to discuss or explore, weren’t part of the otherwise vast, all-encompassing universe of discourse she made her own. And her own social antennae were not finely attuned. Alan Littlewood tells how, at a public event, two architects trying to represent Jane’s ideas got them all wrong. “That’s not me at all,” she rose to challenge them. “That’s silly.” And they just couldn’t go on. They were crestfallen; they just slunk away. Afterward, Jane turned to Littlewood. “Do you think I hurt those people?” she asked.

“Yes, Jane,” he replied, “you did.”

She hadn’t meant to. She felt bad about it. In this way, she seemed to
him “like a little girl.” Sometimes, she just “blundered into things.” She was
not
the stage actor adept at picking up on cues, knowing when to keep silent, when to move on. “Jane didn’t pick up. She was so interested in the subject matter,” whatever it was, “that she suppressed her natural instincts to be kinder.”

Jane’s friendships don’t seem to have included much trading of intimate or introspective revelations; hers was not the “sharing” style of a later generation. “I never heard her reflecting upon herself,” says Lucia Jacobs. Jane wasn’t apt to stew over the past, friend Toshiko reports, nor to air old grievances. When another friend, having just read William Styron’s
Darkness Visible
, his memoir about depression, opened up to Jane about her own frequent depressive episodes, she came away disappointed, even a little hurt: Jane just didn’t seem to understand.

The realm of the personal and the intimate? “None of that ever appeared in any of the Jacobses,” says Littlewood. “She never talked about herself in a personal way. It was never individual.” Always, with family and friends, it was about ideas, about the great world of making, doing, and thinking. With the planner Ken Greenberg, she would argue about the merits of this Toronto project or that. Anne Collins, Jane’s editor at Random House Canada from about 1998 on, remembers her “huge, catholic tastes in books and ideas,” remembers talking with her about medical research, the author Jared Diamond, not much about children. “If you got engaged with Jane she wanted to know what you were thinking.” And invariably, you’d come away from conversations with her feeling “way more interesting than you were before.” Just to talk with her somehow reflected well on you.

Design in white: Jane reviewing design entries for the Toronto Main Streets Competition in 1990
Credit 27

Jane’s friend Alan Broadbent tells how, after a visit to China, he brought back some photos he thought might interest her. “You want to see these pictures?” he asked. They were from Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi
province. Yes, of course she did. But oh,
how
she looked at them! The photos showed a Muslim area of low buildings, narrow laneways, streets filled with hand- and animal-drawn carts, street markets; the barber shop was a man on a stool, out in the open, with a pair of scissors. “She was hugely interested.” She peered at each one—or was it
into
each one?—way longer than you’d expect. The moment stuck with him. Nobody focused the way Jane did.