Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (56 page)

To be the object of that focus could seem the highest compliment. In 1978, Jane met Roberta Brandes Gratz, then a reporter for the
New York Post
, who’d received a grant to pursue her first book, which became
The Living City
, a collection of urban success stories. At the time, Gratz’s editor was Jason Epstein. “You have to go up to Toronto and meet Jane,” he told her. Jane invited her to stay at the house. “She was so welcoming, so warm. She put me at ease” right away. Gratz remembers the big jigsaw puzzle spread across the table; how when it was time for coffee, Jane spilled out some raw beans and pan-roasted them, then ground them, right on the spot. She was there two or three days that first time. But Jane made sure the visit didn’t crowd out her own work. Daytimes, Gratz was sent out into Toronto, exploring. In the evenings, “we sat at her dining room table and just talked.” She was getting an education, and knew it. “I was in awe at the attention she was giving me.”

In coming years, Jane and Roberta Gratz, then in her late thirties, became friends. They realized they already had a connection; Roberta’s husband had a metal-fabricating business in New York that used to buy materials from Frasse, one of Jane’s earliest employers. They both had kids, but seldom spoke of them. Rather, they talked about Roberta’s work. She was finding the transition from newspapers to books difficult. Jane sat her down, worked with her through drafts of the troubled manuscript.

At one session, in 1978, Jane began by affirming an element of Roberta’s writing strategy: “I think it’s
brilliant
to start with the South Bronx.” But then, well, yes, this one part did need some attention. “I hope you don’t mind my marking this.” Soon, they were delving into the “urban homesteading” of that era and its roots in America’s original Homestead Act of the late 1800s—except that Jane thought the links tenuous. “Forget that ’40 acres and a mule,’ ” she said to Roberta. “That’s a red herring.” Gently, she directed Roberta toward the history of homesteading, serving up a disquisition on William Jennings Bryan, the Cross of Gold speech, and land grants—solid facts and fine distinctions to undergird
Roberta’s account: back then, “it was the government giving the pioneers land…You can’t say that now PDC [People’s Development Corporation] wanted the same thing. They wanted something
analogous.
”

At another point, Jane told her, “I have a quarrel with a word, but it’s symbolic of what you do every once in a while.” She read from Roberta’s draft:
“They had targeted the completion…,”
and explained her problem with it: “ ‘Targeted’ is a present-day bureaucratic fashionable jargon word,” downright “barbarous.” (Maybe, to Jane’s ear, like “sibling”?) “It just means you’ve been reading too many reports and memos.”

It could be hard to take, this pointed critique of her budding manuscript. But Roberta was tough-skinned enough to take it, grateful for the attention she got at Jane’s side. “That was part of her nurturing…She was interested in what I was doing,” even if it amounted to a kind of editorial tough love.

Alan Littlewood also basked in Jane’s deep interest. In the years after his St. Lawrence success, he went through a bad period, was discouraged and depressed. Jane offered him a stipend, “to get me over a hump,” which he declined. At another low point, she inscribed one of her books and gave it to him. He took it home, opened it up, and all it said was, “I love you. Jane.” She just
knew
, says Littlewood, that nothing else from her, no great words of wisdom or inspiration, could have lifted him as much as that did. Jane, says her friend Toshiko, seemed able to accept everyone and find “something unique and individual” in them, fairly stripping away their particular craziness to see them as they were, give them what they needed.

In such ways, certainly, she was the best of friends. One time, Toshiko was slated to interpret at an event where she needed to know specialized botanical terms, and soon Jane was marshaling her intellectual forces to help her. Jane’s nephew Decker, staying at the house just then, remembers coming home to find them hunched over the table, dictionaries and books strewn around them, deep into a crash course on fruit trees, blossoms, the qualities of good pears, and the like. (Jane loved fruit, was bothered by how groceries would stock only three or four varieties of apple, kept a running list of the hundred or so varieties she had tasted over the years.)

Summers, Jane and Bob often vacationed with Toshiko and her husband, Sid, on Prince Edward Island. PEI was the smallest of Canada’s ten provinces, a real island, heavily agricultural, thick with farms and gardens spewing out vegetables you’d never see in city supermarkets. Soon after
Jane and Bob moved to Albany Avenue, the Adilmans invited them to join them there. Over the years, they’d go often with the kids, sometimes with brother John and wife, Pete. It was a few weeks or a month in a modest cabin, part of
a cozy summertime community of about fifty families on half-acre lots a few miles from Charlottetown, the island’s chief town. Sid, a journalist, liked to lie out on the island’s red sand beach, down the grassy path leading to it from the cabin—no news, no TV. Jane, who needed to protect her body from the sun, typically wore a hat with a big, wide brim. They’d dig clams, eat giant lobsters, visit lighthouses, make jam together. Eating and reading and talking and laughing with good company in an idyllic spot far from the cares of the world: wasn’t bad.

Jane, family, and friends at Prince Edward Island, ca. 1990
Credit 28

Actually, we know of one other visitor to PEI during those years: Spicy, the pet hamster of Jane’s granddaughter, Caitlin, Jim and Pat’s daughter. In a story hatched by Caitlin, maybe nine at the time, and Jane, who was caring for her that day, and Lucia Jacobs, who immortalized it on film, Spicy escapes and heads for PEI on his own. Jane shows us the miniature ladder, probably dollhouse furniture, with which he’s made his getaway. “Oh, I’d better let Caitlin know the bad news,” she says into the camera,
a little woodenly; she’s no actor. She steps into the red phone closet that is a fixture of the Jacobs living room to make the call. Now the action shifts to Spicy, trying to find his way across a thousand miles of eastern Canada. “How do you get to PEI?” he asks. A bird—in Caitlin’s voice, of course—replies, “Just bear east.” This becomes the mantra for the rest of the journey:
Just bear east.
Finally, in a ferocious storm, Spicy skitters onto an island-bound boat. Lucia’s Oscar-worthy camera work, all pitching and heaving, conveys the storm’s primal force—and grants us a peek at Jane’s new role as grandmother.

For four years, until she was about eight, Caitlin would get dropped off in the afternoon at Jane’s. They’d play games, like Ambulance, or Loose Door Knobs, or Protect the Fruit; the idea of that one was to protect Jane’s fruit bowl from marauding monkeys and tigers. Periodically, Jane would turn back to her work and, saying so, leave Caitlin on her own for a while. “I loved time at her house,” Caitlin recalls today. Whatever one might say of Jane’s parenting style, notes Lucia Jacobs, who saw Jane and Caitlin up close while living on Albany Avenue, she “totally redeemed herself…by being the world’s best grandmother.”

In 1989, at the ripe old age of six, Caitlin got a book dedicated to her (as did her cousin Larissa, Ned and Mary Ann’s daughter, and the three Jacobs children). It was Jane’s children’s book,
The Girl on the Hat.

One summer day in 1987, an editor at Oxford University Press Canada, Richard Teleky, received a call from Jane, who’d gotten his name from a neighbor. On long drives with the children out to Long Island in the 1950s, Jane told stories of Peanut, the doughty, literally peanut-sized boy forever getting into trouble. Now, Peanut had become Peanutina, and little Tina had become the heroine of one of Jane’s books. Teleky’s colleagues hoped they might become Jane’s regular publisher. No such luck; all she wanted was a home for the children’s book. Teleky signed her up, along with the artist Karen Reczuch for the illustrations. “I was thrilled!” says Reczuch, for whom this was her first book. “And then to find out that the author you were illustrating was so illustrious: ‘You’re doing a book with
Jane Jacobs
?!’ ”

The pictures were lovely. Tina in her Jane-like pageboy haircut, in mittens, scarf, and earmuffs, was adorable. The story was charming.

Thinking about a useful life for herself, Tina’s first idea was to make little Easter baskets, starting a long time ahead to have plenty to sell by next Easter. She put ten empty peanut shells out in a row. She lined them with sweet-smelling dried basil and filled them with red cranberries, blueberries and green peas. They looked like darling little nests of tiny colored eggs. But in a few days the berries spoiled and the peas began to shrivel.

When the book was published, a friend wrote Jane to say he found it “
enchanting.” But it didn’t do well,
was scarcely reviewed, and soon disappeared. “The feedback I got from other illustrators and authors,” says Reczuch, “was that the book was already a little dated.” Maybe it would have done better in the 1950s or 1960s—to which, of course, it owed its birth. But by then, as Reczuch says, “children’s literature had moved on.”

As in Jane’s adult books, the things of this world are much part of Tina’s life—caves and carnivals, cameras and canoes. And certainly there is plenty of Jane in tiny Tina, who is industrious, resourceful, and always ready for adventure. Why, someday, she declares, she’d take her camera out to the mountains of British Columbia and photograph Sasquatch.

“
But the Sasquatch is imaginary,” says her father.

“How do you know?” Tina pushes back. “Remember the man at the Bureau of Missing Persons?”

Her parents had called him when Tina was kidnapped, reporting that she was two inches tall.

“He said
I
was imaginary.”

II. HONESTY OR HONOR

The Girl on the Hat
appeared in 1989. Jane’s next book,
Systems of Survival
, published the following year, was inspired by the events of a single day many years earlier, Monday, January 24, 1967.

Jane, on her first trip to Europe, was in
Hannover, West Germany, and in fine spirits. Earlier that day she’d given the first of her European lectures, and was taking in the city’s sights. At some point, she stopped at a bank to transfer into her New York account the proceeds of the sizable check she’d received for her lecture. She handed someone the check, which was in deutschmarks, the German currency predating the euro. She gave them her account number. They gave her a receipt. And that was that. She felt “
like an international merchant transacting my business.” Of the bank itself, she’d remember little except for its expanses of
“polished brass, marble and inlaid wood.” But then, out on the street, she just stood there for a moment, happy, marveling “at how extraordinary this was—that I could feel so secure and protected within a great web of responsibility and trust.” She’d completed similar transactions back home, of course. But here, just a few days into her trip, knowing no one, the foreign surroundings perhaps batting away the blinders of home, it jumped out at her: what made economic life work was this “fantastic web of trust” between strangers.

She experienced a similar jolt of pleasured insight while working on
The Economy of Cities
, as she looked back to the emergence of European cities in the Middle Ages. “Those were
times of terrible piracy,” she would say. Maybe trading Spanish leather, or Scandinavian fur, you couldn’t help but fear robbers, ready to take everything you had. And yet during these years trade fairs sprang up across Europe.

I thought how extraordinary it was, that in these barbarous times, when the line between raiding and trading didn’t seem very clear, that trading ships could meet at certain places and actually exchange things and not take from each other, and do it in a civilized way…Those early European fair-sites were, in this sense, sacred sites where the mayhem was halted and the piracy held at bay, and people did this amazing, civilized, mutually helpful thing.

This all sounds very nice, inspiring in its way. But the book emerging from these insights was no simpleminded tribute to international banking or medieval trade fairs. For there was a wrinkle to the pretty picture, a surprising departure from what we’d expect, and from what
Jane
had expected.

Systems of Survival
had its roots in Jane’s fascination with the morality of the market, the honesty and industry that everyday trade required. In time, she got downright systematic about it, “jotting down precepts people are taught or that law prescribes for how business is carried on.” From business histories, biographies, scandals, and bits of cultural anthropology she’d note behavior extolled as admirable. “If a businessman was praised because his handshake was as good as his bond, I cast it as the precept, ‘Respect contracts.’ ” She did the same for despised or discouraged behaviors, too. And she kept it up for fifteen or twenty years. “I didn’t know why I was doing this except to help myself better understand how the world works.”