Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (58 page)

But during the next half century, Aunt Hannah’s manuscript never entirely relaxed its grip on her. Jane had grown up hearing Hannah’s stories. “She was
a great heroine to us all through my childhood.” A
birch-bark basket the native women of Nondalton made for Hannah was part of Jane’s life growing up; her mother used it to hold letters and keys. Hannah’s manuscript “
had hooked me; so I had the notion that some time I should try to do it justice.”

One day, probably in 1993, after Burgin asked to see it, Jane started reading it again and “
got such a bang out of it, I just decided it should be published.” This despite reservations about some of what good Aunt Hannah actually had to say, including what Jane termed “white man’s burden ideas.” Her task, Hannah Breece wrote in all earnestness, was to
help the natives “
overcome ignorance, poverty, disease, and superstition. [It] was to bring them benefits now available to them from civilization and from Uncle Sam’s care for his less fortunate children.” Jane was as bothered by such notions as she’d been half a century before. But then again, how could you understand Hannah’s time in Alaska
without
confronting them? A more sophisticated modern public, Jane felt sure, would be able to read Hannah without undue judgment.

When the book came out, Jane wrote that she had done what Aunt Hannah expected of her, that she’d “
improved organization, removed repetition and digressions that interrupt the flow, fact-checked distances, names, spelling, vegetation—the customary assistance an editor can give an inexperienced writer.” But that wasn’t all she did. For in July 1994, she and Bob, together with Ned’s wife, Mary Ann, joined a week later by Ned, flew to Alaska to see for themselves something of Aunt Hannah’s world.

They’d gathered brochures that showed off Alaska’s placid blue waters, tree-topped islands, and sun-dappled mountain peaks; marked up old U.S. Geological Survey maps, retracing Hannah’s travels; worked out their itinerary for the two-week trip. As their departure date neared, Jane’s date book recorded their preparations:

July 4: Get travelers’ checks; get emergency food; pack; get Mary’s money.

July 5: Money for Mary M: $210; call Limo for morning. 8:30.

July 6: Leave 10:05 am [for] Anchorage.

They were to arrive there, gaining several hours on a flight mostly due west, at 5:30 that evening.

Until 1967, when she visited Europe for the first time, Jane had traveled little. In the years since, she’d made up for it some with vacations in the Caribbean; with a trip to Japan, where she’d stayed at the inn in Kyoto; Hamburg in 1981; the Netherlands in 1984, where she gave a speech at the royal palace and met the queen; Hong Kong in 1992, from which she came back with new ideas about high-rises as incubators of diversity. She’d come a long way since her first travels, when foreign currencies left her flustered.

Now, in 1994, Jane and family took floatplanes across the Kodiak Archipelago, set down at remote villages figuring in Hannah’s life. They
met natives in whose families tales of Miss Breece had been passed down. At one point they flew over a dozen-mile stretch of rough country from Iliamna Bay, on the Gulf of Alaska, navigating, as Jane wrote, “
along a crooked airpath between awesome mountain peaks and glaciers to both sides of us.” Beneath them lay the Iliamna Portage, which Hannah had crossed with a guide, variously on foot and by horseback. “
I had lived in the Rocky Mountains and crossed the continent several times,” wrote Hannah, “but never before had I been in such a wild grandeur of chasms, valleys and mountain peaks.” She and her guide tramped along the edge of a mountain, looking down into a valley cut by streams from glacial ice fields. From there it was “into a valley where grass was higher than our heads and fireweed blazed everywhere.”

Back home, Jane wrote John and Pete of their adventures—of the obscure, out-of-the-way museums, the “
treasure trove of Aunt Hannah’s correspondence” on microfilm they’d unearthed at a university library. “Mary Ann and I spent most of two days with it.” In the same letter, Jane outlined her ideas for the book’s complex structure, which she’d tried out earlier on Jason Epstein. It would have a foreword giving context; Hannah’s memoir itself; a section, “Puzzles, Tangles, and Clarifications,” about historical questions intriguing to Jane—like reindeer herds and Herman, the first Alaskan saint; an epilogue, on how the villages had fared since Hannah’s time; finally, a lengthy notes section. All told, these came to more than a hundred pages beyond the memoir itself, a third of the book. The result was an intricate palimpsest—Jane and Hannah, Hannah’s time and Jane’s, memoir and history, reportage and travelogue, each talking back and forth to one another across the years.

An early draft of the book’s epilogue tells how Afognak, part of the Kodiak Archipelago, where Hannah had worked from 1904 to 1906, was “
demolished by the tidal wave that accompanied the terrible earthquake of 1964.” In Jane’s final edit, the earthquake is no longer “terrible”; earthquakes usually are. But
A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska
, as Jane titled it, proved much more than a routine exercise in editorial craft for her; it made for what she would call “probably
the three happiest months of my working life. And when I did the research in Alaska I found myself wishing I had a whole extra life to live to be a historian,” to work with raw materials, original documents.

It was Hannah who, fording the Chinkelyes River in knee-high boots, had had her poor feet frozen blue-black; who’d met mountain men and
native villagers, lived with them, taught their children. That was
her
experience. But now it was
Jane’s
experience, too—deliciously imagining Hannah’s life, retracing her steps, laboring over each word—and finally, depositing the whole story, neatly wrapped, on the threshold of the twenty-first century. It was Jane’s book, too, part of her life, layered in family: her childhood soaking up Hannah’s stories; as a young woman trying to find a home for the manuscript; her mother urging her to go back to it; Burgin’s interest triggering her own; brothers Jim and John helping in practical ways; the trip to Alaska with Bob, Ned, and Mary Ann; a life come full circle. “
Every generation,” Jane would say of Hannah, “had their part in valuing her story.”

In Hannah’s story, enacted far from any city, Jane plainly found value, interest, and worth. To one acute reviewer of
Schoolteacher
, this was itself notable. In an essay in
The New York Times Book Review
, Paul Goldberger, the paper’s longtime architectural and urban critic, used the book to comment on Jane’s intellectual evolution. A frank admirer of her work, he nonetheless recalled the criticism that, as in
Death and Life
, “she has always
tended to fall prey to the fallacy of physical determinism,” the overvaluing of a physical form. Yet now, chasing down Hannah’s life in the ragged, nondescript villages of rural Alaska, visiting them, taking them seriously, Jane was making an “implicit concession” to the contrary. “I have always wanted Jane Jacobs, iconoclastic, wide-ranging thinker that she is, to see the world in still broader terms, and with this book she truly has.” Hannah Breece, he suggested, would probably not have been happy in a Jacobsean big city, and Jane’s “willingness to see her as hero in spite of this both deepens and softens our view of Ms. Jacobs herself.”

To her adversaries, and maybe some of her friends, too, Jane could seem harshly outspoken, single-minded, even narrow-minded:
What a dear, sweet grandmother she isn’t.
Well, now Goldberger was seeing in
Schoolteacher
evidence of a softening. It was a lovely, touching take, and one hard not to see as true. Approaching eighty, Jane was looking back, reflecting on the past, not so angry as she’d sometimes been.

Besides, she was now a grandmother after all, and a loving one at that.

IV. INFIRMITIES OF AGE

On June 21, 1994, a few weeks before setting off for Alaska, Jane had written of her upcoming trip to John Branson, a historian at one of the
Alaskan national parks. “
I have my doubts about the trail to the falls,” she said, referring to a possible side trip.

I’m seventy-eight years old, and although in good health suffer some disadvantages of age, mainly difficulty in walking more than short distances and then slowly. My knees, a weakness Hannah also suffered when she had reached my age, catches up with us in our seventies, alas.

It would be a few years before Jane would blame her need to decline a speaking engagement in the Netherlands on “
the infirmities of age.” But gradually, they had begun to accumulate, the inevitable pains and frailties and calamities. Back in 1973, after her return from Japan, a bad fall had broken her left hand, menacing an important nerve. “That was
one hell of an operation,” she wrote Jason Epstein from the hospital. “Last week is all a (mercifully) doped blur to me.” Without the operation, “I would certainly have lost the use of my arm & hand.” The letter was handwritten; she’d not be able to type for months. As it was, she could “move only in a sort of sliding, slither-pivot fashion—I think, actually, it is an old Charleston step—and just managing this now takes about what energy I can muster.”

In 1981 or early the next year Jane stumbled over a pile of bricks in her backyard, broke her right arm and nose, and bashed up her lip. Such a “
stupid, stupid lady” she was, she wrote Roberta Gratz with the news.

In 1985, it was something quite similar. “I did
such a stupid careless thing,” she wrote Gratz again. “In a hurry & neglecting to turn on the light, I slipped on the stair & broke my collar-bone. Not serious, & it’s healing well, but it has held me back from work”; she couldn’t type.

Jane seems to have measured these mishaps against a backdrop of generally good health—good, at least, for her age, which was ticking ahead, like everyone’s around her. Her brother John, appointed fifteen years earlier to the U.S. Court of Appeals, in 1982 took “senior” status, at age sixty-five, which allowed him a lighter caseload. Around the same time, brother Jim retired, moving with his wife, Kay, from New Jersey to North Carolina. In 1993, on March 12, Betty died, aged eighty-three. A memorial service held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture eight days later brought Butzners together from all over. A few months later, a
Boston Globe
reporter wrote of Jane that “
white hair and a marked stoop remind a visitor of Jacobs’s age” but that otherwise she seemed just fine. “Internally, I’m not any different from when I was younger,” Jane told him.
“It’s always a surprise to me that I don’t get out of bed so easily, and I can’t run up and down those stairs…It doesn’t seem natural to be physically old.”

Back in her late thirties, renting a cottage with John and Katia Jacobs on Sconset in Nantucket — collecting rose hips on the beach, a whole wonderful week of laughing, talking, and playing—Jane had made a mutual vow with Katia: when they were eighty—“which to us,” says Katia, “then seemed an unreasonable distance”—with the relatives gathered around the Thanksgiving table set for The Moment when it was time to serve the turkey, they’d exhibit instead, the two of them cackling crazily, a bird and a pig sewn up together, a chimerical creature. “In subsequent years,” Katia says, “we reminded one another of our pledge,” though they never did it. But now, impossibly, that “unreasonable distance” had been bridged, and Jane was eighty.

But however old Jane was, Bob was much older.

Siblings and spouses, 1988: Compare this photo with the one on
this page
, from 1945—same family members forty-three years later (except for Elizabeth Butzner). The family, left to right, are Bob, John, Betty, Jane, Pete, Jim, and Kay. A newcomer is Jules Manson, who married Betty in 1947, at extreme right.
Credit 29

While working on the Alaska book in 1994—it was before the trip, the manuscript still “quite disjointed”— Jane wrote to a Dutch friend that she and Bob were “
aware we’re aging—creakier.” Bob’s, though, was more than a benign creakiness. He was actually a few months younger
than Jane, but had already been retired from Zeidler for several years. Then came a succession of blows. “Bob has
lost the sight of his right eye from a burst blood vessel,” Jane wrote Ellen Perry, her sometime research assistant from
Death and Life
days, “but minimizes the loss and keeps on working, now at machinery design for our son Jim.”

That was early in 1996. In April, Bob was able to accompany Jane to Charlottesville, Virginia, where the University of Virginia was giving her a medal.
Someone snapped a picture of them as they sat together on a bench, their heads two matching puffs of white hair. The stately columns of Thomas Jefferson’s campus behind them, they sat, Jane in a fringed jumper, gripping her cane, Bob in tuxedo, bow tie, and dress shoes (forsaking the sneakers he usually wore), one hand on Jane’s shoulder, a drink in the other. He looked okay. He wasn’t.