Eyes on the Street Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERT KANIGEL

  On an Irish Island

  Faux Real

  High Season

  Vintage Reading

  The One Best Way

  The Man Who Knew Infinity

  Apprentice to Genius

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2016 by Robert Kanigel

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

  www.​aaknopf.​com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kanigel, Robert, author.

  Title: Eyes on the street : the life of Jane Jacobs / by Robert Kanigel.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015050758 | ISBN 9780307961907 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780307961914 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jacobs, Jane, 1916–2006. | City planners—United States—Biography. | City planners—Canada—Biography. | City planning—United States—History—20th century. | City planning—Canada—History—20th century. | Urban renewal—United States—History—20th century. | Urban renewal—Canada—History—20th century. | Sociology, Urban—Philosophy.

  Classification: LCC HT167 .K325 2016 | DDC 711/.4092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https:​//lccn.​loc.​gov/​20150​50758

  Ebook ISBN 9780307961914

  Front-of-cover photograph by Frank Lennon (December 1968) / Toronto Star (Getty Images)

  Cover design by Stephainie Ross

  v4.1

  a

  For Sarah, Jessie, Duncan,

  and all the Calvert Street gang

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also by Robert Kanigel

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART I An Uncredentialed Woman · 1916–1954

  CHAPTER 1 A Generous Place to Live

  CHAPTER 2 Outlaw

  CHAPTER 3 Ladies’ Nest of Owls, and Other Milestones in the Education of Miss Jane Butzner

  CHAPTER 4 The Great Bewildering World

  CHAPTER 5 Morningside Heights

  CHAPTER 6 Women’s Work

  CHAPTER 7 Amerika

  CHAPTER 8 Trushchoby

  PART II In the Big World · 1954–1968

  CHAPTER 9 Disenchantment

  CHAPTER 10 Ten Minutes at Harvard

  CHAPTER 11 A Person Worth Talking To

  CHAPTER 12 A Manuscript to Show Us

  CHAPTER 13 Mother Jacobs of Hudson Street

  CHAPTER 14 The Physical Fallacy

  CHAPTER 15 West Village Warrior

  CHAPTER 16 Luncheon at the White House

  CHAPTER 17 Gas Masks at the Pentagon

  PART III On Albany Avenue · 1968–2006

  CHAPTER 18 A Circle of Their Own

  CHAPTER 19 Settling In

  CHAPTER 20 Our Jane

  CHAPTER 21 Flummoxed

  CHAPTER 22 Adam, Karl, and Jane

  CHAPTER 23 Webs of Trust

  CHAPTER 24 Ideas That Matter

  CHAPTER 25 Civilization’s Child

  Acknowledgments and Sources

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Reprint Permissions

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  THINK ABOUT what you’d want to say about Jane Jacobs and it’s hard not to wonder what she’d say right back.

  You might not want to get in a debate with Jane; she was sure to beat you. In verbal combat she was overwhelming. When she was in her thirties, before she’d written The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she wrote a provocative article for a major magazine whose publisher questioned her reporting. When the two of them met, Jane defended her account with, by one account, “a screed of facts and firsthand observations.” Later, she asked a sympathetic colleague why he’d not stuck up for her more. “No need,” said he. “The poor man”—the publisher—“thought he’d hit a buzz saw.”

  You could say Jane Jacobs didn’t suffer fools gladly, which is true. But you don’t want to say it, because it’s such a damnable cliché, and you don’t want to utter a cliché in front of Jane. You want to be at your best. If there’s a flabbiness to your argument, a want of pointed example, a blurriness of vision, you probably wouldn’t want it to show. Because if it did—around the kitchen table at her home in Greenwich Village, or later in Toronto, or at a public meeting, or among a bunch of academics—she’d just gobble you up. “There are ways to disagree with Jane Jacobs, but not as many as you might think,” Roger Sale wrote of her in The Hudson Review in 1970, “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.”

  Jane—which is what everyone called her, including her three children—wrote seven books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, basked in the glow of legions of admirers, and had a million discussions and debates around the kitchen table, which she always won. At least in her later years—though there’s reason to think it went all the way back to grade school—she invariably dominated the conversation. She listened, she responded, she challenged. She thought about what she wanted to say and said it. Not honey coated, not smoothed over. It just came out. Call her brutal, call her honest. Someone once said of her, “What a dear, sweet grandmother she isn’t.”

  Jane was perfectly normal, healthy and happy in all the important ways. She had friends who loved her. She was good to them, kind, and loving. She could be playful, even silly; at least once, she screwed up her face into ridiculous shapes and submitted herself to the camera. When you greeted her she’d throw her arms around you in a tight clasp. She took time out from the writing that was about the most important thing in the world to her to help her children, her friends, her neighbors. But always, she said what she thought; she didn’t know how not to. Once, the editor of a magazine she worked for spoke to her when she said what she thought to The New York Times. “I believe you really should not have sounded off…”

  Now, it’s fair to ask: Was she always like this? Or was it a personality trait that blossomed over time? Perhaps only after she became famous with her first book? Or, having moved to Toronto, after she became a revered symbol of that city? Were these the affectations of Personality that a prominent person sometimes makes part of him or herself over the years? Or was she always this way?

  —

  Jane Jacobs wrote seven books, but is remembered most for one of them, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, continuously in print ever since, and heralded as the book that, more than any other single influence, has reshaped how people see cities and what they expect of them. When they talked about it later, readers sometimes made it sound as if Death and Life was near to a religious experience for them. That before reading it, they were as they were; then, after they read it, they were different. That henceforth they saw differently. That their Chicago or New York or Boston had been reshaped before their eyes, with a new balance as to what was important and what was not. For many today, certainly, Jane Jacobs verges on a cult figure, with Death and Life a kind of gospel, like Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book in its time, or the Bible, or the U.S. Constitution—a repository of revealed Truth. I was among those early drawn to Jacobs through Death and Life, which I read in the early 1970s. Its unapologetic assertion
of all a city could be at its best, its affirmation of urban sensibilities like those I’d absorbed growing up in New York, and later seen in Paris and San Francisco, was a revelation.

  But these many years later, the subject of the book you are now reading is not cities, urban planning, or urban design. It’s not a book that sets out to gather upbeat stories of rejuvenation and revitalization from the urban front lines. It does not take the reader by the hand and guide her through resurgent Station North in Baltimore or gentrified Williamsburg in Brooklyn; through old warehouses and office buildings made into homes, or downtowns set a-bustling again. Or exult in the reassuring drops in crime in New York and other cities. Or enjoy the vision of city-busting urban highways torn down in Boston and San Francisco. Each of these, seen through the right lens, can be laid at Jane Jacobs’s door. And you’ll find such happy stories in this book. But they are not its subject.

  Rather, this is a biography of the remarkable woman who helped make such accounts possible. This book looks back, to a time when the rare upbeat report of city life was buried beneath stacks of press releases from new suburban developments, new interstate highways linked by cloverleafs, new rounds of corporate exodus to suburban office parks. To a time when old city neighborhoods were being erased, high-rise housing projects erected in their place; when slums were slums and everyone knew exactly what they were, or thought they did; when anyone who wanted to live in the city would have been seen as just a little weird. To a time into which Jane Jacobs strode, looked around her, and helped the rest of us see through new eyes.

  During the last half of her life and since her death at the age of eighty-nine in 2006, she has inspired a devotion whose intensity one is tempted to greet with a lifted eyebrow. She’s been called “the most influential urban thinker of all time,” ahead of Frederick Law Olmsted, Lewis Mumford, Robert Moses, and Thomas Jefferson. She’s been called “genius of common sense,” “godmother of urban America,” an “urban Thoreau,” and “the Rachel Carson of the economic world.” One of her books, Systems of Survival, was deemed “as bitchily observant as a Woody Allen film.” In turn, one Woody Allen film was described as “channeling Jane Jacobs and her complaints…about the alienating scale of modern architecture and postwar urbanism.” The Death and Life of Great American Cities was likened “to the paper Luther nailed to the Schlosskirche Wittenberg four centuries earlier.” A man who described himself as a Jacobs groupie traveled to her residences in New York and Toronto, saying that for him, a “city geek,” “this was like a trip to Graceland and Tupelo, Mississippi.” In an essay, “The Society of Saint Jane,” Mariana Mogilevich wrote how, after Jane’s death, “not surprisingly, no time at all was wasted in beginning the canonization process.” When the Occupiers occupied Wall Street, the economist Sandy Ikeda asked, “What would Jane Jacobs do?” And when Stewart Brand, originator of the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture bible of the 1960s, was asked who he’d like to be other than himself, he picked Jane Jacobs, a “one-lady Venice, fifteenth century. As good as it gets.”

  Individually, these attestations might be intriguing, but collectively they give us pause: you can admire Jane Jacobs, as I do, yet grow weary or suspicious of such a heaping-up of adulation; our understanding of any real human being doesn’t profit from such hyperbole. For the moment we needn’t decide whether Jane Jacobs really does qualify as “Mrs. Insight,” or whether she ranks as the most influential urban thinker of all time, or attains only a lower, merely human standard. Indeed, as we’ll see, plenty of revisionist thinking questions one or another facet of Jacobs’s legacy. But we can find in such lionization at least one firm fact: that among thousands of architects, urban activists, city planners, economists, city dwellers generally, and champions of independent thought, Jane Jacobs is seen in just such larger-than-life terms; that something in what she said, or how she said it, inspired not cool, respectful admiration but ardency and awe; that many emerged from her books, or from hearing her in public, as fans or acolytes.

  What makes this phenomenon all the more confounding is that Jane Jacobs couldn’t boast those superficial extras that can contribute to public reverence. For one thing, she was not a man. She was not rich. She did not reach public recognition of any magnitude until she was pushing fifty. She was never beautiful. She was not even memorably unbeautiful; for long stretches of her public life, she was a pudding-faced old lady in ill-fitting jumper and sneakers. Her voice, which in its timbre could verge on squeaky, conveyed no hypnotic majesty. She didn’t wholly avoid television interviews or other publicity on behalf of her books or the social issues she championed, but she didn’t normally reach out for it, either. After the success of her first book, she would say, she had to decide whether to be a celebrity or to write books, and opted for the latter. How, then, we are left to wonder, did so many come under her spell?

  They came under her spell, I think, almost solely through her words. Her words expressed ideas. And those ideas had a quality and resonance that were new and fresh and thrilling. They were memorably put, in distinctive aphorisms, in brick-like agglomerations of evidence and fact, that added up to a sense of irrefutable rightness. For many readers, too, what she said seemed to stand up for them. Maybe you thought you didn’t want to march off to the suburbs like everyone else, that it was satisfying, or fun, or fascinating, to live amid a million strangers in an anonymous city, and here was a lady who thought so, too, who understood, and who helped you see your city, and maybe yourself, in a new and liberating way.

  But there was more: her words conveyed a stance, a sensibility that to many were marvelously attractive and compelling. Her language was lucid, but you don’t get a hold on people by being merely lucid. It was disruptive, too—combative, even bitchy. And defiantly independent, yet suggesting that it was all just common sense in the end, and that maybe anyone could be like her.

  There’s a scene in the classic Academy Award–winning 1940 film The Philadelphia Story, where a tabloid press photographer, played by Jimmy Stewart, and Tracy Lord, upper-class to her toenails, played by Katharine Hepburn, are both thoroughly smashed, with maybe the makings of romance burbling up between them.

  “You’re quite a girl, aren’t you?” says Stewart.

  “You think?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Thank you, professor, I don’t think I’m exceptional.”

  “You are.”

  “There are any number like me. You ought to get around more.”

  Of course, every frame of film, every word uttered by Tracy Lord, every look and gesture, every syllable of her Main Line accent, adds to the conclusion that if anyone is exceptional it’s her, and that to deny it is either willful faux modesty or evidence she’s out of touch with herself or with the effect she has upon others.

  Almost sixty years later, something like this scene was enacted with Jane Jacobs. It was 1997 and a Canadian interviewer was asking her why there were so few iconoclasts like her. Oh, but there were: “You must move in different circles than I do,” says Jane. “Most of the people I know think for themselves, they really do.”

  “But you’re a brilliant woman and you attract those sorts of people.”

  “No, I’m not that brilliant,” Jane replies. “I’m really slow. I run across them [iconoclasts] all the time. I’m a very ordinary person.”

  And it’s just as false coming from Jane Jacobs as from Tracy Lord.

  Of course, Jane has the good grace to add, “But I’m articulate.”

  —

  Jane Jacobs’s words did not reach her admirers solely through her writings. Many of her acolytes knew her not through Death and Life, or her lesser-known books, but through her work as an urban activist. To them, especially during the 1960s and early 1970s, that was her day job. One time, city authorities wanted to run a road right through the park where Jane’s kids played. Another time, they wanted to write off her whole Greenwich Village neighborhood as a slum, bringing it under Urban Renewal’s dark, unlovel
y sway. Then they were going to all but lop off the whole bottom of Manhattan Island with a big expressway and, it looked like, destroy her whole way of life.

  What else could she do but try to stop it? So she stood up and spoke at public meetings. She wrote forceful, sometimes angry letters. She had friends spy on city authorities. She helped organize protests; once, she managed to get herself arrested, and had four felony indictments thrown at her. Neighbors would come by for strategy sessions around her kitchen table, deciding on what facts and figures to gather, or how to maneuver some city official to come around. Jane wasn’t the one to go around collecting signatures. Most often, she was the master strategist, often the public face of protest, getting up at public meetings to harangue the planners, or the developers, or city officials, or whoever else was the enemy this time. Most of the time, she won, as she did in fighting the New York planning czar Robert Moses to a standstill, defeating his Lower Manhattan Expressway; “Jane took an axe to Moses and killed him,” her longtime editor, Jason Epstein, would say. And when her neighbors weren’t a little put off by the sheer impudence of her urban battle strategies, the fierce single-mindedness with which she waged her wars, they loved her. That was how they remembered her—as protector and defender of the neighborhood. When she became famous and the magazines and newspapers needed something to call her they depicted her as “the Barbara Fritchie of the Slums,” or as a “Madame Defarge leading an aroused populace to the barricades.”

  So prominent were some of these battles—they loom in collective memory in part thanks to books and articles that almost reflexively pair her with Robert Moses, her David to his Goliath—that they make it sound like this is what she was, that here, in this work on behalf of her community, was the real Jane Jacobs: organizer, activist, radical, a woman of the people who’d risen up out of the gritty city streets to fight city hall. She was all that, and though she never quite said so, she must have derived satisfaction from it. More often, though, she went on the record to say some something like this: “I resented that I had to stop and devote myself to fighting what was basically an absurdity that had been foisted on me and my neighbors.” To listen to Jane, it all made for an interruption from her real work.