Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (10 page)

HIGGINS NEIGHBORHOOD CENTER

PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

MARKLE HANDICRAFT BUILDING

LOCAL PRODUCTS WEAVING

WOODCRAFT BASKETRY, ETC.

That “etc.” included wild honey and sorghum molasses.
On July 3, 1934, while Jane was there, the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, visited, buying several “mountain jugs” at the little roadside stand they’d set up for the occasional tourist.

By the time Jane arrived in Higgins in May 1934, Aunt
Martha—Higgins’s “inspiring genius,” one account called her—had made great strides at dragging it into the twentieth century and bettering the social and, presumably, the religious life of the local people. Jane stayed with her and Martha’s foster children at Sunshine Cottage, which sat on a knoll, up a steep slope from a stream that you could hear rustling and gurgling all around the little compound. The Markle building was substantial. It dominated the site. Yet it was wholly dwarfed by the mountain rising across the road from it, as if sited precisely in order to show off men’s and women’s insignificance in the face of God’s grandeur.

Jane’s sister, Betty, had come down for a visit in the summer of 1932, but stayed only about a week. Jane was up in the mountains for about six months and for at least some of that time put to work. In July, the center hosted a vacation bible school. “
Girls’ club work will be under the direction of Miss Jane Butzner,” a local paper reported—noting what was apparently her chief credential, that in the Girl Scouts back in Scranton she’d been a Golden Eaglet, the highest rank. On July 29, Higgins briefly became a kind of rural metropolis, as “
the largest gathering of people ever brought together in this neighborhood” converged on its Holland Memorial Church for a grand family reunion, 250 people from all over, dozens of Higginses among them, gathered on the lawn in front of the Markle building.

By early fall, just as the surrounding hills were erupting in fall color, Jane’s father and younger brother Jim came down to pick her up, along with the brooms, chairs, and other craft mementos of Higgins she’d collected, and take her back to Scranton. In those first hours of her leavetaking, we can’t say how Higgins inhabited her mind. But over time, it is plain, the place touched her profoundly. Fifty years later, she would devote to it a substantial chunk of one of her books.

In it, the mature Jane Jacobs did not view Higgins through a scrim of nostalgia or allow visions of a simpler rural past—of a Higgins perhaps poor, but more noble for all that—to distort her memories of the place. “
We may mourn the disappearance of the old subsistence life with its bypassed, interesting ways,” she would write. But, she all but said, she didn’t indulge in that kind of thinking herself. Nor was Jane apt to remind you of Horace Kephart, that chronicler of the Smokies, in his love for the mountain people and fascination with their ways. Conceivably, her time in Higgins might have ignited in her a wish to return, renew old ties, immerse herself in the lives of those she’d met in 1934. But she
seems
never to have seen Higgins again, nor to have much corresponded with anyone she’d met there. The Asheville area became renowned for its artisans, craftspeople, and music makers and as a popular destination for tourists and retirees (including Jane’s brother Jim and his wife, Kay, whom she did visit in 1988) as well as photographers who could never get enough of its mountain mists, of baby bears and great bounding bucks, of shimmering waterfalls and oaks in autumnal glow. Jane was not blind to these charms; she’d recall the area’s “
majestic folded hills, hardwood forests and loud, tumbling brooks.” But they were not what made the deepest impression on her.

No, what stuck with Jane all those years later was something darker and bleaker: Higgins’s poverty, its ignominious decline over the generations, the tragic disappearance of its old skills. Jane would write of how, before the coming of Aunt Martha, candles had disappeared from daily use, of families forced to “
make do with firelight”; of an ancient relic of a sorghum mill, “powered by a circling, plodding mule”; of looms repaired so ineptly that the cloth they made was of inferior quality, “too fragile in some spots, too thick in others, lumpy and unraveling at the selvages.” Jane would tell her son Ned how coffee in Higgins meant a pot of old grounds, hot water run through it again and again, stretched interminably; she tried it herself and “about died.” Whatever the temptation to paint this backwoods world in a warmer glow, such loss of human craft, ingenuity, and economic vitality to her seemed a tragedy.

Read Martha Robison’s accounts, public or private, read articles written about Higgins, and it is hard to avoid the truth that her little mountain outback depended on charity. When a writer for the
Presbyterian Advance
described her work there in September 1932, he billed it as “
the thrilling story of Higgins Neighborhood Center and its enterprising executive Martha E. Robison.” And it
was
a thrilling story, if you gave yourself over to it in the right spirit. But his account concluded by asking for help—for a radio, and “a phonograph with a lot of good records,” and a Delco electric generator. Any letter to Miss Robison “proposing to send gifts,” readers were assured, would “secure prompt response.” And yet these hard times in Higgins, long predating the Depression, were not the product of a killer hurricane, spring floods, or racial oppression. Its people, from that same hardy English stock that first colonized America, worked hard, “were
bright and full of curiosity, as intelligent as any of us,” Jane would remember. “They were a far cry from the feckless and loutish
hillbillies of the comic strips.” Yet somehow, Higgins had descended to this sad state where it depended on the kindness of strangers.

Jane was neither unmindful nor unappreciative of Aunt Martha’s efforts. On the contrary, she had seen with her own eyes all she had done, could contrast it with the Higgins of that wet January day back in 1922 when Martha Robison had first come to town. And, amid the depths of the Depression, Higgins was getting better—no question. But what gnawed at Jane was how it had descended so far in the first place. How had Higgins gotten to the point that all of Aunt Martha’s dynamism and determination, and all of John Markle’s money, were so necessary? A question began to form, if perhaps without words yet to put to it:
How could this have happened?

   CHAPTER 4   

THE GREAT BEWILDERING WORLD

I
N NOVEMBER
1934, in the middle of the most malignant economic depression anyone could remember, eighteen-year-old Jane Butzner moved to New York City.

Nothing we know of her parents suggests that either of them discouraged her from doing so. They were both in “the helping professions,” but hadn’t tried to push her into nursing, teaching, or medicine. They had offered to put her through college; but Jane was not about to endure another day in class, and they were not about to make her. The spirit and energy of cantankerous Uncle Billy in Fredericksburg, the example of her adventurous aunts in Alaska and North Carolina, were alive in the family; in comparison, lighting out for New York was unspectacular, hardly apt to be discouraged—that is, if anything like discouragement was part of the Butzner family repertoire at all. Even Jane’s straitlaced mother could be seen as a model, having thrown over one career for another and abandoning small-town life for big-city Philadelphia.

For Jane, high school was behind her. She had basic job skills, and a year of reporting experience with a serious paper. Her hometown, whose depressed coal economy had preceded the country into the Depression, offered scant reason, economic or otherwise, to remain. In moving to New York, she was doing what generations of ambitious and spirited young men, and sometimes women, had done before her—heading off to the city to become artists and writers. New York, Jane would write, was “where I
came to seek my fortune.” A cliché? Certainly, but true: “I was trying to be a writer.”

By the time Jane arrived in New York, her sister, Betty, six years older, was already there. While Jane was painfully scraping through high school, Betty had been working hard, doing well, in Philadelphia. She’d graduated from the
Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art in June 1933, completing a program in interior décor, her four years there brimful with furniture, fabrics, watercolor, and design; on the evidence of the several prizes and honors awarded her in her junior and senior years, she probably stood near the top of her class. But her career miscarried in Depression-sick New York. For a while she’d lived with other young women in a
cheap rooming house on East Ninety-fourth Street. Finally, though, she got a job in Brooklyn, in the home furnishings department of the big Abraham & Straus department store downtown—one unworthy of her education, perhaps, but a job. Soon she moved to an apartment on the top floor of a walk-up on
Orange Street, a fifteen-minute walk to A&S, where Jane now joined her.

Their building was on the edge of
Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood occupying a bluff rising sharply from the East River and looking across to Manhattan. The Heights had long been an aristocratic enclave of fine brownstones, a swank suburb of New York, really, though its luster dimmed a bit when the subway arrived in 1908 and with it less high-toned commuters. Just a few blocks from where the Butzner women lived, a street called Columbia Heights flanked the river; from it, the Lower Manhattan skyline could seem close enough to touch; on most days you could see the Statue of Liberty. Up Columbia Heights near the Brooklyn Bridge was Fulton Ferry, the stretch of riverside Walt Whitman had commemorated almost a century before in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” but now seedy, overgrown with flophouses and greasy restaurants; Jane and Betty lived a block from the print shop on Cranberry Street where Whitman had set type for
Leaves of Grass.
Their stretch of Orange Street was lined with both newer apartment buildings and grim “old-law” tenements that reformers had tried to root out but which still housed miserable hundreds of thousands all over the city. The street came to an end at Fulton Street, with its shops and clattering elevated trains.

From almost the beginning of that first year in Brooklyn and for most of her first two years in New York, Jane
bounced between jobs—occasional jobs, part-time jobs, jobs that looked like regular jobs but vanished when her employer did, as happened more than once. Early on, she worked for
a financial writer for the Hearst papers,
Robert H. Hemphill, a former utilities executive, Federal Reserve Bank official, and sometime inventor who held decided views about the decidedly wobbly Depression-gripped banking system; she kept his clipping files, did his research, took his dictation. She
helped a broker who thought he was writing a book about the stock market. She
sought work at the Markle Foundation, Aunt Martha’s benefactor—but came up empty. She worked for Westclox, makers of Big Ben, the “polite alarm clock,” a mainstay of American bedsides, filing orders “from
all the exotic places on Earth”—that’s how Jane put it. For one heady moment, she felt “involved in this great enterprise, in which soon everybody in the world would be supplied with clocks.” What she actually did all day, of course, was type and file, file and type. Ultimately, she realized that the great enterprise would never be done, “that the clocks would break down or get lost, and that the work was going to be interminable.” The big Up, then the precipitous Down—played out across a single week, at the end of which she quit. Give her a break; she was eighteen years old.

It was the only time Jane actually quit a job during these years. Often she had no work at all. And jobs she did land might pay as little as $12 a week. “I could barely scrape by on it,” she later wrote. She’d remember one that was particularly boring—working all alone, endlessly filing colored slips of paper. Coming to feel “hopeless and depressed,” Miss Jane Butzner
turned to gambling. Well, not exactly—but she did shell out $1.25 for a share of an Irish Sweepstakes ticket, which was illegal at the time. She’d been raised to disapprove of gambling “as stupid, feckless and in some way immoral…But in my mood of futility,” she bought in. “I couldn’t afford it. It meant postponing new soles for my shoes, making do instead with pieces of inserted cardboard.” She didn’t win, yet never regretted it: “Suddenly, and so easily, I had purchased suspense, anticipation, hope,” she’d write. “I’m still grateful for the weeks of nutty anticipation when I needed it so badly. The daring and delicious illegality didn’t hurt either.”

Betty was doing a little better than she, making about $14 a week. When both of them were working they could sometimes even afford to get their
apartment cleaned. But occasionally, too, they were reduced to eating
Pablum, a bland, precooked baby food that, however unappetizing, was at least nutritious, or so their father said. More often, they’d chop up onions, tomatoes, and green pepper and mix in some beans and
a little hamburger. And some garlic: “We thought we were really in the avant-garde,” Jane would remember. “We’d never had garlic in Scranton.” They called their concoction “
catchabeano,” because “it had lots of beans in it and we just thought it was a catchy name.” Compared to Pablum, “it was our equivalent of a grand gourmet thing.” At some point, Mrs. Butzner gave them a copy of
The Fanny Farmer Cookbook;
when once Jane complained to her that she’d never taught her how to cook, Mrs. Butzner shot back, “Well, I
taught you how to read, didn’t I?”

Later, Jane never made much fuss about the difficulties she faced in adapting to New York; it was adapting to the Depression she remembered with a shudder. “I think that’s the hardest time I ever had,” she’d say. And yet, it wasn’t
as
hard for her as for many others. For people in their thirties who’d watched newly launched careers crash, or those in their forties or fifties flattened by rejection and idleness, the Depression was devastating. Back in 1929, the national unemployment rate had been 3 percent; in 1935, it was
20
. But for Jane and some of her young friends, she’d write, they could still “make stories out of our
rejections and frugalities and the strange people we met up with in our futile searches and could bask in the gasps or laughs we generated.”