Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (16 page)

Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., about the time he met Jane in 1944
Credit 5

They’d known each other a week.

“She said no,” Bob would recall, “but very nicely.”

The following Wednesday, she called him at work. “Have you changed your mind?” she asked. He hadn’t.

“Because I have.”

The engagement ring he bestowed on her, the story goes, was fashioned from
a hose clamp, or
was
a hose clamp, probably from the Grumman shops. But the engagement wasn’t long in any case, and would have been shorter still had Bob not felt Jane needed to meet his family; given the whirlwind courtship, they might have worried she was pregnant.

How long had he known her? they asked.

“Well,” he replied, smoothly enough, “I’ve
known her sister for almost a year.” That, apparently, was good enough for Mom and Dad.

The small wedding took place in Jane’s childhood home on Monroe Avenue in Scranton. The living room was decorated with lilacs and roses. Jane wore a white, street-length dress trimmed with turquoise and fuchsia.

MRS. JOHN DECKER BUTZNER

ANNOUNCES THE MARRIAGE OF HER DAUGHTER

JANE

TO

MR. ROBERT HYDE JACOBS, JUNIOR

ON SATURDAY, MAY THE TWENTY-SEVENTH

NINETEEN HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR

SCRANTON, PENNSYLVANIA

It was two weeks before D day, two months since they’d met. Their honeymoon took them on a bicycle trip into northern Pennsylvania and southern New York State.

“He was conventionally good-looking. She was
conventionally not good-looking,” says John Jacobs’s wife, Katia, analyzing their marriage from a perch six decades into the future. “She was superior in brainpower and he admired that.” He was from “a good family, good-looking, and this was flattering to her.” That’s one way to look at it. Another is that, through the fever of their romance, they could discern the deep harmony of spirit that would serve them so well and for so long. It must have helped that by this time, Jane was almost twenty-eight, had lived in New York for a decade, and knew something of herself and the world. “Their
easy intimacy was the envy and wonder of people who knew them,” one admiring obituary of Bob Jacobs asserted; and it seems to capture the largest truth of their marriage—the two of them, best friends, confidants, comfortable in one another, feeding ideas and fruitful insights to each other all their lives. Under other circumstances, Jane told her children later, she might have kept her maiden name. But given her
weakness for alliteration, how could she
not
go through life as Jane Jacobs?

Bob was an architect by training. After two years at Bard College, he’d gone on to the Columbia University School of Architecture, where the normal run of courses included
design, descriptive geometry, construction methods, architectural history, and strength of materials. Awarded a bachelor of architecture degree in June 1942, he did not immediately work as an architect. It took him until well into his thirties before he found a secure professional niche.

The war, first of all, directed Bob to serve its own stern strictures. At Grumman, he worked on a variety of design projects. In one, a test pilot’s
urine-release gizmo had to be redesigned so that bodily waste flowed out of the plane instead of back into the cockpit. Another was an auxiliary fuel tank. The prototype was supposed to be made of sheet metal but, unaccountably, the drawings went to the foundry, where they were used to make the heavy wooden pattern needed for metal casting.
Oops.
When they discovered the mistake, Bob was able to take the useless pattern home, where it became a doorstop.

After the war, Bob taught art appreciation at New York’s City College. In an article he wrote for
College Art Journal
, he described an approach aimed at overcoming the slavish deference to word and symbol most students dragged into class with them. “
We run the risk,” Bob wrote, “of letting verbalized symbols overwhelm, smother and even negate the direct data actually supplied by our senses.” His simple exercises—for example, using pairs of L-shaped cardboard as a collapsible frame around a
scene—were designed to force students to simply see what lay before their eyes. They needed to push beyond “myths” linking, say, the color red to “blood, courage, war.” They needed “to use their eyes as a direct instrument to the brain.” In fact, this sounds like Jane in
The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Did she influence Bob? Or did Bob influence her?

Bob would design many of the quirky clever features of their houses, from a kitchen that left the cook practically in the middle of the dinner conversation, to the public phone booth in their living room. He would be as much the community activist as she, in the Village and then later in Toronto. He was handy, a good draftsman and artist, a close student of human nature; he could meet people cold, his daughter remembers, make them feel special, learn from them. Friends would listen with interest as he declaimed on subjects close to him, including his work, but with perhaps greater interest when it was just him, alone; when Jane was around, says Katia Jacobs, he was apt to “slip back into the shadows.” Jane, by every account, was the queen bee, Bob comparatively subdued. “Bob was wonderful,” recalls Decker Butzner, son of Jane’s brother John, whose earliest memories of Bob and Jane go back to the 1950s. He knew about everything, could talk about anything, was easy and calm. “And he was never bothered
playing second fiddle to Jane.”

Which, of course, he did.

—

To celebrate the Allied invasion of Europe on June 6, 1944, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia ordered the city’s lights back on after years of wartime blackout. New Yorkers in tenements and brownstones trooped up to their rooftops to watch the spectacle. “
Without warning, the entire skyline of New York erupted into glorious light,” remembered the writer Pete Hamill, then a nine-year-old Brooklyn boy: “Dazzling, glittering, throbbing in triumph. And the crowds on the rooftops roared. They were roaring on roofs all over Brooklyn, on streets, on bridges, the whole city roaring for light.”

With the race of Allied armies across Europe and the success of American arms in the Pacific, the war was drawing to a close. Near the end, Jane at one point had a dozen people reporting to her. Of course, some of them weren’t very good and she wound up staying late trying to clean up their work. “
They were so fast!” she would say. But “it took me so long
to rewrite what they’d written.” She tried farming some of them out to other departments, until she was down to just herself and one particularly adept researcher. She was a boss now, but apparently not a very good one. Says son Jim: “She was not a leader, not an organizer, not a manager.”

But Jane did not have to endure this role for long. Soon,
no one at OWI had much to do, since there wasn’t much of a war left. People would show up late for work, gather together for the rest of the day discussing the postwar world ahead—“the PWW,” they called it—talking hopes, dreams, and job prospects, thinking about the ad agency they’d start or the novel they’d write.

One day, probably in late 1945, the Washington Place apartment where Jane and Bob first met was the scene for
another party, this one with many of the Butzner clan on hand. Jane’s younger brother Jim and his wife, Kay, high school sweethearts who’d married in 1942, were there. So was John, newly demobilized after three and a half years with the army meteorological service in Alaska. And so were some of the Grumman people Bob and Betty liked to bring home. One of them was a tall, thin, stylish young Barnard College graduate from New York’s Staten Island. She had enrolled in a graduate fine arts program at Yale, but the war had derailed that plan, bringing her to Grumman instead, where she worked as a draftsman. Her name was Viola Peterson but everyone called her Pete. Betty liked her. Jane liked her. Bob liked her. Everything they saw in Pete convinced them she was just right for John. Recalled Jane, “We wanted her in the family.”

The two of them, John and Pete, had actually met at an earlier party but found little chance to talk. Well, then, how to promote a budding romance that hadn’t budded? It was Bob who hatched the strategy. Uncle Billy Butzner’s daughter Elizabeth was up from Virginia, visiting; of course they’d have to commemorate the occasion in a photo. So the whole party, all those Butzners, marched up to the roof, there to be artfully arranged for the camera: In front was Jane, in slacks and jacket, sitting on the roof, Bob squatting beside her. In the back, Elizabeth from Virginia; brother Jim, towering over everyone, with wife, Kay, in a pretty print dress; Betty in the center, looking regal; John in uniform, smoking a cigarette; and Pete, a great sweep of dark hair lofted behind her head, beside him. No hint of the hardships of war, everyone well dressed and groomed, looking great, lined up for the camera,
snap.
The scene recorded for posterity…

Clockwise, starting from Bob Jacobs crouched in the front row: Jane; Kay Butzner, brother Jim’s wife; Jane’s cousin Elizabeth Butzner, daughter of her uncle Billy; brother Jim; sister Betty; brother John; Viola (“Pete”) Peterson, John’s future wife. This was taken on the roof of the building where Jane and Betty were living at the end of World War II.
Credit 6

And now Bob’s scheme swung into action. He guided John and Pete to the parapet by the side of the roof and started pointing out New York landmarks. But behind his back he was making hand signals to Jane and the others, shooing them off the roof. “And so we all beat it,” Jane recalled. Bob got the couple fixed on some landmark, then quietly scooted away, too, locking the door to the roof behind him. Pete and John were stuck there, alone together, left to figure out how to get back down.

John urged Pete down the fire escape first; as a woman, she’d be less threatening to anyone seeing them swing gigantically into view at their window. Finally they found someone willing to buy into their story, open his window, and let them back inside. By this time, of course, they were fast friends, victims together of Bob’s devilish ruse, intrepid adventurers.

On May 25, 1945, three months before the end of the war, they were married. Recalled Jane, “It all worked just the way Bob said it would.”

—

In August, atomic bombs incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In September, Japan surrendered. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen began streaming home. The great belligerent apparatus of man, woman, and machine built to defeat Germany and Japan began to break up. Soon, paperwork progressing through the war-bloated federal bureaucracy was informing hundreds of thousands of government employees that they were out of a job. Jane was among them.

Like many a writer out of work before and since,
Jane became a freelancer. The word sometimes just means a writer between jobs, or a wannabe who’ll never make a nickel from writing. But it can also mean just what it sounds like: an independent writer for hire, paid by the article, essay, or book. It could be scary, weathering rejection, your income dependent on the vagaries of editors and the uncertain depths of your own wit, skill, and diligence. On the other hand, you were apt to meet people you wouldn’t normally meet, go places—geographic, intellectual, and imagined—you might not normally go. One of Jane’s early assignments took her to the South Pacific, if only in her head.

Even before Pearl Harbor, the Australian navy had put together a network of missionaries, planters, miners, and government workers that, all through the Pacific war, surrounded by Japanese army and naval units, funneled information on their movements to the Allies. Its head was Eric A. Feldt, an Australian naval officer, who wrote of their exploits in a book titled
The Coast Watchers:
“It is a story of
damp, dimly lighted jungle camps, of hidden treetop lookouts; of silent submarines, landing a few intrepid men on hostile beaches, in the dead of night; of American airmen mysteriously rescued from enemy-held islands, surrounded by enemy-dominated seas.”