Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (20 page)

It was a different time. The government could ask such questions. People like Jane were enjoined to answer them if they wished to keep their jobs. Of the specific figures in Snow’s interrogatory, most are forgotten today—the United Public Workers of America, their Atlantic City convention, Henry Wallace, the Progressives, the World Federation of Trade Unions. They are the stuff of a particular moment in history. Only Senator McCarthy and his
-ism
remain in the consciousness of mainstream America.

Jane submitted her response and never heard anything further. She’d long wonder about this silence and would ask her brother John, a lawyer, on the brink of a distinguished legal career, what he made of it. Oh, the federal bureaucracy just doesn’t know how to cope with you, he’d say. But years later, in 1998, after rereading Jane’s “foreword,” he changed his mind. No, he guessed, the loyalty board reviewer must have been won over by the sheer power and feeling of her ideas; Jane had “left the reviewer with
no option but to agree.”

Maybe so, but any judgment the government might have made was rendered moot when Jane submitted her resignation from
Amerika.

—

It was a miracle
Amerika
held on as long as it did. As the cold war heated up, the Soviets reputedly did all they could to discourage its distribution, manipulating circulation numbers in order to claim their citizens just weren’t interested, returning 25,000 unsold copies each month. “I think it’s
a safe conclusion that
Amerika
as we know it will shortly be throttled to death,” Gordon Knox, the embassy’s first secretary, had written Marion Sanders in the spring of 1950. Yes, it was good for
Amerika
to have a presence in Russia even if few Soviet citizens could get their hands on it; he understood that. But “my suggestion is that we quit quite soon,” maybe once the British did—their publication,
British Ally
, was getting similarly hammered—“so that we keep a solid front and make it clear that the Soviets cannot tolerate Free World publications in the USSR…The cold war has become a good deal colder, and
Amerika
inevitably is one of the casualties.”

The scuttling of the magazine didn’t come right away. As late as early 1952, it was still given to
soul searching over its mission, “presenting to the Soviet people the best in American civilization”; it was conjuring up article subjects apt to show off America to Russia’s disadvantage, even weighing color palettes most likely to appeal to Russian readers: too many bright blue skies were “blinding to an inhabitant of the gray-brown Russian landscape.” But in the end, Knox was right, the magazine folded later in 1952 and moved the vestiges of its operation to Washington, D.C., where it would be revived in 1956 under a different name.

Moving to Washington, of course, was nothing that Jane, her ties firmly to New York, with two kids, busy fixing up the house on Hudson Street, was about to do. So, effective May 2, 1952, she resigned. She was, at this point, a GS-13, fairly high in the U.S. civil service system, making $8,360 per year—something like $90,000 or $100,000 today. In writing to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about Jane’s case on June 20, 1952, Hiram Bingham, the then chair of the Loyalty Review Board, simply checked a box: “Resigned or otherwise separated from Federal service
prior to decision on loyalty.”

—

When she left
Amerika
, she’d write, Jane was
drawn to two magazines for her next job. One was
Natural History
, the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History, which went back to 1900, the whole natural
world furnishing its subject matter. But it, too, was located in Washington, D.C., so that was out. The other candidate was
Architectural Forum
, a Time-Life publication that elbowed its way to the attention of American architects every month with oversized 250-page issues stuffed with accounts of new buildings coming down the pipeline, think pieces about the state of architecture, with lots of text but even more with photos and drawings, and, of course, pages of ads for stainless steel and masonry, aluminum curtain walls and folding doors.
Amerika
had used a number of
Forum
illustrations for its articles; Jane herself may have borrowed them from its editors. Bob read the magazine. Jane admired it. She was a good fit for it, her several ambitious articles on architecture and housing at
Amerika
strengthening her credentials. And it was likely to pay better, too. She did a trial run with the magazine, and by September was on the masthead as a
Forum
“associate,” one of its dozen or so staff writers. From the beginning, she was left with a good feeling about her new employer.
Forum
had recently lost two editors, one whose beat was hospitals and schools, the other private homes. “
They asked me—instead of automatically slotting me—which I would be more interested in. I said hospitals and schools, and they said fine.” It was mutual respect from the beginning.

But now Jane had a new language to learn: recalling her first days at
Forum
, Jane would later tell how, in the evenings, once the kids were in bed, Bob
taught her to read blueprints. Which sounds cozy and straightforward enough, but probably wasn’t. Drawings, arranged in a hierarchy of set sizes, thick with symbols, cross-hatching, dimensions, and dotted lines, were the universal language of architectural practice. Through them, you presented ideas for individual buildings or whole projects—that is,
sold
them—and then conveyed detailed instructions for how they were to be built. They ranged from easy-to-read floor plans to intricate workings-out of window openings, or the complex junctures between floors and walls; site plans, elevations, and cross-sections; isometric projections and two-point perspectives, where lines leading off into the distance converge to a vanishing point. Each had its own purpose, each its own conventions. Ease with them normally came only with years of architectural education and practice. If you were writing about a new building for
Forum
, it didn’t mean the building had gone up and you’d toured it from top to bottom; it meant that it
wasn’t
up, you’d reviewed the drawings for it, and you had to imagine it. “I
was utterly baffled at first,” Jane would write, “being supposed to make sense out of great, indigestible rolls of working drawings and plans. My husband came to my rescue and every night for months”—
months
—“he gave me lessons in reading drawings, learning what to watch for as unusual,” bestowing upon her new eyes.

Jane’s first piece for
Forum
, about a mixed maternity and general hospital in Lima, Peru, appeared in June 1952, before she was scarcely loose from
Amerika
and not yet employed by
Forum;
this was her trial run. Though she asserted that “
its planted entrance court and many patios are leisurely and welcoming,” Jane had never seen them, never visited Lima, basing her account on interviews with the architects, and on plans, drawings, and models. But that was enough for her to be able to write that moving through the complex “is as pat and deceptively simple as a double crostic.” Or this—that in Peru, childbirth was seen “as an exciting, wholesome event which has nothing to do with illness and should be kept strictly apart from arrangements for sick people.”

In succeeding months, she wrote a succession of articles on her assigned beat, and off it. She wrote a long article on the hospital architect Isadore Rosenfield, and, in March 1953, a piece about shopping centers—air-conditioning them, anchor stores designed to pull in customers, what downtowns could learn from them—all full of bright energy and enthusiasm. Later that year, she did a piece on what was then a new phenomenon—self-service, not just in supermarkets but for clothing, perfume, or building supplies, and how stores needed to be redesigned with new fixtures, racks, and shelving systems. “Self-selection,” as self-service was still called, “
speeds things up for the fast-tempo customer and so increases turnover. It lets the dilly-dallier happily dilly-dally on his own. It gives the salesman a chance to concentrate on the power-tool or baby-carriage customers instead of the 25-cent screw-driver and dozen-diaper shoppers.”

(Jane’s initial beat, hospitals, ultimately became her husband’s architectural specialty. Through her articles, by one account, he came to see “that hospitals presented design problems of such
wondrous complexity that an architect might happily give a whole career to them,” which is what he did. By 1953, he was working with Joseph “Munio” Neufeld on the Hadassah-Hebrew University Hospital in Jerusalem, the first of some two dozen hospitals overfilling his long career.)

As she scoped out subjects for future articles, recommended which
buildings and which architects warranted editorial treatment, Jane seems almost from the beginning to have been taken seriously around the office. On August 25, 1953, less than a year after she first joined
Forum
, the longtime editor Douglas Haskell wrote his own boss, the publisher Perry Prentice, about what he imagined as a major editorial project for the magazine. In the distant reaches of British Columbia, the aluminum producer Alcoa of Canada was creating a new community. It would house, besides its manufacturing plant, forty thousand people. Kitimat, it was to be called. A bold project on a gargantuan scale, and one deserving commensurate treatment in
Forum:
“
Every way you turn, this is a completely thought out town,” wrote Haskell, worth maybe fifty pages in the magazine. One of the architects involved in the project himself wanted to write it. But Haskell saw the many interwoven aspects of the subject—architectural, geographic, economic, human—as extraordinarily challenging. And as he looked around at his staff, he wrote Prentice, “it seems to be the only writer we can assign to this is Jane Jacobs. She alone will have the capacity of giving it the human touch while digging into the details.”

Jane, on a routine assignment for
Architectural Forum,
October 26, 1956, not long past her fortieth birthday
Credit 9

It didn’t work out that way; the article was scaled back to twenty pages, appearing about a year later, and Jane didn’t get to write it. But still, it was striking how soon, and how completely, Jane had won Haskell’s trust. Perhaps feeding off it, Jane grew increasingly free to express her opinions, often in strong language, about the many buildings and projects she reviewed. Of a prefabricated school, she wrote Haskell in 1955, “
I heartily dislike the looks and the general tone of this school. It
looks
cheesesparing and niggling and no fun and no aiming high, and there is something wormy and pathetic about its little attempts at applied amenities.” Of a shopping center in Yonkers, New York, she wrote him that it was “
a spectacularly bad example of shopping center planning,” then spent the next three pages, in close single-spaced text, explaining why: the two department stores were too far apart; the overall design only accentuated its forbidding length. “It is a monotonous succession of triangular planting beds (and ugly bituminous paving) with no variations, no enticement.” The center’s excellent site and large surrounding population might make it a success, but, if so, no thanks to its design.

With Jane’s rhetoric always came fact, evidence. Back at
Amerika
her performance reviews had practically always come in at Excellent. For all the excesses of her personality, her need and determination to
express
, she inspired trust.

She was doing a good job.

But is there something a little watery and wanting in so homely an assertion?

In early 1955, Jane was thirty-eight years old. She was happily married, a mother of two, pregnant with a third. She had a house of her own. She had risen in the world, had achieved much of what she’d wanted in coming to New York; she was a writer paid well for her work. She had all the knowledge, experience, initiative, and talent she would ever need to do what she was going to do in the big world. But she had not yet done it; she wasn’t one of those artists, thinkers, and precocious talents—mostly men, in a man’s world, propped up by men’s privileges—who, by age thirty-eight, had already made their mark. Hers was a more gradually unfolding story.

If you read her articles in
Amerika
, or in
Forum
during her first years there, you find little hint of the themes percolating up in
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
—except, that is, for her interest in the subject itself: cities. But her impatience with existing architectural and planning
practice? Her rejection of the status quo? These are nowhere to be found. At least as she expressed them in the pages of
Forum
, and before that in
Amerika
, hers are conventional sensibilities. She attacks nothing, submits to what is, embraces the new suburban shopping centers. She accepts the postwar world without cavil or complaint.