Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (25 page)

established her as a person to be reckoned with. Here was a new kind of “expert”…This able woman had used her eyes and, even more admirably, her heart to assay the human result of large-scale housing, and she was saying, in effect, that these toplofty barracks…were not fit for human habitation.

In later years, other urban design conferences would be held at Harvard. But this was the first, the one they’d talk about later, the one where Jane Jacobs first stood up to speak. A moment before, she had been invisible; now she was a name. She was like the understudy for a Broadway show brought in at the last minute to sub for the real star. Doug Haskell they’d wanted; they got Jane Jacobs instead. And a lot of them never forgot it.

The twenty-seven-year-old Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, a future Pritzker Prize winner then studying at the Harvard School of Design, would recall Jane’s “
passionate plea” on behalf of endangered neighborhoods. But the passion didn’t come out as broad emotion or through commanding stage presence; then and later, Jane Jacobs was not a galvanizing speaker. Rather, it was
what she said
that stuck with people, the actual words, the ideas themselves;
they
conveyed the passion. “I had hypnotized myself,” she’d say in an interview later, “but I had apparently hypnotized them too.”

This wasn’t artful sleight-of-hand, either. Jane had been observing and writing about cities almost since she first came to New York—first in the pages of
Vogue
, then in
Amerika
, and now, since 1952, in
Forum;
she was no Janie-come-lately amateur. She had something to say because
she’d thought deeply about things she’d seen and read; and because she’d been around long enough that she had plenty of city life to think
about
—plenty of buildings, plenty of streetscapes, plenty of architects, maps and drawings, books and articles, artistic statements and aesthetic principles, plenty of neighborhood characters, city officials and developers, storekeepers, moms and dads. When she stepped before her audience at Harvard, her stew of ideas had long been simmering.

A week after the conference, Doug Haskell heard from the architect Victor Gruen, whose work was the subject of one of Jane’s
Forum
articles and who had attended the conference. Jane was “
wonderful,” he wrote.

Everyone was using the expressions “human scale” and “warmth” but Jane was the only one who really talked about it, without ever using any of the big words. She was like a fresh wind in the airless room…Her simplicity and sincerity and her thoughtfulness swept everybody off his feet. There’s no doubt that she was the “star” of the show.

At Harvard, Jane stood among the giants of the field; you couldn’t vault much higher into the urban design firmament than her audience there. It wasn’t that everything she’d said in those ten minutes had never been said before. As Gruen intimated, modernist architecture and planning had begun to wear a little thin; intimacy of scale had become part of the conversation. Still, Jane made her mark. On the back of Gruen’s letter, Haskell penciled, “The wisest thing I have done in a long time was to turn over that assignment to her!”

—

That Jane was independent, even fearless, doesn’t mean she was immune to praise, that she didn’t care what others thought of her. Certainly the plaudits that came her way now would help extinguish any vestigial self-doubt about the worth of her ideas or her ability to express them. Preparing her talk and enjoying the response to it plainly marked a turning point for her. In a letter to Catherine Bauer, the public housing expert, Jane would write that her ideas had “been
stewing around in me for the past two years or so,” taking care to add: “not before.” The letter was dated April 29, 1958—two years, to the month, since Harvard. High-profile honors like Nobel Prizes often go to those toward the end of their careers. But a second-tier honor, coming earlier, can serve its own,
perhaps greater social purpose, reinforcing the recipient’s sense of worth, bolstering her ambitions, helping to propel her and her ideas into the world. Something like this had now happened to Jane.

Her Harvard showing strengthened her hand at
Forum
, landing her higher-profile assignments, many of them now anointed with her byline. Jim remembers his mother coming home with the news, the significance of which, at age nine, escaped him. Jane explained that her name would now appear on the articles she wrote; she was, quite literally, no longer anonymous. It was good for
Forum
to be publishing the work of the woman who’d electrified Cambridge. And good for Jane, too, left freer to stretch her intellectual and editorial muscles.

In September 1956, a substantial chunk of the magazine was devoted to the question “By 1976, What City Pattern?” Jane wrote the lead essay: “
The last ten years have given us an unholy mess of land use, land coverage, congestion and ugliness. This is nothing to what the next twenty promise. Barring annihilation, deep depression, or a more tractable invention supplanting the automobile, we have no way to avert this crisis of growth.”

In a March 1957 article, she surveyed the office boom in New York, which had seen sixty-four major office buildings go up since the war—Lever House, the Seagram Building, 430 Park Avenue. “What,” she asked, “has happened to those
sensible-sounding postwar catchwords, ‘dispersal’ and ‘decentralization’? What has happened to the vision of the happy file clerks eating sandwiches on the grass far from the madding crowd?”

In May, she revisited that classic urban form, the row house: “
The big rediscovery is that a basic scheme dating from pedestrian days in Pompeii, and carriage days in Philadelphia, turns out to be an excellent answer to the automobile.”

In August, she turned from streets and alleys to regions. The problems of metropolitan government would be solved “
not by abstract logic or elegance of structure, but in a combination of approaches, by trial, error and immense experimentation in a context of expediency and conflicting interests. Whatever we arrive at, we shall feel our way there.”

All this energetic voicing-of-views appeared within Jane’s longtime journalistic home. But
Forum
could not contain her forever. It was the littlest child in the Time-Life family. It had the smallest circulation. Bigger by far, with a broader reach and larger profile, was
Fortune
, Henry Luce’s
oversized business magazine, launched in 1930. In the first week of January 1957, nine months after Jane’s Harvard talk, Doug Haskell received
a brotherly memo from a
Fortune
editor, Holly Whyte, seeking help.

William Hollingsworth Whyte, a Princeton graduate and Marine Corps officer who’d served in the Pacific, had made a splash the year before with one of those era-capturing popular books,
The Organization Man
, about corporate life in the new American suburbs. Now, at
Fortune
, he was turning his attention to the problems of the cities. He had in mind a whole series of articles to come out later that year. He was looking for ideas, and for writers to take them on.

Jane was one of his finds. “
I kept hearing about this Jane Jacobs,” he’d recall. “I went to see her and I was mightily impressed. I thought she was a real genius.”

   CHAPTER 11   

A PERSON WORTH TALKING TO

L
ATER, IN 1992
, thinking back to the article he commissioned her to write for
Fortune
that would bring her such attention and acclaim, Whyte remembered deciding that Jane was “
just the person” to do it. Nonetheless, the article, “Downtown Is for People,” almost never happened at all.

At first, as Whyte told it, “she demurred and told me she wasn’t up to it; she had never written anything longer than a few paragraphs.” His colleagues at
Fortune
“felt she should not be entrusted” with so important a piece. “She was a female; she was untried.” Why, she commuted to work on…a…
bicycle.
All in all, it seemed to them, Jane Jacobs was “a most inappropriate choice” and was actually taken off the story—which, to hear Whyte tell it, left her feeling relieved. But when a senior editor on the project fell ill, Jane was reinstated. And this time there was no stopping her. “She wrote and wrote and wrote, providing a first draft of 14,000 words with not a word, she believed, to be edited out. Our lamb had become a tigress.”

Controversy lit up Jane’s piece, not just potentially but right then, right there, within Time Life. When her draft was passed around, Whyte heard right off from the publisher, C. D. Jackson, who was “aghast.” Just who, he demanded to know, was this “crazy dame” who, in the pages of
Fortune
, proposed to give “aid and comfort to critics of Lincoln Center?” That much-anticipated, gleaming new performing arts complex was all set to go up and transfigure the cultural life of the city’s West Side. Yet Jane was painting it as an example of all that was wrong with modern planning.

A luncheon meeting was arranged. Jackson was there, along with a coterie of
Fortune
editors, and Jane. “The antagonists went at it,” recalled Whyte. Jackson—Mr. Charles Douglas Jackson, a fifty-five-year-old Princeton grad, veteran of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor to the CIA, expert in psychological warfare, speechwriter for President Eisenhower, trustee of the Metropolitan Opera and long-standing champion of Lincoln Center—questioned the accuracy of Jane’s reporting. Jane defended her essay with “
a screed of facts and firsthand observations.” Whyte kept his head down; when it was over, Jane asked him why he hadn’t stuck up for her. “No need,” replied Whyte. “The poor man”—meaning Jackson—“thought he’d hit a buzz saw.”

Now, there are discrepancies in Whyte’s account, which may be a little more “colorful,” and less accurate, than one might like. When he first encountered Jacobs, he’d assert in 1992, her work at
Forum
“consisted
mainly of writing captions.” This is untrue. Like other staffers, she wrote some of the captions a photo-stuffed magazine like
Forum
required. But this was the least of her work; her pages-long, research-heavy articles going back five years represented the magazine’s last word on urban subjects. And in claiming that Jane demanded not a word of her article be cut, Whyte was imputing to her a stance more like that of a novice writer than of the seasoned pro she was; Jane knew better than anyone the value of an editor’s blue pencil.

Because Jane’s
Fortune
article led her directly to
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, Whyte had legitimate reason to revisit those days in 1957 when, in retrospect, Jane stood at the threshold of fame and he, Whyte, was there to witness it. But just why he wrote so dismissively of her in 1992 remains a wonderment. He and Jacobs were friends. They lauded city life with equal ardency.
They respected one another. Perhaps the passage of thirty-five years had clouded his memory. Perhaps depicting a callow Jane Jacobs made for a story more fun to tell. Perhaps he’d ingested more of the prejudices of his
Fortune
colleagues than he realized. Or maybe, back in 1957, he’d simply not known any better. As Jane’s son Jim suggests, he may never have known that Jane’s career as writer and editor reached back across two decades; “Jane wasn’t one to toot her own horn.”

Certainly, the article’s passage into print was difficult; the fourteen-thousand-word draft of Whyte’s memory got whittled down by more than half. Though he was only nine at the time, Jim remembers his
mother working on it. “It was really hard; she worried she couldn’t get it to work.” But she did get it to work. And with it, the gate onto the big world that had inched open after her Harvard talk swung open wide.

—

The articles in the
Fortune
series began appearing in the fall of 1957. They stood out, Whyte would say in his introduction to
The Exploding Metropolis
, which carried them into book form, because they were written “by people who like cities”; in that era of Suburbia Ascendant, there weren’t many of them around. Together the seven articles made for what Sam Bass Warner would call in his foreword to a later edition “
a manifesto of cultural politics,” one holding for the small-scale and the local as against the over-big.

Whyte himself introduced the series with a provocatively titled piece, “Are Cities Un-American?,” though he didn’t really ask, much less answer, the question. Then, month by month, came articles about cars and cities, slums, urban sprawl; this last was again by Whyte, who lamented how “
huge patches of once green countryside have been turned into vast, smog-filled deserts that are neither city, suburb, nor country.” Then, in April 1958, Jane’s piece appeared.

Big cities, she began, were getting ready to build again; new downtown redevelopment projects were in the pipeline. What would they be like?

They will be spacious, parklike, and uncrowded. They will feature long green vistas. They will be stable and symmetrical and orderly. They will be clean, impressive, and monumental. They will have all the attributes of a well-kept dignified cemetery.

She cited several of them by name—Golden Gateway in San Francisco, Lower Hill auditorium complex in Pittsburgh, the Convention Center in Cleveland. And a dreary business they would be: “The projects will not revitalize downtown; they will deaden it. For they work at cross-purposes to the city. They banish the street.”

Jane’s piece ran about six thousand words, about twenty-five double-spaced pages. It ranged over broad territory, referred to numerous cities, was accompanied by arresting illustrations. But at bottom, Jane was devoting a sizable swath of
Fortune
’s expensive editorial real estate to city
streets.
But just what were cities if
not
streets? Didn’t the awful
failures of city life all come down to streets that weren’t safe, streets strangled with traffic, streets that were ugly, dirty, and depressing?