Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (31 page)

Then, there were the black-hatted city planners as a gang, barren of ideas, purveyors of the “pseudoscience” of urban planning, stuck “in the same stage of
elaborately learned superstition as medical science was early in the last century, when physicians put their faith in bloodletting, to draw out the evil humors…believed to cause disease,” an analogy Jane developed at impressive length.

Of Ebenezer Howard, Jane wrote, “
His aim was the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own.” This was not the only time Jane was acerbic or unforgiving. “You were
pretty ticked off at American culture” while writing
Death and Life
, James Howard Kunstler once said to her: “What was it that was getting under your skin in those days?”

“What was getting immediately under my skin,” she replied,

was this mad spree of deceptions and vandalism and waste that was called urban renewal. And the way it had been adopted like a fad. And people were so mindless about it and so dishonest about what was being done. That’s what ticked me off, because I was working for an architectural magazine and I saw all this first hand and I saw how the most awful things were being excused.

Herbert Gans may have been wrong to think that Boston’s West End, a neighborhood soon to be wiped off the map, had failed to interest her.
She did visit it, talked to shopkeepers there, found in its sad story examples of just the kind of dishonesty that made her livid. In 1958, she talked to two architects who had helped justify its destruction. One said of its homes that they were built so well its displaced residents would never again live in anything so structurally sound. Another told of having to get down “
on his hands and knees with a photographer through utility crawl
spaces so that they could get pictures of sufficient dark and noisome spaces” to label it a slum. Here was duplicity justified as serving a greater good—the elimination of a slum that, from all Jane (and Gans) could see, was no slum at all.

As a girl, on a trip to Fredericksburg, Virginia, near where her father had grown up, Jane visited a museum featuring machines and tools brightly painted “to
show you how they worked”—wheels and housings, rotors and ratchets, showing themselves off as they whirred in front of you or as you imagined them whirring. At the Scranton railroad station, too, she liked “the locomotives and those pistons that moved the wheels,” the cams and connecting rods transferring the steam’s hot pressured power into forward motion, so visceral and direct. But then, beginning in the 1930s, locomotives began to sport
skirts
—sheet metal shaped and positioned to suggest modernity and motion, but hiding the real works behind them. Now, said Jane, “you couldn’t see how the wheels moved, and that disturbed me.” Likewise for cities, so much more complex than any locomotive, a similar incuriosity: Billions went into housing projects. Neighborhoods were torn down. Towers went up. Streets were widened, or eliminated. Zoning laws prescribed mathematical ratios of this to that. And yet, it seemed to her, no one stopped to ask how the cities thus affected actually worked. “It may be that we have become
so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give,” she wrote in
Death and Life.

What made cities work, and work well, was the overarching theme of her book. Cities required “exuberant diversity,” the endless mixing of every kind of everything. And that demanded the satisfaction of four conditions: 1) mixed primary uses; 2) short blocks; 3) buildings of varied ages, including old ones; and 4) dense concentrations of people. To each, in Part II, she devoted a substantial chapter.

“Mixed primary uses” was Jane’s name for an urban texture in which commercial areas were not segregated in one place, residences in another, and warehouses and factories in a barren third, but were all mixed up. In any one stretch of street, divergent uses and needs—shops, bars, houses, grocery stores, little factories—fed off one another, drawing people at every hour of the day, and sometimes night, helping to keep the area lively and safe.

Short blocks encouraged varied walking paths, the chance to encounter different people, businesses, activities—more choices, more corners
for small shops, more liveliness; long, self-isolating blocks led to stagnation. “
It is fluidity of use, and the mixing of paths, not homogeneity of architecture, that ties together city neighborhoods into pools of city use.”

Ramshackle old buildings, with their low rents, encouraged new business start-ups and fledgling neighborhood institutions. “Among the most admirable and enjoyable sights to be found along the sidewalks of big cities are the ingenious adaptations of old quarters to new uses,” like the stable that becomes a house, the basement that becomes an immigrants’ club, the brewery that becomes a theater. “
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings,” she wrote. “New ideas must use old buildings.”

Finally, Jane devoted a chapter to how great cities depended on dense concentrations of people—not just downtown, but in residential neighborhoods. “
The overcrowded slums of planning literature are teeming areas with a high density of dwellings. [But the seemingly] over-crowded slums of American real life are, more and more typically, dull areas with a low density of dwellings.” Witness Oakland, or Roxbury in Boston, or Detroit, with its “seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.”

This sort of cartoonish summary of some of its key ideas is not the best way to appreciate
Death and Life.
Like other books almost unbearably rich with fresh ideas, it loses much in the translation to outline and overview, is left vulnerable to unthinking adulation or lazy distortion. Its memorable catchphrases, which have become fixtures in the literature of cities and planning, do help bring the book to mind:
border vacuums;
mixed primary uses; unslumming; cataclysmic money;
eyes on the street.
But once
Death and Life
became a kind of urban gospel, developers and others sometimes took to invoking them with scarcely a nod to what Jane actually meant. Then, too, the book’s aphoristic flavor makes it tempting to reduce it to the likes of study guide or catechism:

•  “In cities, liveliness and variety attract more liveliness; deadness and monotony repel life.”

•  “In orthodox city planning, neighborhood open spaces are venerated…much as savages venerate magical fetishes.”

•  “Why are there so often no people where the parks are and no parks where the people are?”

•  “Corruption grows more inventive, rather than less so, the longer it has an object to play with.”

•  “People are rightly suspicious of programs that give them nothing for something.”

•  “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”

To paraphrase Walt Whitman,
Death and Life
contains multitudes. It can be abridged and digested, but not without irremediable loss. Not just Jane’s artfulness but her loving attention to each facet of city-ness, detailed and nuanced (if occasionally tedious), made the book what it was.

Even the likes of parking lots and windowless industrial frontages were eligible for that sort of treatment from her. Consider a later chapter, “The Curse of Border Vacuums,” Jane’s term for certain lifeless tracts deadening to the eye and destructive to pedestrian life. She showed how a railroad
station
could tie in to its surroundings, but not a railroad
track;
a single government
building
, but not normally a large government
complex.
In both cases, the former could unite and strengthen a city district while the latter tore it up. “
Frequent borders, whether formed by arterial highways, institutions, projects, campuses, industrial parks, or any other massive uses of special land, can in this way tear a city to tatters.”

Railroad tracks, of course, are the classic example of a border vacuum. “The other side of the tracks,” after all, is shorthand for a social border one side of which is poorer or slummier than the other. Jane didn’t mean social borders here but physical and functional ones. The “blight-proneness” of areas beside railroad tracks was sometimes explained by the noise and soot thrown off by passing trains. But that was a secondary factor—
had
to be, really, because you could see the same deadness adjacent to a highway, or hospital complex, or featureless parking lot, or high-rise housing project, or over-scaled college campus, or even a park ineptly integrated into the rest of the city. The root cause was not noise and soot; rather, border vacuums served as unlovely barriers to movement and interaction. The streets abutting them were the “end of the line,” attracting few pedestrians; it was discouraging or difficult to cross a broad highway or parking lot, much less a warehouse’s blank wall. They “fail to get a by-the-way circulation of people going beyond them in the direction of the border, because few are going to that Beyond.” With the adjoining streets shunned, the vitality of the whole area suffers.

But it
didn’t have to
, said Jane. Borrowing a principle from Kevin Lynch, an MIT professor whose
The Image of the City
she much admired, a
border
could be made into a
seam
, “
a line of exchange along which two areas are sewn together.” For example, waterfronts, blocked off from neighboring streets and often serving as border vacuums, “should be penetrated by small, and even casual, public openings calculated for glimpsing or watching work and water traffic.” She continued:

Near where I live is an old open dock, the only one for miles, next to a huge Department of Sanitation incinerator and scow anchorage. The dock is used for eel fishing, sunbathing, kite flying, car tinkering, picnicking, bicycle riding, ice-cream and hot-dog vending, waving at passing boats, and general kibitzing…You could not find a happier place on a hot summer evening or a lazy summer Sunday. From time to time, a great slushing and clanking fills the air as a sanitation truck dumps its load into a waiting garbage scow. This is not pretty-pretty, but it is an event greatly enjoyed on the dock. It fascinates everybody.

And so, a troublesome border metamorphoses into a “seam,” the city stitched whole.

I cite at somewhat greater length Jane’s treatment of this one unattractive urban phenomenon—she devotes seventeen pages to border vacuums—to suggest something of her method. The book’s abiding worth lay not in her ideas alone but in the richness of insight, detail, and observation with which she developed each of them—often, as in the preceding passage, from her own life and experience.

In arguing that cities need old buildings to nourish economically precarious businesses, Jane describes the shabby old building on Sheridan Square that housed her writing studio:

The floor of the building in which this book is being written is occupied also by a health club with a gym, a firm of ecclesiastical decorators, an insurgent Democratic party reform club, a Liberal party political club, a music society, an accordionists’ association, a retired importer who sells maté by mail, a man who sells paper and who also takes care of shipping the maté, a dental laboratory, a studio for watercolor lessons, and a maker of costume jewelry.

And then, as if to throw in her lot with her Sheridan Square friends, she adds, “There is no place for the likes of us in new construction.”

—

A little after her book came out, a Cleveland man wrote Jane for advice on how he might track down housing and crime statistics for New York housing projects. At the city housing authority, she wrote back, he could expect little help on crime statistics. “
They are extremely touchy on this matter. They may even deny that they have such a thing.” At police precincts, they probably couldn’t break down the stats the way he’d want. Still, it was “possible to get a pretty good idea by going in person to police precincts” and interviewing officers; likewise, schoolteachers serving the project. “In short, you have to see many people and do a great deal of detective work.”

In 1959, Ellen Perry, a recently divorced twenty-eight-year-old who had studied at the Harvard School of Design, was advised by a friend that a Mrs. Jacobs needed help in researching a book. Soon, she was fielding Jane’s requests, feeding facts back to her. On Chloetheil Smith, a modernist architect; on population density figures for Georgetown, in Washington, D.C.; on the union pay scale for elevator operators. The modest checks Perry received, for the equivalent of $100 or $200 in today’s money, came through Jane’s Rockefeller grant. “
There is something more you could do now,” Jane wrote Perry in October 1959: She needed crime statistics on the ten or fifteen largest cities. And juvenile crime and delinquency rates, too, if Perry could get them. And something on what London was like before the automobile. Perry would report back to Jane with little executive summaries she recalls Jane appreciating. “
The subjects she asked me to follow were those on which she had hunches but no firm numbers.” Sometimes, Jane would have Perry wander through neighborhoods, counting mom-and-pop stores, or people sitting out on stoops or hanging out of windows.

Jane’s hard facts stood out sharply from the artful sketches and bird’s-eye vistas that were the stock-in-trade of design studios and planning departments. “
People who are interested only in how a city ‘ought’ to look and uninterested in how it works will be disappointed by this book,” she wrote in its introduction. “To seek for the look of things as a primary purpose or as the main drama is apt to make nothing but trouble.” Here, her anger welling up, she told of a pretty patch of green in an East Harlem project. A social worker was “astonished” by how often, and with how much vehemence, it was derided, though no one could say just why. Then, finally, one tenant did: