Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (33 page)

Still, if she was a mother of the 1950s, she managed to sidestep most of its tyrannies and would rank as one of somewhat unorthodox style—as were she and Bob, together, as parents. “There was something weird about us,” allows Jim, speaking of the family. To the children, all through their lives, their parents were never Mom and Dad, but Jane and Bob. From early on, Jane treated her children as adults; for his parents, says Jim, the children were “not small versions of you. They were their own people.”
Hey, listen to this
, she’d say, rounding them up to read aloud what had caught her attention in some book she was reading, about archaeology or politics or who knows what else. She and Bob included them almost automatically in their adult activities. An acquaintance from one community battle, Pierre Tonachel, remembers Jane bringing them to protests and neighborhood meetings; the kids—“happy, sweet kids,” he calls them—were “always listening in” to whatever was going on. “It must have been fun for them to come along.” Mary remembers being with the adults at the Lion’s Head, a local tavern, where a round table in the window served as neighborhood meeting place.

Death and Life
devoted a whole chapter to the role of city streets in “assimilating” children. The streets and sidewalks granted them
an “outdoor home base from which to play, to hang around in, and to help form their notions of the world”—in short, she all but says, become civilized.
The tone is one of clear-eyed acknowledgment of what young people are really like. “
Little tots are decorative and relatively docile,” she writes, “but older children are noisy and energetic, and they act on their environment instead of just letting it act on them,” which is what gets them into trouble. As they grow older, they leave their jump ropes and roller skates behind, and flirt, talk, push, shove, and indulge in horseplay. “
Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it.” Mary was too young while Jane worked on
Death and Life
to figure much in it, but glimpses of the boys do appear—darting out into the street, finding secret hiding places in the subways, contriving to avoid getting beat up by other kids.

Jane’s boys, Jimmy and Ned
Credit 18

A photograph of Jimmy and Ned, ages maybe seven and five, shows two ragamuffins, the bigger boy with his arms tightly twined around his younger brother, devilish glee written across his face, Ned looking plaintively off to the side. Ned, in his sixties, recalls that one of his parents’ regrets is that they seemed unable to restore peace between them, intervening perhaps a bit too little or too late.
Oh, they’ll be friends someday
, Jane’s own mother assured her, and they are. “But it was certainly hard to believe” at the time, Jane would say, “when they were such fighters.” They were
always
fighting. A friend of Jane’s from later years theorizes that they’d ratchet up the conflict to gain her attention. Ned tells how he and Jim exploited Jane’s tendency to get lost in what she was thinking, counting on a distracted “Yeah, yeah” when asking permission for this or that. But they got into trouble often enough that eventually Jane rewrote the rules: “Not only do I have to say yes, I have to know I’m saying it.”

There was plenty of intellectual challenge in the family, less room for the emotions, navel gazing, or overt criticism. “It wasn’t part of the family dynamic to raise voices,” the way you’d see in some families, says Mary.
“There were no heavy trips,” no histrionics, no yelling and screaming. The emphasis was on thinking things through, the children left to learn from experience, free from too heavy and oppressive an adult hand. “Permissive” is the word that can bubble up. Indeed, Jane and Bob’s relaxed parenting style could raise the eyebrows of some, even among friends and family, who felt their brand of permissiveness, if that’s what it was, went too far. “Some of their shenanigans would not have been acceptable” in her own family, says cousin Jane, Jane Henderson today, speaking of the Jacobs kids. Her second husband, Riley, who joined the family in the late 1960s, speaks of the Jacobses’“unorthodox way of rearing kids.” Still, he adds, “no matter what they did or didn’t do, Jane always praised them.”

Katia Jacobs, whose husband, John, Bob’s cousin, had worked with Jane at
Amerika
—the four of them close friends who would vacation together on Nantucket in a house in Sconset near the beach—says of her that “Jane had a wonderful, vivid personality, but not much of a maternal instinct.” It bothered her the time Jane and Bob came over with baby Mary, and Jane “didn’t seem to care where she was going to sleep.”
Oh, we’ll find a place to tuck her in.
“I was shocked with her casual approach,” Katia says.

A letter in the Jane Jacobs archives, from Mary to her grandmother when she was twelve, in
block printing mixed with cursive, is littered with misspellings, like “gooing” for “going” and “rember” for “remember”; Mary was dyslexic. At home, among her parents and brothers, life was stimulating, educational, with lots going on, and she soaked it right up. She was bright, even gifted. Like her father, she could do almost anything with her hands. But, she says, she “had a hard time in school.” Her reading problems had slipped through whatever there was at school to help her, as well as right by her parents; no one, it seems, ever asked whether she’d done her homework. Jane “didn’t pay a lot of attention” to her school problems, she recollects—
until
, she says in a carefully neutral way, “at age nine it came to her attention that I hadn’t learned to read.” Her brothers had been teasing her about it for a while “before Jane finally got wind of it.”

When she did, Jane pounced on the problem. She tracked down a special kit of color-coordinated books, with stories and questions, that someone had recommended to her and that she purchased by mail order. It was perfect for her, Mary remembers, something she could use on her own;
maybe Ned and Jim could block out all the distractions of home, street, and school, but she couldn’t. Using the reading kit Jane found for her, she “progressed by myself and learned to read in jig time.” The first book she remembers reading was Robert Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land.

Something similar happened with Jim. In high school, taking the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, he did poorly on the math part. Around the house, Jimmy was the Little Professor, obviously very smart (he would wind up with a PhD in solid-state physics), so why had he done so miserably on this standardized test? Belatedly, Jane and Bob realized, it wasn’t mathematical concepts hanging him up, it was basic arithmetic—times tables and the like. Jane began drilling him in these fundamentals and, the following year, when he took the college-qualifying SATs, he did well.

Their parents, the children agree, didn’t tamp down or crimp their natural instincts. No need to micromanage, intervene, or unduly fret over your children; trust in them and they’d do fine. Something like this was the Jacobs credo. On the other hand, you could miss things that way, as Jane and Bob occasionally did. “Benign neglect”? The children themselves, reflecting back, don’t see it that way. The hands-off stance that let Mary’s reading problems and Jim’s in arithmetic slip by could seem a blessing. Jane “had a sense that we were
all right
,” says Mary. When one of the kids got into trouble in school, Jim recalls, Jane or Bob—more typically Jane, at least while she was still at
Forum
—showed up at school “and supported us totally,” he says, “no matter who was right or wrong.” One time, the boys wanted cowboy boots, which Jane bought for them and they wore to school. But the teacher said no, that for whatever reason they couldn’t wear them in her class. Jane went in and remonstrated with her.
She
was the parent.
She
had bought boots for
her
sons. They were perfectly good boots. There was nothing wrong with the boots, or with them. The teacher gave in.

It was a moral and practical education the Jacobs kids received at home. When Glennie was dying, Jane gave blood, taking Mary with her to the hospital, which was “a total hell hole, all black people, terribly sick people, very crowded”; Mary never forgot it. Jane taught her about scams, the kind that came through junk mail, and about book clubs that suck you in and charge you for books you don’t want. She was lucky to get an education like that, she says, one that inoculated her against being manipulated as an adult. One time, around 1961, in the cold war days of nuclear
posturing and real nuclear threat, the air raid sirens went off while she and Jane were out walking; the wailing sirens meant they were to “duck and cover,” and, sure enough, everyone disappeared from the street. But not them. It was silly and pointless, Jane told her six-year-old. “We’re not ducking and covering.”

Reminiscences of Jane’s children and their cousins often come tinged with the flavor of extended family, of one big clan of Butzner cousins. Jim and Kay Butzner’s family and their children, Jane, Ann, and William, lived in southern New Jersey, in a suburb called Woodbury. John, his wife, “Pete” Butzner, and their son, Decker, lived in Virginia. Of course, Betty and Julie, and their children, Carol, Paul, and David, were over in Stuyvesant Town. As several of them tell it, they were cousins, yes, but closer than cousins, more like brothers and sisters.

Decker Butzner, today a physician living in Calgary, Alberta, holds memories of the Jacobs household going all the way back to 1953, when he was three. On family trips to New York they’d also visit his mother’s family in Staten Island, and Aunt Betty and Uncle Jules in Stuyvesant Town. But it was Jane and Bob’s Hudson Street house he remembered best. As you came in from the street, there was a galley kitchen to your left, with open shelves separating it from the dining room; Bob had designed it that way so whoever was working in the kitchen wasn’t cut off from conversation around the dinner table.

On Thanksgiving, the men would take the kids to the Macy’s parade, finding a spot along the west side of Central Park near the Museum of Natural History at Seventy-ninth Street. Most often, it was Jane’s three kids, Betty’s three, and him, Decker, but sometimes also the South Jersey contingent. They’d get around by subway or, more often, on foot—the better to burn off youthful energy before dinner, as Decker later reckoned the grown-ups’ strategy. Meanwhile, the women would be cooking—turkey, green peas, creamed onions, three or four kinds of pies. The big meal would come around three. Then the cousins would go out and play, the food left out for “grazing.” He loved those trips up to New York. “We were all so excited to see each other.”

To the cousins, Hudson Street could seem an isle of liberation. Decker and the Jacobs boys would ride the train down to the South Ferry station, there to briskly make their way down the bank of pay phones, collecting coins left by frazzled Staten Island Ferry commuters rushing for the boat. Jane Butzner, sometimes known as Little Jane to distinguish
her from her aunt, after whom she was named, was the eldest of the cousins. Growing up in New Jersey, she “couldn’t wait to visit my cousins in New York,” the Jacobs kids and the Mansons. When she was old enough, she’d be dropped off at the bus station in Philadelphia and arrive at the Port Authority in New York, where Betty would pick her up and ferry her over to Stuyvesant Town or to Jane’s. She’d arrive at Hudson Street wearing her pretty patent leather shoes and soon head off with the boys to Washington Square. Fun, apparently, was planting her on one end of the seesaw, then jumping precipitously off the other, slamming her end down. She’d return with the boys hours later hopelessly “dirty and disheveled,” her nice shoes sorely scuffed; her own mother would never countenance
that.
In the house, she played on the jungle gym in the boys’ bedrooms, a horizontal ladder that let you walk across the room with your hands. She ate raw clams and artichokes, things she’d never get at home. They’d take the storied subways; she was still small enough to duck under the turnstiles. Once or twice her mom invited the Jacobs kids to their house in New Jersey, doing them a kindness, presumably, by getting them out of the city; of course, says cousin Jane, “they were bored out of their minds” in leafy Leave-It-to-Beaverville. Hudson Street was more interesting, though it didn’t adhere to the highest standards of suburban spit and polish. Lucia Jacobs, Katia and John’s daughter, second cousin to Jane’s children, remembers walking barefoot around the old house, the soles of her feet in no time turning black.

Jane’s West Village was as much a place of business, warehousing, and small-scale manufacturing as of homes. A former stable at the corner of Hudson and Perry dealt in industrial fasteners. The Fisher Chemical warehouse was just down Hudson Street; Jimmy, not much older than twelve at the time, would walk there for a liter of potassium chromate, some sulfuric acid, potassium hydroxide pellets, and purple dye, pay for it with a little pocket money, and head home to concoct crazy “experiments.” Decker recalls visits where they’d play under the old West Side Highway, a few blocks from the house, and spy longshoremen, with their iconic, scary-looking steel hooks, pilfering from broken-open crates.