Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (38 page)

Next morning, Jane wrote a petition and, children in tow, marched off to the local printer to have it run off. Forget it, the printer told her; he had too many restaurant menus to set in type and print up; it would be weeks before he could get to it. “
That’ll be too late,” said Jane, the sidewalks would be gone by then. “Which sidewalks?” he said; of course, they included the one right outside his store. An hour later Jane had her petitions. Jimmy began taking them around. Ned and little Mary, bundled up in hats and hoods and heavy coats, gathered signatures in front of the house. They sat at a little table, under a sign tacked to the front door that looked like this:

SAVE

THE

SIDEWALKS

ON HUDSON STREET

Local parochial schools sent petitions home with their children. Jane approached influential Village figures she’d met in the park fight, especially the well-connected Tony Dapolito, a baker by trade, who’d go down in Village lore as its honorary mayor. Jane was among a delegation that made their plea before the borough president, but, Dapolito told Bob Jacobs later, the outcome had been decided
before they went in to see him. The sidewalk-snipping scheme was stopped in its tracks.

Early on, Jane would recall, some of her neighbors had concluded that, petitions and signatures notwithstanding, they’d lose: “You can’t fight city hall.” But the realization that they
could
fight city hall, and win, would serve them well next time around.

IV. NIBBLED TO DEATH BY DUCKS

In February 1961, a month after submitting the manuscript for
Death and Life
, Jane opened the newspaper to learn that part of the West Village had been named an urban renewal area. Its slums were coming down,
The New York Times
declared. New housing was going up.
“I knew at
once what that meant,” Jane would recount—“that we were going to be designated to be wiped out.” The designated
fourteen-block stretch ran from Hudson Street to the Hudson River. It included her own block. It included her own house. Any sweet, peaceful interlude she might have anticipated for the months leading to her book’s publication was abruptly cut short.

The stakes were much bigger than a few stunted sidewalks; yet this early in the story it all seemed to come down to
$300,000. This was the amount, according to the city’s housing and redevelopment board, successor to Robert Moses’s slum clearance board, that would go into a planning study for West Village urban renewal. Even back in 1961, $300,000 wasn’t that much. But to Jane, this little pot of money was just the first step toward bulldozing her neighborhood into anonymity, unaffordability, or both. This “advance of planning funds,” which the board of estimate had formally to request from the feds, would set in motion events Jane had seen play out time and again, signaling that urban renewal, in all its malignancy, was on the way: amid the uncertainty, businesses pull back on their investments; landlords stop maintaining their properties; residents move out. The result? A downward spiral of deterioration that accelerates neighborhood decline. Just before the announcement in the paper, a woman named
Elizabeth Squire was offered $50,000 for her house; a few days later, after the announcement, but before she’d thought to accept it, the offer was rescinded. Let that pot of planning-study money go through, Jane was certain, and such painful stories would recur daily.

So Jane got on the phone.

The battle would play out over almost a year. Jane’s days and those of her friends grew thick with calls to make, letters to solicit or write, hearings to attend, legal papers to file, presentations to prepare, petitions to draw up, rallies to organize, church basement penny sales to orchestrate, puppet “citizens’ committees” to expose. The fight became so frenetic, Jane would report, “that we just
disconnected the doorbell and left the door open at night so we could work and people could come and go.” These were the days of the fabled West Village Martini, gin and a few drops of vermouth in any handy glass, an olive or a pickled onion, an ice cube, and then, by Jane’s recipe, “you put your finger in it, and go swish, swish, swish”; no time for niceties.
The battle for the West Village, Jane’s son Ned recalls, “totally consumed the lives of my parents and their neighbours.” But in the beginning, everything happened all at once—
had
to, because the city had left only
two days before a board of estimate hearing intended to set the whole process in motion. When Jane and thirty of her neighbors trooped downtown to see the commissioner of housing and redevelopment, they succeeded in postponing the hearing for a month.

This photo of a West Village strategy session, from about 1961, was taken for an article about Jane that never appeared. That’s Jane’s son Ned at far left.
Credit 21

Three days after the postponement, on February 26, three hundred people crowded into the St. Luke’s School auditorium, a few blocks from Jane’s house, and set up the Committee to Save the West Village. They elected Jane, who in the wake of the sidewalk battle had something of a reputation, as one of two co-chairpersons. “The aim of the committee,” Jane was quoted as saying, “is to
kill this project entirely because if it goes through it can mean only the destruction of the community.” She and the other Villagers were angry: the rationale for designating the West Village as suitable for urban renewal was simple—that it was a slum. And they knew it wasn’t.

But what if it
was
? That is, if the West Village were really the sort of hopeless mess that federal urban renewal laws and the whole spirit of modernism had in mind to wipe clean and start over with, then tearing it down and replacing it with new housing, as the city planned to do, might be a good thing. The West Village fight can be seen as a succession of public hearings and presentations, charges and countercharges, set against a backdrop of the sheer day-to-day work of waging civic war. But in the end it came down to just what the West Village really was: A slum
unworthy of life, to be put out of its misery and made into something better? Or a community to be preserved much as it was?

The facts themselves were there for anyone to see, there on the streets and in the homes of the West Village; the threatened area ran from West Eleventh Street down past Christopher to Morton Street, back from the Hudson River piers east to Washington, Greenwich, and, finally, Hudson Street. About eighteen hundred people lived in those blocks—home owners, renters, longshoremen, teachers. Thousands more from outside worked in the neighborhood’s warehouses, factories, retail stores, and other small businesses. Its urban palette ranged from blackened brick and rutted concrete to cobblestone and oil-slicked asphalt. West Village houses were almost never like the iconic ones kindergarten children crayon in, with front door, windows, chimney, and lawn. Rather, they were new or gussied-up apartment buildings, firetrap tenements, the occasional frame house going back to the early nineteenth century, stunningly rehabbed row houses, and shabby single-room-occupancy hotels near the piers. There were parking lots and warehouses, St. Veronica’s Church and a Western Electric research laboratory. All jumbled together within an area of less than a twentieth of a square mile. The question was, how to
see
all that.

How to see cities, of course, was what Jane’s book, just then on its way to publication, was all about. Every chapter offered alternative ways to see: tottering old buildings could be sources of anarchic creativity; new housing could mean a brutal wiping-clean of old, familiar social connections; a factory near your house need not be unwholesome, but instead a nexus of economic and social renewal. And now, just as Jane’s book would challenge conventional urban thinking, so did the battles of 1961 playing out in her neighborhood. Oversimplify just a bit and you could dub the yearlong drama
Death or Life: The West Village.
Jane’s committee printed up index-card-sized handbills that read, simply, “SAVE THE WEST VILLAGE.” Save it from what? Save it from extinction, from its transformation into the sort of place in which its residents either wouldn’t be able, or wouldn’t want, to live. The neighborhood was just fine the way it was.

But
no
, not true
, that
wasn’t it either: Jane and her neighbors didn’t see the neighborhood as just fine the way it was. They weren’t blind, could hardly miss its failings, the raucous truck traffic, the decaying warehouses. Cobbled streets could sing of charm and nostalgia, but they also warbled of the worn and the decrepit. Compared to today, there were few trees, the streets were more littered and dirty, the façades of
tenements and industrial lofts bore scant sign of today’s proud infusions of new paint, new windows, and new money. There wasn’t much money in the West Village, hadn’t been for years, and it showed. “
We are 100% for improvement and we know our neighborhood can stand some,” an early Committee to Save the West Village newsletter emphasized. They
did
want to see new middle-income housing, welcomed the “opportunity to work with officials of the city’s conservation program to make our neighborhood a still happier place to live.”
Like, say, a stretch of new park beside the river?
Other improvements would come from “building up what we have instead of destroying the existing neighborhood.
Our
best efforts would be aimed at saving and improving, not destroying.” They already had so much: low crime, little overcrowding, much liveliness, even an old farmhouse or two, lovingly restored, that went back practically to colonial times.

When, in May, the department of city planning’s newsletter made the case for urban renewal, it acknowledged that the West Village included some decent housing and showed signs of rehabilitation. But it emphasized the “
blighting influence” of an elevated New York Central freight line spur that ran to an abandoned terminal along its west side. It bemoaned the “indiscriminate mixture of warehousing, truck terminals, garages and loft buildings” along Washington Street, the many tenements and nonresidential structures that were “run down and deteriorated.”

They weren’t making things up. A few years later, when she moved into an apartment at the corner of Horatio and Washington streets, a bit north of the contested blocks, longtime Villager Patricia Fieldsteel would remember the West Village as a

less-than-desirable area, tucked away…in a faraway inaccessible pocket bordered by the Meat Market and the shipping docks, massive crumbling carapaces that had leeched themselves to the Lower West Side, obliterating the river from view. Across the piers, from West to Greenwich streets, was a dank warren of small factories, meat packers, printing plants and light industry. Enormous trucks blocked the streets, spewing fumes into already fetid air, blackened by free-flowing soot from unregulated building incinerators. There were no trees, no gardens, no parks.

What later became a row of fine restored townhouses along Jane Street was then still “broken up into seven- and ten-family tenements, or
boarding houses renting out single-occupancy rooms to single, often ‘wayward’ men.”

For the city planning department, it was the neighborhood’s “mixture of land uses,” including bad housing, heavy commercial traffic, and the freight line, that left the neighborhood blighted. No matter that just such a mixture—residential, commercial, and industrial all together—was what Jane said could make for a healthy, interesting, vital area.
No
, insisted the planners, it was
just that
which generated blight, all but
made
it a slum. How could a neighborhood exhibiting such a disparate mess of uses, which the planning wisdom of half a century, reaching back to Ebenezer Howard and beyond, had ordained as ill-befitting a modern city, be a good, healthy, respectable way to live? That was one essential question.

Of course, the other essential question was,
Who was to say?

This was not long after the end of World War II, when trust in generals, government officials, scientists, and experts was not wholly unknown, before the Vietnam War sowed doubt about “the best and the brightest” and authority in general. The default position was still to trust the people who knew their technical disciplines and possessed knowledge most people didn’t. But already Jane didn’t buy it. She had seen the work of the planners across America and how, presumably with the best of intentions, they had done harm. Academically uncredentialed herself, with an outlaw streak going back to her school days and an abiding faith in her own vision, she and the rest of her committee were inclined
not
to trust the experts, but to see in them corruption, incuriosity, and ignorance. When, early the following year, Jane reflected on what they’d learned from the West Village war, she painted a picture of behind-the-scenes skullduggery and incompetence on the part of the authorities. No, not the vaunted “experts” but only the residents themselves could properly decide a neighborhood’s future. A few weeks after the battle was joined, the columnist John Crosby wrote an essay for the
New York Herald Tribune
with the apt and challenging title “
Who Says What Is a Slum?” And no, it wasn’t necessarily the blinkered experts. What Crosby called “the psychological beauties of a neighborhood, where people live together in their own harmonies, is far more precious than the paint job on the houses.” Score one for Jane and her friends.