Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (42 page)

It did change, of course, but by now Jane had reached a remarkable conclusion, one she’d stick with to the end and had developed enough to try out, as an excerpt, on Jason and his wife, Barbara, editor of
The New York Review of Books.
Barbara Epstein wrote back saying it was “
marvelous” and that she might want to run it in the
Review.
It was called “
Cities First; Rural Development Later” and it became part of chapter 1. In it, Jane breathed a new, invented city into the world, “New Obsidian.”

Once, long ago, humans were hunter-gatherers. Living in small bands, they killed animals, gathered nuts and berries, surviving on what they could collect in the wild. That was human existence for eons. Then, ten or twelve thousand years ago—on this figure, at least, there is not too much scholarly disagreement—people began to domesticate animals and to plant and harvest crops. With the resulting agricultural bounty, the story went, stable and settled communities developed, and with them crafts, division of labor, complex social organization, and, ultimately, cities. In short:
Agriculture first, urban development later.

Jane didn’t think so. “Our understanding of cities, and also of economic development generally, has been distorted by the dogma of agricultural primacy. I plan to argue,” she wrote in
The Economy of Cities
, “that this dogma is as quaint as the theory of spontaneous generation,” the idea that, for example, maggots festering in rotten meat come to life out of nothing. Here was “a vestige of pre-Darwinian intellectual history that has hung on past its time.” Jane wished to advance quite a contrary notion, one that might seem “radical and disturbing” to some—that cities came first and from them, agriculture.

To illustrate the idea, she created first in her mind’s eye, then for her readers, New Obsidian, located on the Anatolian plateau of Turkey near a real city, Çatal Hüyük, the ruins of which had been discovered by the British archaeologist James Mellaart some years before. Obsidian, of course, was real enough—a tough, black glass produced in volcanoes, in some ways the nearest thing to steel, used to make early man’s sharpest cutting tools, knives, arrowheads, and spearheads; yet, gleaming and glossy as it was, it was used for mirrors, too. Trade in it was known to go back to at least 9000
BC
, among and between hunting groups, in small settlements. One of them, in Jane’s reconstruction, becomes New Obsidian, a nascent city.

Over the course of twenty manuscript pages, we watch it grow. Its population climbs. Its people become skilled at crafts. Traders from afar visit, bartering for obsidian with goods from their own hunting
territories. Likewise, traders fan out from New Obsidian, the volcanic mineral in hand to barter, trading for copper, shells, and pigment. In both directions, commerce includes nonperishable food, especially live animals and hard seeds. In time, some of the animals are domesticated. Some of the seeds, not immediately consumed, are sown, at first haphazardly, in time with patience and care. Under the watchful eyes of local inhabitants, hybrids, crosses, and mutants lead to better, more bountiful food, superior to wild strains. All this takes place in the budding city’s relatively safe, protected precincts. “Prosperity is a prerequisite. Although time is necessary, time by itself does not bestow cultivated grains.” But the two together do. Agriculture, as we know it, comes to New Obsidian.

But New Obsidian had been there first.

Copper in the Caucasus, Jane allowed, or the trade in seashells from any coastal settlement, could have served as well to tell her story. But this, anyway—cities as the basis for agriculture—was what Jane was getting at. Of course, she was writing about more than agriculture, more than cities. She was writing about the tides of economic growth.

III. TECHNICOLOR DREAMING

Early in 1967, invitations to give talks in Hannover, West Germany, and in London took Jane, at age fifty, out of North America for the first time. In her almost monthlong travels through Europe, she proved an eager tourist and, in her letters home, a gifted raconteur. And maybe more: she seems liberated, as if being off in Europe, away from her book’s demands, left her freer to declaim on anything at all that caught her eye. These were not vapid postcard jottings, but
small gems of reportage and memoir that together make for a fresh and lively picture of Jane in a new setting.

She wrote of her struggle with unfamiliar foreign currencies; of the short skirts the English girls wore; of a large hospital with projecting sunporches designed by Finnish architects, commending it to the attention of her husband, the hospital architect; of a Denmark that was clean, neat, and manicured: “When our
living room is all cleaned up it looks very much like Denmark.” At a club, she saw how the Danes loved jazz. “But the dancers,” she lamented, “are much too sedate and uninventive and self-conscious. I kept wishing they could see some Americans doing
the monkey.” She visited many places and met many people, but plainly she missed home. “
I hope you get my letters,” she wrote from Amsterdam, to Bob, Ned, and Mary (Jimmy was away in college). “I think of you so often.” Once she reached London, she noted with evident pleasure, she’d be on a clock only five hours off, not six, from that of her family in New York.

On January 25, about a week into her trip, Jane wrote a long letter home from her Venice-bound train. She’d given her talk in Hannover, a city she found nicely rebuilt after the war’s devastation. Frankfurt, by contrast, had come as a shock—“
dirty, garish, ugly and just plain mean looking,” redeemed only by Goethe’s rebuilt house, in whose music and game room she saw early pianos, clocks, and chessboards. “
You could play chess in that house almost anywhere the fit took you!” On the plane from Frankfurt to Milan, she caught her first sight of the Alps. “
Snow covered, wild, beautiful and incredible: peaks, valleys, glaciers and finally the lake bordering Switzerland and Italy.” But Milan had been shut in by fog, so they’d had to land in Genoa instead, and now she was sprawled across three seats of a nearly empty first-class train carriage bound for Venice.

The following morning, installed at her hotel, drinking her coffee after breakfast in her room, she thought back to her arrival early the previous morning. She’d come in the fog—“
just enough to enhance the mystery and beauty.” Getting off at the Rialto, a porter had escorted her across Venice to the hotel, Jane’s bag atop his head. “This walk through the streets was enchanting, in the quiet and the fog; through a maze of astounding alleys, steps, bridges, squares, hidden corners, populated only by cats.”

She’d enjoyed her day in the city. “I spent most of yesterday walking the streets,” which she liked more than the fabled canals, “and could hardly stop.” And then, on into the night, “when the city had returned to the cats and the fog, and a few people were left, most of them singing as they walked. This city is so beautiful it almost breaks your heart.”

Two days later, she was in Paris, writing just to Mary this time, thanking her for her “
dear, lovely letter. I was so glad to get it, and have read it about ten times.” She told Mary about a street along the river where they sold birds, goldfish, and turtles. “The whole street for blocks was like a big, cheerful pet store. I also saw a church with stained glass so beautiful it was like standing inside a jewel.” She promised to save a coin from each
country she visited; she’d ask Jimmy to drill a hole in each so she could make a necklace or bracelet from them.

A week later she was finally in London. She went on a walking tour of the city, visited the Tower of London, was later taken to “
one of those great and famous London clubs for a drink.” This was a men’s club, but one that opened its great gates to women “for about an hour on Fridays. This radical move is a 5-year experiment!” Well, she did see the rooms of the club—“what a palace, what a refuge”—but she saw no club members. “Evidently they all clear out while the weekly experiment occurs. Bill & I were the only souls to be seen except for the servants.”

On February 7, at a meeting of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Jane gave the last of her scheduled talks, which was like a work in progress,
a foretaste, of
The Economy of Cities:
How did some cities come to prosper? One way was when a product or service “produced for a market within [the city slips] into supplying people outside.” Case in point: London’s Carnaby Street clothing makers, for years serving only the locals, had in the early 1960s become an icon of hip and cool in world fashion. This kind of transformation, a “slippage” from purely local to export markets, represented one path toward economic vibrancy.

This was her last talk, she wrote the night after it was over, and she was “so relieved that that is done. Now I feel truly on vacation. NO MORE SPEECHES.” Jane appended a PS: “In answer to your question, Bob, I hardly
can
stand it. I dream about you,
in full technicolor, if you know what I mean.”

From Chester, near the border of Wales, after a bit of sightseeing and tea with the mayor, Jane wrote home grousing about another dull evening with the planners. “These people are
tiresome beyond belief about their new towns, etc. I wish they would just leave me alone.” By now this was a vexing problem for her and, on the train to Edinburgh the next day, she set her mind to solving it. That evening, the chill of the house where she was staying relieved by a roaring fire and a hot water bottle in bed, she wrote home with her solution, which was simply “to enjoy my own company instead.” The following evening, inaugurating her strategy, she “
took charge of the conversation and never let it get on the subject of planning for more than 30 seconds.” She pulled off this feat right there, in front of the great Sir Robert Matthew, eminent Scottish modernist architect, who “came absolutely hating me…and determined to do me in,” needling her, goading her. She responded by simply
lapsing into “funny stories about Higgins, North Carolina.” Worked like a charm. “Sir Robert left madder than ever, I suspect, but I for one had a good time. This will be my policy henceforth. I get a bang out of my own stories, fortunately.”

She’d largely succeeded, she continued, at avoiding tours of dreary projects and reviewing student work. She still owed an appearance at several cocktail parties and dinners, but she’d managed to see something of Edinburgh on her own—especially its glorious castle, “
complicated and wonderful, with keeps within keeps, and strategic points superimposed upon strategic points,” the whole edifice “intricately incorporated into and upon the great rocky outcropping on which it rises.” She’d visited a bagpipe shop, too, talking for an hour with the instrument maker about the wood used for the pipes, a bagpipe lesson from the next room sounding all the while.

It was February 9. Soon she’d be off to Glasgow, then Belfast on the 13th, Dublin on the 14th, and, after close to a month away from her family in the great cities of Europe, a 6:45 p.m. arrival on the 16th in New York.

   CHAPTER 17   

GAS MASKS AT THE PENTAGON

O
N APRIL
10, 1968, after a noisy disturbance at a public hearing, Jane was arrested, packed into a squad car, and driven to the local precinct house. Later she would be fingerprinted, photographed for mug shots, and charged with riot, inciting to riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing government administration; each alone could get her a year in jail. It was not the first time Jane had been arrested. The earlier incident stemmed from her opposition to the war in Vietnam; this one from her opposition to a highway. No napalm and carpet bombing here, just off-ramps and asphalt, jobs for construction workers, a few minutes lost or gained in getting to New Jersey—
infrastructure
, for goodness’ sake.

It was called the Lower Manhattan Expressway. It was to have been two and a half miles long, connecting two East River bridges at the lower tip of Manhattan to one Hudson River tunnel. Today, it doesn’t exist. If it did exist, reminisced Jane’s editor, Jason Epstein,

the building I live in would be gone. There would be no mozzarella in the morning, no Chinatown, no garment industry with its thousands of entry-level jobs, no grandmothers taking their children to school, no De Sica films on warm summer evenings and no SoHo with its lovely cast iron buildings, its cobbled streets, its restaurants, its galleries and shops and its millions, indeed billions of dollars of taxable property.

At least in broad brushstrokes, the Lower Manhattan streets the expressway meant to erase look today much as they did then, only better.

We speak today of habitat preservation, of protecting natural resources, virgin forest, and family farms against the ravages of sprawl, each properly seen as precious, worthy of strong feeling. For those who opposed the Lower Manhattan Expressway, there was also a precious habitat at risk, only not a natural one. It was a product of human hands, a patch of tightly textured city. Someone encountering it for the first time, newly arrived from, say, a Phoenix suburb or a Kansas farm, might be hard-pressed to see it as a distinct
thing
at all, much less one inspiring nurture or affection. But this crowded urban landscape harbored homes, whole communities, businesses representing many lifetimes’ work, and, more broadly yet, a way of life.

—

In
Death and Life
Jane had much to say about highways and cars, especially in the chapter “
Erosion of Cities or Attrition of Automobiles”:

Today everyone who values cities is disturbed by automobiles.

Traffic arteries, along with parking lots, gas stations and drive-ins, are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction. To accommodate them, city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot.

And so on, a litany of sins that today can seem overfamiliar or self-evident. But then, Jane, being Jane, had the nerve to take an abrupt turn: “But we blame automobiles for too much.” Soon she was taking us back to London, circa 1890, a hell of horse manure, mud, and stench, of metal-rimmed wheels grating on granite, “the creaking and groaning and chirping and rattling of vehicles, light and heavy,” all raising a din beyond imagining. This, noted Jane, was Ebenezer Howard’s London; small wonder he saw city streets as unfit for human beings. “Stop telling ourselves fairy tales,” wrote Jane, “about the suitability and charm of nineteenth century streets for horse-and-buggy traffic.” The automobile, with its internal combustion engine, could even be seen as a force “for liberating cities from one of their noxious liabilities.” Jane herself didn’t drive, normally getting around New York on foot, by bike, on the subway, or by cab. But Bob did drive and the family did have a car, kept in a
garage on Greenwich Street and used mostly for vacations.