Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (48 page)

Still, Gans rounded out his long review, “What Mrs. Jacobs has done
in this book and in her earlier one is to begin to formulate a badly needed urban myth for our now almost entirely urbanized society. In the long run, this may well be her most important contribution.”

After Lehmann-Haupt’s review in
The New York Times
, an archaeologist,
Patricia Daly, wrote Jane, faulting her on some of her points, mostly about ancient Çatal Hüyük, what it really meant to be a city, and several technical issues. At one point in her lengthy reply, Jane had this to say:

Anthropologists make a terrible mistake in looking at the most stagnant (that is, the most primitive) economies
now
in existence in the world, and attempting to draw conclusions from these concerning prehistoric processes of development. That can’t work; one simply cannot extrapolate from stagnation.

There was little to learn from stagnation and decline, she was saying. The lessons were all in life and health.

—

“Back when I came to Toronto in 1968,” Jane would report, “there was
not a single outdoor café…In fact you couldn’t sit in your own back yard and legally take a drink of alcohol. Or on your front porch…Because a child might see it…That was the thing. I’m not making that up.”

At the time, Toronto was a city of about 2 million people, 350 miles from Montreal, 500 from Quebec City, 250 from Detroit. It was a famously sleepy town for much of its history, certainly up to 1968, lying in the shadow of older, more cosmopolitan, French-influenced Montreal; and maybe even, for that matter, of Buffalo, New York. If you wanted a night on the town, you’d hear it said, drive a hundred miles around the western lip of Lake Ontario to Buffalo, with its beautiful Olmsted parks and hint of urban bustle.

In its Great Lakes–flavored English stolidity, Toronto might have seemed to a midwesterner from the U.S. comfortably familiar, laid out on roughly orthogonal lines, unprepossessing, flat. Of course, it
wasn’t
flat, not really, but furrowed, right down into the city, by dozens of what Torontonians called “ravines,” shallow valleys left over from the glaciers that gave it topographical richness, sylvan streambeds, bits of untended forest, even seeming wilderness. New Yorkers might see Toronto as the end of the world, but even in his brief 1967 visit, Bob found in it redemptive
features. The city was growing, beginning the surge in population and influence that would let it soon overtake Montreal as Canada’s premier city. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, English-speaking Montrealers, scared off by the political tumult in Quebec, began moving to Toronto, tens of thousands of them, laden with money and talent. Energetic, increasingly Asian newcomers, 75,000 of them a year, were moving in, too. A new city hall had gone up a couple of years before Jane’s arrival—“two boomerangs over half a grapefruit,” as someone called Viljo Revell’s striking modernist structure—that was neither universally loved nor reviled; but certainly, as Robert Fulford wrote in
Accidental City
, “
it transformed Toronto by cracking open the city’s prejudices about how buildings should look; the public idea of what was acceptable in architecture seemed to change overnight.” Toronto’s gray was blossoming into color.

By the time Jane arrived, hints of pink, blooming health were enlivening Toronto’s doughy face, just when most American cities were in decline, hemorrhaging population. Canadian banks, Jane would hazard as one reason, had never “redlined” neighborhoods into destruction. Racial ghettos were almost unknown. Though Canada’s local and provincial authorities could still do damage, at least the federal government wasn’t pushing highways through cities. Finally, Canada’s version of urban renewal had intruded less, and destroyed less. These virtues of omission, Jane would point out, were enough to make Toronto more hopeful than most of its American counterparts. The city had fine old neighborhoods, a decent subway system, three daily papers, a top university. It was the provincial capital. Its localities bore English place-names like York and Scarborough, Glencairn and Runnymede. Its old Kensington Market district could remind you of New York’s Lower East Side, with crowded streets and tiny shops, live chickens in cages, a welter of foreign languages, a bit decrepit, yet charming, more like Hudson Street back in the 1940s. House hunting soon after they got to Toronto, the Jacobses did tour Kensington Market but couldn’t find just the right place among its thin residential offerings. “It looked a little desolate,” Jim recalls, “but so what, it didn’t
feel
desolate.”

It must have been late in their second year in Toronto that they began to look for a more permanent home; the Spadina Road house was being sold, so they
had
to move. And besides, it was way too small. They wound up a few blocks away, near the western end of the same neighborhood, the Annex (for its annexation by the city back in 1887).

The Annex was a rectangle of real estate sitting just north of the University of Toronto across Bloor Street, two miles from city hall, marked by large brick and sandstone houses arrayed along tree-lined streets; some of its Victorian mansions went back to the 1880s. Bobbi Speck, the woman who’d helped draw Jane into the Stop Spadina fight, recalled the Annex of the late 1960s as mostly absentee owned, the Depression having broken up many old houses into apartments. But it was busy, with lots of foot traffic, safe, kids out on the street at all hours, and, as one resident would recall, spectacularly diverse:

We had one or two of the original inhabitants going back to 1903, 1905 or their descendants. We had a large Eastern European community. We had Holocaust survivors. We had a genuine Nazi. This is on one block. We had communists. We had rooming houses. Chinese rooming houses…We had drug drops. We had unsavory people. We had three brothels. They were part of the community, actually. My son played with the son of the madam. And then there were young professionals like us who were renovating. It was a completely mixed community.

Here in the Annex, at 69 Albany Avenue, the Jacobses found a home.

“
We think we have bought a house, four blocks from here,” Jane wrote Jason Epstein in July 1970. “I hope so. It has space enough in it for a room for me just to work in!” It was a three-story, semidetached, redbrick affair dating to about 1910, built for the University of Toronto
dinosaur expert, William Arthur Park. Two large rooms on the third floor; Jane and Bob’s bedroom second floor front, Jane’s office in the rear; dining room, living room, and kitchen on the first. Albany Avenue was no broad “avenue” at all, but a modest street, with room enough for a single lane of traffic and two of parking. The houses lining it were packed close, narrow spaces between them, making for mostly uninterrupted street frontage. Each had a little garden out front, a more extensive yard reaching out back. Jane’s daybook recorded their planned move: they were to measure rooms on August 1st, close on September 10th, get the phone installed on November 13th, move in on the 21st, clean out Spadina Road the next day.

“
We are going to have more room,” Jane wrote her young planner friend, David Gurin, not long after the move. “I say ‘going to’ because at present the first floor, where we demolished walls, is kind of a half-plastered welter.” Bob was putting his design mark on the place,
opening up the ground floor, kitchen shelves facing the living room, a lawn glider covered in imitation leather the new living room couch. Son Jim remembered it, for all its quirks, as “a very elegant-looking place.” Some months after the move, Jane wrote her mother, “
The carpenter yesterday finished a balcony—or as they say here, a veranda,” on a roof extension at the back of the house above Jane’s work room, practically in the treetops. “We are still in a mess,” Jane wrote Epstein early the following year. “The painters are at work; what a relief after the plasterers. Hey, this is going to be a nifty place.” In time, the house would be covered by thick vines. Towering maples would rise from the front yard.

Of course, with Jane it was never just the house itself that mattered, but the street. And not just the street, either, but its ties to the rest of the neighborhood and the city. From Albany Avenue, Jane was a couple of minutes’ walk to the subway, the Bathurst station on Bloor Street, where trains pulling out every three or four minutes brought her, with transfers to the Yonge Street line, virtually anywhere downtown.
Bloor Street’s array of shops and businesses changed over the years. Early on it was mostly local, studded with grocers and butcher shops, little clothing stores, a yarn shop. Jane would take her “bundle buggy,” a small shopping cart, to pick up provisions, sometimes take the subway down to the city’s old St. Lawrence Market. In time, as the Annex gentrified, Bloor Street became a shopping destination for outsiders and students, the more neighborhood-oriented shops thinning out.

Jane would live on Albany Avenue for the rest of her life—for the first quarter century or so with Bob and then, for ten years more, alone.

The house gloried in that first flurry of Bob’s design wittiness. But with the passage of time, it settled into its old age just as he and Jane did, grown familiar and friendly, if inevitably a bit shabby, with its stained-glass windows, African sculpture, oil portrait of Jane’s great-aunt, a clothes-and-
wire scarecrow over the staircase, endless shelves of books. The children, settling into their own lives, were frequently in and out. When Jane’s brothers and sister and their families visited, they stayed with Jane and Bob at 69 Albany Avenue, or across the street with their friends Toshiko and Sid at 74, or down the street with son Jim and his wife, Pat, at 31.

Jane became a fixture of the neighborhood. She’d sit out on the front porch watching children rattle and whiz down the sidewalk on their skateboards. She’d sell jam at the neighborhood’s fall fair. She could be
seen walking chummily along with Bob; sometimes they held hands. At neighborhood meetings she might show up without having registered to speak beforehand, but someone always would give her his time; as one neighbor said, “
You can’t say no to Jane Jacobs.” Another neighbor told of having a sick tree removed from in front of his house, only to encounter Jane on the street, angry, labeling him a “
white painter,” the local term for those who’d buy a house, slap on a coat of white paint, and sell it for a quick profit. Later, it seems, after digging around in the root bed and discovering the tree was really dead, she apologized.

Another Annex neighbor, Katherine Gildner, told of the time
Jane rescued her. She was a doctoral student and young mother, up near dawn that day in the local park, a toddler in tow and infant twins in the stroller, and having a hard time of it: “You know, you’re feeding one, the other’s screaming, right?” And the older kid is carrying on, “Mommy, Mommy, I want to show you my hockey cards.” Her husband was out of town, she was on her own, exhausted, having trouble keeping it together. Then, an older woman approached her. “She didn’t say, ‘Would you like some help?’ Because I’m the type who would say, ‘No, I’m fine, thank you very much.’ ” Instead, she just stopped, picked up a [baby] bottle, picked up one of the twins, and started feeding him, meanwhile talking softly with the toddler about his hockey cards:

Oh, I know Gordie Howe
…She seemed really interested in them. She turned them over while she was feeding one baby, read all the statistics.
These are amazing cards. Let’s organize them.
And he loved that. He was just thrilled to have the attention. I remember this so clearly. Because I saw the sun come up and it was the first time since the babies were born…the first time that I had silence. It was like
velvet.

Of course, the woman was Jane Jacobs, though it was a year before Gildner realized it, her husband pointing her out one day while shopping on Bloor Street.

Never itself celebrated in any of her books, as 555 Hudson Street was in
Death and Life
, the Albany Avenue house became a place of pilgrimage; Jane would have abhorred the word, but it wasn’t far wrong. Mayors and other civic leaders, journalists and scholars, would come to work out political strategies, try out ideas, settle in to the bouts of intellectual combat she relished. “She had a droll, dry way of speaking,” remembers
Bobbi Speck. “She never showed emotion…She was expressionless, like an ancient tortoise.”

Meanwhile, Canada
took
with Jane. “I find
all the threshing around that goes on here about a Canadian identity absolutely bewildering,” she told an interviewer as early as 1970. “When you come here from outside, as I did, you know immediately what ‘Canadian’ means.” To her, it meant common sense and less suspicion of government; Jane was much impressed with how calmly Canada opened its arms that summer to a threatened “hippie invasion.” She developed “faith in the Canadian character, in [its] whole lack of hysteria as a people, in [its] refusal to be caught up in what I call ‘righteous manias.’ ”

In September 1974, six years after immigrating,
Jane became a citizen. She went to a special court in Toronto, paid a $12 fee, filled out an application, submitted passport and birth certificate, and, a few weeks later, was summoned to appear before a federal judge. The judge was a woman about as old as Jane who had herself emigrated from Poland a quarter century before. At one point Jane volunteered that she liked Canada’s “mosaic” idea: immigrants and their descendants did not need to wholly assimilate but could retain their ethnic and linguistic roots, like brightly colored tiles contributing to the whole. That was better, it seemed to her, than the American “melting pot” idea, which looked to erase such differences. At this, the judge laughed.
Wasn’t always like that.
After first coming to Canada she’d worked in a factory where the manager forbade her to speak Polish with other Poles, warning she’d be fired if she did. She did, and she was. Sometimes, said the judge, Canadian women would say to her, “Oh yes, my mother had a Polish maid.” To this, she’d reply, “So did my mother, four or five” of them.