Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (59 page)

A few months later, Jane wrote John Branson, the Alaska historian, “
Our news is not so great, because Bob is ill with inoperable cancer.” After most of a lifetime’s smoking, lung cancer. He’d gotten a course of radiation treatment at Princess Margaret Hospital, which he’d helped design. “He actually
liked going for the treatments,” Jane would say, “and I did, too, because he liked seeing how his hospital worked.” He handled the treatments well. Between then and the next round they were bound for Prince Edward Island.

They had “
a happy month” on PEI, Jane wrote Branson in October, “which is good to remember.” But in the end, the cancer took him fast. Early in September, he’d begun “to weaken and decline rapidly.” The children gathered, nursing him at home. He died on the 17th. “
An interesting, loveable, good and irreplaceable man,” one obituary called him.

Jane wrote with the news to Ellen Perry, who had approached her for memories of her grandmother back in Bloomsburg, for a book Perry was preparing on family recipes.

I am kind of useless at the moment, as you may imagine. You had better not count on my contribution to the cookbook. It’s ridiculous, but I feel so blank and distracted that just the idea of hunting up a photo of my grandmother, getting it copied, and doing the small revision…that you need seems so formidable.

At the funeral, Jane didn’t cry. “I never cry,” she once told Toshiko Adilman. But the sadness washed over her whenever she’d think,
I want to tell Bob something.

   CHAPTER 24   

IDEAS THAT MATTER

I. THE LIFE OF
Death and Life

The citation for Jane’s Jefferson Medal, received that day in Charlottesville, Virginia, Bob still by her side, declared that
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
was

firmly ensconced on the list of the most influential books of our century. It is hard to identify a single work that has influenced more the thinking and strategies in the field of American urban planning and design.

From the publication of this book, one can date the rethinking of U.S. urban renewal policies, the eclipse of modern architecture, the rise of historic preservation, the invigoration of neighborhood involvement, and even vigorous and principled public opposition to large-scale public projects that threaten to destroy the texture and vitality of urban places.

She created a mood that has influenced urban planning and architectural concepts for over 40 years.

Across those forty years, Jane had explored new subjects in new books, but all the while
Death and Life
was sinking its roots deep into the earth of intellect and culture, finding new readers, inspiring scholars, architects, and planners, influencing the shape of real cities. Jane could escape the book no more than anyone else. Inevitably, she was
celebrated for it, forced to think back to its origins, respond to criticisms of it—and surely, in spare moments, drink deep drafts of pride that she had created it.

Bustle and surprise, bountiful variety, human energy, and sheer, vital messiness: might these trump the suburban troika of light, air, and green? Hundreds of thousands, probably millions, had read the book whole or in part and absorbed the idea that maybe they did. Among planners and architects who had grown up on the tenets of modernism,
Death and Life
asked,
Are you sure?
“
I still cannot walk down a city street without Jane Jacobs rushing up to me and shouting: ‘Look at that…’ ” wrote the British journalist Simon Jenkins. “She saw in streets the crooked timber of mankind on vibrant display.” An urban consultant grown up in London, Richard Gilbert, wrote Jane that
Death and Life
had “made sense of my life.” A Stanford University student, Nick Grossman, feeling cut off from the energy of his New York roots, read it during his sophomore year and abruptly
got
it, understanding how he felt about where he’d lived before and where he lived now. Michael Kimmelman, art critic of
The New York Times
, wrote that on reading the book, “it was with a jolt of recognition…It said what I knew instinctively to be true but had never articulated, which is the quality of great literature.”

No need to dwell on testimonials like these; I’ve heard or read dozens of them and so perhaps have you. The book that on publication had faced both derision and praise had become enshrined, early criticism mostly drowned out by a sustained chorus of attachment, loyalty, and love — for the book and for the kind of city it championed. By the time of the thirtieth, then the fortieth anniversary of the book’s publication—and then later, after Jane’s death, with the fiftieth anniversary in 2011—critics and scholars of every stripe were exploring its origins, its impact on the U.S., Canada, and the world, its literary and intellectual qualities, and whether its insights even still applied.

“Is There Still Life in
Death and Life?
” asked Roger Montgomery, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of city and regional planning. For Jane Jacobs, he went on to observe, the city was a kind of “
vernacular utopia…And that is what the book is really about: teaching us how to love big cities…Jacobs taught her readers city love.” It let readers ’fess up, during those long decades of suburban night, that it might actually be among the stately row houses of Baltimore’s Mount Vernon Place that they felt more at home than in Cockeysville, or Towson, or any of the
city’s other sprawling suburbs; or in San Francisco’s still-ragtag Castro District more than some perfect little town up in Marin.

In 1961, when the book came out, the postwar suburbs, their modernist style, their vision of the good life, were so entrenched it could be hard to recognize any other. But in a way reminiscent of the “liberation” struggles of black people, ethnics, women, gays, and other marginalized groups during roughly the same years, Jane’s book helped legitimize the heretical sensibilities of the confirmed city dweller. It helped its readers think about neighbors and strangers, anonymity and privacy, security and adventure, ugliness and prettiness, the very shape of daily life, in new ways.

At the time of Jane’s death, a Canadian writer, Sandra Martin, observed that
Death and Life
“
connected with a generation of young adults who were trying to make sense of the post-war world.” But not that
whole
generation, Jane realized, only part of it. Writing in 1992, she distinguished between
“car people” and “foot people,” those seeking “the camaraderie, bustle, and promises of surprise and adventure” of the street. They
got
her book, which gave “legitimacy to what they already knew for themselves.”

The city,
Death and Life
emphasized, throws you up against strangers, whereas the suburbs insulate you from them, leave you snug in a cocoon of familiarity and comfortable sameness. One scholar, Jamin Creed Rowan, has pictured Jane as part of a literary tradition, epitomized by certain
New Yorker
profiles of the 1940s and 1950s, that abjured sweet togetherness (
a “nauseating name for an old ideal,” Jane called it); city dwellers were
“
interconnected
, not
interrelated.
” That is, the city wasn’t a place where most people knew your name; on the other hand, it tied you by invisible threads to everyone else, and to the larger organism that was Chicago or LA. Urbanites, Rowan wrote, were bound by “the involuntary accumulation of public contacts rather than the purposeful cultivation of private intimacies.” A good thing? Bad? You could debate that all day and night. But it was
different
—and different,
Death and Life
declared on every page, was
okay.

Of course, the long decades during which the book became a back-to-the-city bible also allowed time for a reaction to set in against it, for new rounds of reappraisal and revisionism. Early critiques of the book had pictured Jane as antagonistic to visions of the city other than her own; as unmoved by
sides of city life unrelated to physical form,
including the social and, especially, the racial. Now, with the stark improvement of many city neighborhoods, also laid at Jane’s door has been gentrification—that unwelcome consequence, or exaggeration, of the “unslumming” Jane hailed as a route to urban health: the new gentry snatch up marginal properties, make them glisten and shine, attract glittering boutiques, new high-end gyms, and high-rise condos. Prices rise. Taxes climb. Ordinary people can’t afford to live there and soon move out. Just tour broad square miles of Brooklyn, Boston, and San Francisco to see the social damage. Not that it
looks
like damage; at first it seems seductive, bright, and appealing. But it exacts a price. “I have lived in the West Village since 1964, and I can attest to the fact that gentrification has destroyed this area,” wrote one respondent, “Joyce,” to an online article by Michael Powell titled “An Urban Theorist Questions the Gospel of St. Jane”:

Gone is any semblance or authenticity of a vibrant, creative, economically mixed area. I am sickened by the influx of unbelievable wealth…I can barely afford to buy a hamburger in my neighborhood anymore. I mourn the death of this once vibrant community.

Another example of a good thing gone wrong, thanks, presumably, to Jane’s book, was the planning profession as a whole. Or so said Thomas J. Campanella, professor of urban planning and design at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He pictured Jane as a latter-day Martin Luther,
Death and Life
like the manifesto he nailed to the Wittenberg church that sparked the Protestant Reformation.

So thoroughly internalized was the Jacobs critique that planners could see only folly and failure in the work of their own professional forebears. Burnham’s grand dictum, “Make no little plans,” went from a battle cry to an embarrassment in less than a decade.

Things had gone too far, Campanella asserted. The planning profession had become emasculated.
Death and Life
was to blame.

And speaking of planners, why had Jane directed her animus at them in the first place? They were too easy a target, wrote Sharon Zukin, looking back at
Death and Life
in
The Architectural Review
in 2011, “
compared to developers who build, and banks and insurance companies who
finance, the building that rips out a city’s heart”; of them, Jane’s book stood largely mute. In her West Village battles, she had failed to “attack the nexus of economic and state power” behind Robert Moses, instead picking on the relatively powerless planners.

Jane did sometimes bother to answer charges leveled at
Death and Life.
Gentrification? It attested to how much people really
wanted
diverse and vibrant neighborhoods. Unfortunately, she said in 2005, with the growth of the automobile “
we stopped building places worth gentrifying,” so demand “increasingly outstrips supply,” forcing up prices in the few potentially good neighborhoods. So-o-o, make more such places!

Some of her critics said that the good life wasn’t “possible in the [high density] situations I recommend. Well, I don’t say ‘I recommend.’ I say ‘This exists.’ ” This was Jane in 1963, and it would remain her most abiding defense, that she didn’t prescribe, merely described. To test her ideas, Jane held, you needed only to look at how they worked, or didn’t, in real cities. “
I hope any reader of this book,” she wrote in
Death and Life
, “will constantly and skeptically test what I say against his own knowledge of cities and their behavior. If I have been inaccurate in observations or mistaken in inferences and conclusions, I hope these faults will be quickly corrected.” In fact, her book had many assertions you
could
test, like an
Origin of Species
set against the observed facts of nature.

For example, did
older, smaller buildings of the kind Jane said contributed to urban vitality really do so? A report by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, based on the experience of San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Seattle, concluded that they did.

Did “eyes on the street” reduce crime, as Jane argued in the book? Maybe not, a
University of Pennsylvania Law Review
study suggested; pedestrian-dense mixed-use development in Los Angeles neighborhoods did record lower crime than those exclusively commercial; but purely residential areas had crime rates lower than either. A “meta-study” of research drawn from the broad discipline of environmental criminology came away similarly skeptical.

Was gradual and piecemeal development of a neighborhood, as opposed to broad-scale redevelopment all at once, with piles of big money behind it, more apt to promote a sense of community, as Jane said? Looking to Chicago, the Duke University sociologist Katherine King found evidence that it did.

These and other such studies didn’t always yield scientifically ironclad results. And, as in science generally, most of them raised as many
questions as they answered. But in trying to test the book’s conclusions they hinted at the singular status it had achieved:
Death and Life
, the measure.

It became the measure not alone in the United States and Canada but around the world, in Berlin and Vienna, Abu Dhabi and Buenos Aires. Two Egyptian scholars, for example, reported that the Beirut, Lebanon, central business district was being redeveloped with an eye to principles laid out in
Death and Life
, but that so far the city’s built fabric lacked “true diversity and vitality.” In the Netherlands, observed Gert-Jan Hospers, the name of Jane Jacobs had become “a warranty of urban quality.” In Spain, where
Death and Life
was first published in 1967, her thinking had by the 1970s already become part of the city planning curriculum, wrote the Spanish historian of architecture José Luis Sáinz Guerra. Her “message in favor of the dense, diverse city” was helping to bring “vitality, intensity of use, and quality of life to Spanish city centers.”