Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (65 page)

Dark Age Ahead
was deeply personal for her. While civilization and its shaky pillars can seem a “big” subject, it turns repeatedly to the small, to events in Jane’s own life. It takes us back to her first jobs in Manhattan; to her father’s struggles during the Depression; to Higgins, the little town in that bypassed Appalachian pocket whose handful of residents had forgotten much their forebears once had known.

In this, her last book, Jane didn’t make her arguments as deftly as she had before. And yet, if its execution was flawed, its urgency calls out to us. It is as if here, near the end of her life, she sheds a tear for the world that has been so good to her but from which she must soon take leave. That human world, with its many cultures, its cities, its achievements in the arts and sciences, was civilization’s child—ours to nurture, lead toward healthier, more vibrant, more abundant life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCES

PEOPLE AND PLACES

First, many thanks are owed the following members of the Butzner and Jacobs families for their recollections of, and insights about, Jane: Carol Manson Bier, Decker Butzner and Deborah Sword, Ned Jacobs and Mary Ann Code, Burgin Jacobs, the late John Jacobs, Katia Jacobs, Lucia Jacobs, Jim Jacobs, Pat Broms, Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, Jane and Riley Henderson, Annie Butzner, and the late Kay Butzner, all of whom were unfailingly generous with their time, often as well with their personal papers and other artifacts of their lives with Jane.

Thanks to David Ebershoff, Jason Epstein, Anne Collins, Mary Rowe, Max Allen, David Gurin, Herbert Gans, Nathan Glazer, Roberta Brandes Gratz, Karen Reczuch, and Alan Littlewood for their memories of working with or collaborating with Jane.

For helping me to draw a picture of Jane’s life in Scranton, I wish to thank Arthur Magida for his leads to his old hometown; Louis Danzico for showing me around the Medical Arts Building in Scranton and furnishing the architectural drawings for Dr. Butzner’s office in the 1930s; Jean Harrington for admitting me to Jane’s first house on Electric Street; Connie Brown for showing me around Jane’s house on Monroe Avenue; Esther Kiesling for her recollections of the Powell School of Business of long ago; Jim Dilts and Herb Harwood for key tidbits about the realities of early-twentieth-century rail travel.

For help with Jane’s Virginia roots, I would like to thank the indefatigable genealogists Betsy Butzner Greene and her husband, James C. Greene, especially for their guided tour of Fredericksburg and environs.

Jane lived only about six months in Higgins, North Carolina, but
her time there came at an impressionable age, represented her first substantial exposure to a place outside her hometown, and introduced her to lives and life stories very different from her own. For help on this North Carolina side of Jane’s life, as well as that of her aunt Martha at the Higgins Neighborhood Center, I would like to thank Kay Butzner, now deceased, her daughter Jane Henderson and Jane’s husband, Riley, for their hospitality in North Carolina and their memories of Jane; as well as Diana Ruby Sanderson at Warren Wilson College, for tracking down the Higgins Neighborhood Center footage; and the staff of the Rush Wray Museum of Yancey History, in Burnsville, North Carolina. I wish especially to thank Annie Butzner, for showing me around the area and furnishing me with a 150-page trove of clippings bearing on Higgins from local publications like the
Burnsville Eagle
and
Asheville Citizen
, church publications, and those of the Higgins Neighborhood Center itself. These may originally have been part of a scrapbook and appear in something like chronological order, but often lack complete bibliographical information. I have kept this cache intact, as received from Ms. Butzner in 2012, citing it in the Notes simply as the “Ann Butzner papers.”

In New York City, where Jane lived from 1934 to 1968, I would like to thank Katy Bordonaro and Pearl Brower for introducing me to West Village Houses; Kathy Goldman, Judy Kirk Fitzsimmons, Rebecca Lurie, Eugene Sklar, Sara Stuart, and Sam Hall Kaplan for helping me to bridge the years back to the East Harlem of the 1950s. Likewise, thanks to Pierre Tonachel for his recollections of the West Village wars and for the cache of documents he so graciously provided (and to his brother Dick for leading me to him); to Ellen Perry Berkeley and Ron Shiffman, for their memories of Jane from her New York years and for access to some of their personal correspondence. A warm and sustained round of thanks goes to Robin Henig and her husband, Jeff, for their easy warmth and lively hospitality on my frequent visits to New York. (And thanks, too, Robin, for being my date at the Jacobs/Moses opera preview!) Barbara Garson at Westbeth, Ryan and Jamie Webb in Brooklyn, and Joel and Patty Schaindlin in Ossining were also kind enough to put me up on some of my New York visits; thanks to you all.

I am grateful to this book project for bringing me back to the New York City I lived in as a child and teenager. Through it, I renewed my ties to the streets of New York, and saw a lot I’d never seen before, from
East Harlem to Sunnyside, Queens. As a student at Stuyvesant High School from 1959 to 1962, I looked across First Avenue to Stuyvesant Town, or passed it on the way to the Canarsie Line subway, almost every day, without once venturing within it. Writing about Jane gave me the chance to atone for this lapse.

Finally, Toronto, where Jane lived from 1968 to the end of her life: For remembrances of Jane drawn primarily from her life in Toronto and for introductions to various places within the city, I would like to thank, in addition to family members mentioned previously: Megan Ogilvie, for my earliest car tour of the city; Max Allen, for taking me around through “the Kings”; and Alan Broadbent, Diane and Robert Brown, Anne Collins, David Crombie, John Downing, Cliff Esler, Ken Greenberg, Alan Littlewood, Liz Rykert, John Sewell, Bobbi Speck, Richard White, Eb Zeidler, and Margie Zeidler. A special thanks, on many counts both within and outside Jane’s orbit, to Toshiko Adilman, for her kindness, helpfulness, generosity of spirit, and access to some of her personal papers; thanks to Toshiko, too, for introducing me to “Heron Maiden.”

Though Jane never lived there, Boston figures in the making of this biography, too. The Jane Jacobs Papers, which brought me to the city repeatedly, are located at the Burns Library of Boston College; my first foray into the Burns collection came in late 2010, when I still lived in Cambridge, before moving back to Baltimore the following year. For their kind hospitality in Boston and environs, I wish to thank Ann and Dick Tonachel; Roz Williams and her late husband, Gary; and Jessie Arista and Duncan Webb.

Thanks go to the following scholars and writers who have made city planning, architecture, or Jane Jacobs herself among their areas of special interest: Lizabeth Cohen, Pierre Desrochers, Richard Florida, Paul Goldberger, Roberta Brandes Gratz, Chris Klemek, Glenna Lang, Timothy Mennel, Jamin Creed Rowan, Dirk Schubert, David Warsh, Sandy Zipp, and Peter Laurence (whose early work on Jane Jacobs, going back to the late 1990s, threw up signposts alerting me to promising leads I later pursued on my own). Thanks, too, to the Society for American City and Regional Planning History for their enormously worthwhile conferences in Baltimore and Toronto.

I would also like to thank Bill Dedman, for his help and encouragement at a crucial moment in pursuit of Jane’s FBI file; Anne-Marie Corley, a former student of mine in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science
Writing, for her translations of some of Jane’s work for
Amerika
from the Russian back into English; Arthur Magida for a stream of leads, human and digital, clippings, online references, and good humor; Jane Entwistle Shipley for her help in pursuing Mr. Frank; Neil Kleinman, for helping to get school records of Jane’s sister, Betty; Khanh Hoang, Dwight B. Waldo Library, Western Michigan University, for supplying the Robert Hemphill materials; and Martin Perschler, for his enlightening evening course at Johns Hopkins University, “Modernism & Postmodernism in Architecture.”

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gave me a substantial grant in support of this book, which permitted me to follow leads, research avenues, and travel that would have been beyond my means otherwise, and thereby helped make this book a better one: Thank you. Along with Doron Weber, vice president, who shepherded my application through Sloan’s deliberations, I wish to thank Delia Di Biasi and Sonia Epstein, for their much appreciated administrative help and advice.

I also wish to thank Michael Carlisle, my agent, and the whole crew at Knopf for their help in bringing this book into being. Ann Close presided over the whole business with insightful editing and good, measured advice. Maggie Hinders designed the book; Kevin Bourke oversaw its march toward production; Jessica Purcell has set about telling the world about it. Annie Eggers, Marisa Melendez, and Todd Portnowitz handled numerous recalcitrant editorial chores; they were patient, persistent, intelligent, and kind.

My thanks and love go out to Rachele, who gave the book its title; to David, Harry, Jessie, and Duncan; to my late father, Charles Kanigel, and my mother, Beatrice Wolshine Kanigel, who died while I was finishing this book; and every day and always, to my beloved Sarah.

ARCHIVES AND PERSONAL PAPERS

I’ve made use of manuscript and other archival resources at the following listed institutions, whose staffs I wish to sincerely thank for their help, patience, and professionalism. In the excitement of the chase surrounding archival research, it is too easy to misplace the names of those, at the front desk and in the stacks, who have helped you. But the debt is huge, one that I, and all those who do this sort of work, owe. I am writing this at
a time when barbaric forces in the Mideast have been destroying precious icons of our cultural heritage. Working within a great library or archive reminds us of all that, in an instant, can be lost forever.

Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania

Early historical materials about the Normal School, courtesy of Robert Dunkelberger, archivist, Andruss Library

Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn, ca. 1934

Burns Library, Boston College, Boston, Massachusetts

Jane Jacobs Papers; a special thanks to Justine Sundaram, who helped me at the beginning, back in 2010, and, with her colleagues, all across the years since

Centre de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, New York

Ellen Lurie Papers

Columbia County Historical and Genealogical Society, Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania

Bloomsburg and Espy

Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New York, New York

Columbia University Press Papers

Herbert Gans Papers

Union Settlement Papers

Random House Papers, especially those of Jason Epstein; Box 535 covers his papers from 1959 to 1962; Box 1365 from 1962 to 1984

Columbia University, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, New York, New York

Douglas Haskell Papers

James Marston Fitch Papers

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C.

228-page file on Jane Jacobs requested under provisions of the Freedom of Information/Privacy Act

Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, New York, New York

Lackawanna Historical Society, Scranton, Pennsylvania

Scranton history, street directories, newspaper archives

Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York

Le Corbusier exhibit, “An Atlas of Modern Landscapes,” 2013

National Archives, College Park, Maryland

Amerika
magazine, mostly RG 59, P 316

National Archives, St. Louis, Missouri

Jane’s federal employment records from her jobs at the Office of War Information and
Amerika
, including job applications, efficiency ratings, detailed job descriptions, leave requests, references to FBI reports, notes of personnel actions, pay records, memos, etc.; in all, these papers add up to about 180 pages

New-York Historical Society, New York, New York

Peter Frasse & Co. Papers

“WWII & NYC” exhibit, 2013

Municipal Archives, New York, New York

Goldstone Papers

City Planning Commission Papers

Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York

Chadbourne Gilpatric Papers

John Markle Papers

Scranton Central High School, Scranton, Pennsylvania, Donna Zaleski, librarian

Jane’s school records

Toronto Reference Library

Personal papers of Toshiko Adilman, Ellen Perry Berkeley, Annie Butzner, Decker Butzner, Anne Collins, David Ebershoff, Cliff Esler, Roberta Brandes Gratz, Betsy Butzner Greene and James C. Greene, David Gurin, Jim Jacobs, Lucia Jacobs, and Pierre Tonachel

NOTES

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS IN THE NOTES