Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (72 page)

CHAPTER 11: A PERSON WORTH TALKING TO

“just the person”
: William H. Whyte Jr., “C. D. Jackson Meets Jane Jacobs,” preface to Whyte,
The Exploding Metropolis
, p. xv.

“a screed of facts”
: Dillon, p. 41.

“mainly of writing captions”
: William H. Whyte Jr., “C. D. Jackson Meets Jane Jacobs,” preface to Whyte,
The Exploding Metropolis
, p. xv.

They respected one another
: On two occasions, for example (see below and next chapter), Whyte supported Jane’s grants with the Rockefeller Foundation.

“a manifesto of cultural politics”
: Sam Bass Warner Jr., foreword to Whyte,
The Exploding Metropolis
, p. iv.

“huge patches”
: William H. Whyte Jr., “Urban Sprawl,” in Whyte,
The Exploding Metropolis
, p. 133.

“They will be spacious”
: Jane Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” in Whyte,
The Exploding Metropolis
, p. 157. In what follows, I use the page numbering of the 1993 University of California Press reprint, which differs from the 1957 edition (which is credited to “The Editors of
Fortune
”).

“narrow, back-door alley”
: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 162.

“
The smallness of big cities
”
: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 163.

“This cultural superblock”
: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 173.

“To the north”
: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 173.

“the cheerful hurly-burly”
: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 158.

Lincoln Square
: My account largely follows
Projects
, part III.

“The pain brought on”
:
Projects
, p. 200.

“the logic of egocentric children”
: Jacobs, “Downtown Is for People,” p. 158.

“Look what your girl did”
: “Comments on Downtown Is For People,” Ruth Kammler,
Fortune
Letters Dept., RF, RG 1.2, Ser. 200R, Box 390, Folder 3380, Rockefeller.

“the first blink”
: Gillian Darley, “Ian Nairn and Jane Jacobs, the Lessons from Britain and America,”
Journal of Architecture
17, no. 5 (2012): 738.

the mainstream place
: My account of
Forum
during this period derives in part from Blake,
No Place Like Utopia;
LaurenceDiss; see also David A. Crane, “Working Paper for the University of Pennsylvania Conference on Urban Design Criticism,” University of Pennsylvania, Institute of Urban Studies, 1958, p. 11. Crane could be harsh: “These magazines seem to defer to a real or imaginary demand for easy entertainment: ‘slick’ pictures and glib captions which never intentionally show faults in a building. The level of discourse is rarely of real professional caliber; indeed it compares unfavorably with some newspaper writing on art or drama.” (But, he noted, “Jane Jacobs’s recent comprehensive and thoughtful treatment of urbanism in
Forum
comes as a very welcome change.”)

“quickly to understand”
:
Dark
, p. 127.

Barcelona Pavilion
: This brief survey of modernist architecture and planning has been drawn from, among others, Fishman,
Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century;
Blake,
No Place Like Utopia;
Goldberger,
Why Architecture Matters;
the Le Corbusier exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, 2013; Martin Perschler, through his course “Modernism & Postmodernism in Architecture,” Johns Hopkins University, 2013; and, inevitably,
D&L
itself.

“What is the ideal city?”
: Fishman,
Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century
, p. 3.

stood before a map
: I saw the footage at the Le Corbusier exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, 2013.

“The Garden City”
: Fishman,
Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century
, part I; Miller.

Charley in New Town
: Halas & Batchelor Cartoon Film Production, Central Office of Information, U.K., 1948.

“didn’t bring them around”
: Kunstler, II, p. 9.

“shattering to those of us”
: Blake,
No Place Like Utopia
, p. 290.

party with architects
: Chadbourne Gilpatric diary, February 22, 1958, RF, RG 12, Box 168, Rockefeller.

“flashing charm and audacity”
: Arthur Meier Schlesinger,
A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings
,
1917
–
1950
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 115.

“approach to city pattern”
: Douglas Haskell to Messrs. Hazen, Lessing, Grotz, November 21, 1957, HaskellPap.

“Jane’s blockbuster”
: Laurence, “Jane Jacobs Before Death and Life,” note 46.

“What Is the City?”
: JJ to Doug Haskell, April 25, 1958, HaskellPap.

“Wow!”
: Douglas Haskell to JJ, April 28, 1958, HaskellPap.

“I would eventually”
: I wasn’t there when she said this, which was during an interview in 1994 for a television station in Texas; rather, I watched a video recording of it. But what she said didn’t sound the way the words read on the page. I must have played back the clip a dozen times, trying to read into Jane’s peculiar mix of shyness and self-assurance. As she said, “…
eventually have
persuaded
them,” her eyes closed and her eyebrows lifted, and abruptly she seemed like some geeky high school student telling us, sweetly and demurely, “Oh, and I won the school science fair prize”—except with an implicit “Of course, what would you expect,
certainly
I won it, how could I not?” The interview was by Lee Cullum, May 4, 1994, VHS recording, Burns.

In a letter to Peter Newman, January 20, 1997, Burns, Jane uses similar, if more qualified, language: “My editors were very orthodox in their beliefs about city planning and related architecture and not receptive to this iconoclasm. Eventually, I think, I might have persuaded them—maybe—but in any event I got a contract with Random House to write a book instead.”

“The criss-cross of supporting relationships”
: Typescript, “Talk given April 20, 1958, at a dinner panel of the New School Associates,” Box 37, Folder 380, Rockefeller.

“the deepest satisfaction”
: Lewis Mumford to JJ, May 3, 1958, Kunstler, II, p. 22.

“Mrs. Jacobs herself”
: Chadbourne Gilpatric diary, May 9, 1958, Rockefeller.

“fairly bubbled”
: Chadbourne Gilpatric diary, June 4, 1958, Rockefeller.

“sounds very abstract”
: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, June 14, 1958, Rockefeller.

“questions about the scope”
: Chadbourne Gilpatric diary, June 26, 1958, Rockefeller.

“One is the image”
: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, July 1, 1958, Rockefeller.

“an interested publisher”
: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, June 14, 1958, Rockefeller.

His name was Jason Epstein
: See Jason Epstein,
Book Business: Publishing, Past Present and Future
(New York: Norton, 2001); introduction to 50th anniversary edition of
D&L
, Modern Library, 2011.

both urged Jane
: Chadbourne Gilpatric diary, June 26, 1958, Rockefeller.

“clearer and better composed”
: Chadbourne Gilpatric to JJ, July 13, 1958, Rockefeller.

a professional biography
: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, July 13, 1958, Rockefeller.

“She made a brief address”
: Lewis Mumford to Chadbourne Gilpatric, August 1, 1958, Rockefeller.

“wholeheartedly enthusiastic”
: William H. Whyte to Chadbourne Gilpatric, August 4, 1958, Rockefeller.

“grandiose and vague”
: Christopher Tunnard to Chadbourne Gilpatric, August 18, 1958, Rockefeller.

“I’d back Jane Jacobs”
: Catherine Bauer to Chadbourne Gilpatric, August 5, 1958, Rockefeller.

“some general usefulness”
: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, September 15, 1958, Rockefeller.

CHAPTER 12: A MANUSCRIPT TO SHOW US

“completed plans”
: Chadbourne Gilpatric, October 17, 1958, Rockefeller.

“opinions and critical comments”
: Chadbourne Gilpatric, December 2, 1958, Rockefeller.

“had it all figured out”
: Lucy Jacobs video interview; see also Claire Perrin interview of JJ, May 1999, Burns, 23:32.

“woman wanted to see the North End”
: Interview, Herbert Gans.

didn’t seem interested
: Herbert Gans, “Remembering
The Urban Villagers
and Its Location in Intellectual Time: A Response to Zukin,”
City & Community
(September 2007): 231–36.

“district taking a terrible beating”
:
D&L
, p. 12.

“I looked down a narrow alley”
:
D&L
, p. 13.

“Mrs. J’s most exciting discovery”
: Chadbourne Gilpatric, December 2, 1958, Rockefeller.

“a lot of unexpected problems”
: Chadbourne Gilpatric, June 10, 1959, Rockefeller.

“On almost everything I had thought about”
: JJ to Chadbourne Gilpatric, July 17, 1959, Rockefeller.

realized they knew little
: Union Settlement brochure, January 31, 1961, p. 14, Burns, 2:4.

Ellen Lurie
: Interviews, Ron Shiffman, Kathy Goldman, Rebecca Lurie, Jim Jacobs; Zipp, “Superblock Stories.”

George Washington Houses
: Statement of General Purpose of George Washington Houses Study Project, January 9, 1956, Union Settlement Papers, ColumbiaRare.

“sobering”
: Union Settlement brochure, January 31, 1961, p. 14, Burns, 2:4.