Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (74 page)

“enormous intellectual temerity”
: John Chamberlain,
Wall Street Journal
, November 3, 1961.

“a window of January air”
: Edwin Weeks to JJ, January 29, 1962, Burns, 2:3.

a hot ticket
: This correspondence is drawn from Burns, 2:3.

“Laws of the Asphalt Jungle”
: Account drawn from Walter McQuade,
The Nation
, March 17, 1962, pp. 241–42; press release, Museum of Modern Art, February 2, 1962; untitled summary by Sidney Frigand and Peter Lapham of MOMA panel discussion, February 14, 1962, Commissioner Goldstone Papers, New York Municipal Archives.

“the enchanted ballerina”
: Morton Hoppenfeld,
Journal of the American Institute of Planners
, 28, no. 2 (1962).

visiting Pittsburgh
: Account drawn from James V. Cunningham, “Jane Jacobs Visits Pittsburgh,”
New City
, September 15, 1962; press release, “Jane Jacobs, Anti-City Planner, Will Spend Week Here Lecturing,” University of Pittsburgh, January 25, 1962; William Allan, “City Planning Critic Gets Roasting Reply,”
Pittsburgh Press
, February 22, 1962.

“I am filled with delighted admiration”
: Eugene Raskin, in “Abattoir for Sacred Cows.”

“Khrushchev see the North End”
:
Matter
, p. 51.

“What a dear, sweet character”
:
Matter
, p. 15.

Mooritania
:
Matter
, pp. 53–54.

“like two Japanese wrestlers”
: Jason Epstein to JJ, December 1, 1960, Random House Papers, ColumbiaRare.

“a morbid and biased catalog”
:
D&L
, p. 28.

“I held my fire”
: Miller, p. 474.

“Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies”
: Quotations that follow drawn from reprint of article in Lewis Mumford,
The Urban Prospect
, pp. 182–207.

“like a chestful of combat ribbons”
: Miller, p. 475.

“born and bred New Yorker”
: Mumford, “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” p. 193.

Sunnyside Gardens
: The community still exists.

in the spirit of Ebenezer Howard
: In a review of a new edition of Howard’s
Garden Cities of To-morrow
, Mumford calls
Death and Life
a “preposterous mass of historic misinformation and contemporary misinterpretation…[in which] she exposed her ignorance of the whole planning movement by seeking to make Howard responsible for all the mistakes made in modern planning.” Lewis Mumford, “Revaluations I: Howard’s Garden City,”
New York Review of Books
, April 8, 1965.

“not utopia”
: Mumford, “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” p. 194.

“Her simple formula”
: Mumford, “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” p. 197.

“driven Mumford into schizophrenia”
: Dwight, unknown last name, on
New Yorker
letterhead, to JJ, December 6, [1961], Burns, 2:3.

“I laughed”
: Rochon, “Jane Jacobs at 81.”

“quite a sexist”
: Dillon, p. 42.

“When two people”
: Miller, p. 474.

“I’m not sure whether”
: Herbert Gans to JJ, January 19, 1962, Herbert Gans Papers, ColumbiaRare.

“What is lively”
: In Gans’s typed notes about
Death and Life
, Herbert Gans Papers, ColumbiaRare.

“No child of enterprise”
:
D&L
, p. 105.

“She doesn’t accept the existence”
: Morton Hoppenfeld,
Journal of the American Institute of Planners
28, no. 2 (1962).

“She imposes her tastes”
: A. Melamed,
Journal of the American Institute of Planners
28, no. 2 (1962).

“a brilliant personal diatribe”
: Catherine Bauer Wurster, in “Abattoir for Sacred Cows.”

“a brilliant and distorted book”
: Kevin Lynch, in “Abattoir for Sacred Cows.”

“mixing apples with battleships”
: “North End Here to Stay, Boston Planners Declare,”
Boston Sunday Globe
, October 15, 1961. The planner quoted is Donald M. Graham.

“no direct, simple relationship”
:
D&L
, p. 147.

“the physical fallacy”
: Herbert Gans, “City Planning and Urban Realities,”
Commentary;
reference to the physical fallacy appears on p. 172; see also typed notes about
D&L
in Herbert Gans Papers, ColumbiaRare; Herbert Gans, “Jane Jacobs: Toward an Understanding,” pp. 213–15.

“old-hat stereotypes”
: JJ to Herbert Gans, January 19, 1962, Herbert Gans Papers, ColumbiaRare.

“she broke off relations”
: Herbert J. Gans, “Jane Jacobs: Toward an Understanding,” p. 213.

Mr. and Mrs. McLean
: See Ellen Lurie, “A Study of George Washington Houses: The Effect of the Project on Its Tenants and the Surrounding Community,” 1955–1956, Union Settlement Papers, Box 11, Folder 13, ColumbiaRare. For an imaginative reconstruction of Lurie see Zipp, “Superblock Stories.” Lurie died, at age forty-seven, in 1978.

“a question to put”
: Jason Epstein to JJ, December 22, 1960, Random House Papers, ColumbiaRare.

“a poor idea”
: JJ to Jason Epstein, December 27, 1960, Random House Papers, ColumbiaRare.

“was more firmly convinced”
: Jason Epstein to JJ, December 28, 1960, Random House Papers, ColumbiaRare.

“Jason is very worried”
: Nathan Glazer to JJ, January 30, 1961, Random House Papers, ColumbiaRare.

“the discrimination which operates”
:
D&L
, p. 371.

“touched some sensitive chords”
: Arthur T. Row,
Yale Law Journal
71 (1962): 1597–1602.

“inept introspective scholarship”
: Paul A. Pfretzschner, “Panning the Planners,”
Antioch Review
22, no. 1 (spring 1962): 130–36.

“conveniently overlooks”
: A. Melamed,
Journal of the American Institute of Planners
28, no. 2 (1962).

“remarkable appraisal”
: Jerome Zukosky, letter to the editor,
Commentary
, July 1, 1962.

CHAPTER 15: WEST VILLAGE WARRIOR

“People who have seen her”
: Kramer.

“If you write a press release”
: Laura Hansen, “Claire Tankel,” oral history interview, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, March 1, 1997, and February 20, 1998.

urban oasis was threatened
: This account is built up in part from Fishman, “Revolt of the Urbs”; oral histories in the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation archives; Flint, chapter 3.

“a cumbersome kind of name”
: KentVillage, p. 3.

the winning strategy
: KentVillage, p. 5.

“the backroom boss”
: Susan DeVries, “Norman Redlich,” oral history interview, Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, March 6, 1997.

“had every reason to expect”
: KentVillage, p. 5.

“We expect you do it”
: KentVillage, p. 6.

“all these little elves”
: KentVillage, p. 8. When, years later, she sent her son Ned a transcript of Kent’s oral history of her, Jane suggested he might want to simply “enjoy it yourself as a piece of life, in which you shared importantly in so many ways, young as you were,” JJ to Ned Jacobs, January 28, 2001, Burns.

“passed the word”
: Susan DeVries, “Norman Redlich,” oral history interview, Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, March 6, 1997.

ribbon-
tying
: When
The New York Times
reported on the closure, it referred to Jane as “Mrs. Jane Jacobs, the author.” This was almost three years before the publication of
D&L
, and even before she went under contract for the book with Random House.

“tough political pressure”
:
D&L
, p. 472.

“issue-oriented politics”
: KentVillage, p. 9.

Robert Moses
: See Caro; Ballon and Jackson; Mennel, “A Fight to Forget,” in which he quotes a 1962 Moses letter to an acquaintance: “Jane Jacobs isn’t really worth refuting. She has the Architectural Forum following and the professional critics with her, but nobody with any experience or responsibility is impressed by such captious owl dropping…La Jacobs doesn’t know this metropolis or any other. In an examination on facts she would not get 40%. After all, you must start with knowledge, not cyanide.”

“All new work”
: Robert Moses, “What Happened to Haussmann,”
Architectural Forum
(July 1942): 57–66.

“partisans, enthusiasts”
: Cited in Robert Fishman, “Revolt of the Urbs,” p. 122.

“did more harm to New York”
:
Ethics
, p. 187. See also Amateau, “Jane Jacobs, Urban Legend”: “It makes me sick when I hear, ‘People are too timid and you need someone with the boldness of Robert Moses,’ Jacobs said. ‘Well, if you like a big dictatorship and life under a dictator you had the closest thing to it under Robert Moses.’ ”

“NOBODY, NOBODY, NOBODY”
: Kunstler, II, p. 24. Jane says here that she saw Moses only once. However, in an article in
Building Design
, May 5, 2006, p. 9, Richard Sennett recalls Jane taking on Moses at a public meeting:

In her public encounters with him, she was anything but politically naïve. Other people would scream at Moses but she just politely asked him questions like: “How do you know this is what people want?” “Do you know any of the people in this room?” “Who do you know?” It drove him crazy. Rather than telling him the community was against him, she focused on his position. I was at one meeting where she asked him “What is beautiful for you?” She put him on the defensive.