Jacobs Jane - Eyes on the Street: the Life of Jane Jacobs

THINK ABOUT what youd want to say about Jane Jacobs and its hard not to wonder what shed say right back.

You might not want to get in a debate with Jane; she was sure to beat you. In verbal combat she was overwhelming. When she was in her thirties, before shed written The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she wrote a provocative article for a major magazine whose publisher questioned her reporting. When the two of them met, Jane defended her account with, by one account, a screed of facts and firsthand observations. Later, she asked a sympathetic colleague why hed not stuck up for her more. No need, said he. The poor manthe publisherthought hed hit a buzz saw.

You could say Jane Jacobs didnt suffer fools gladly, which is true. But you dont want to say it, because its such a damnable clich, and you dont want to utter a clich in front of Jane. You want to be at your best. If theres a flabbiness to your argument, a want of pointed example, a blurriness of vision, you probably wouldnt want it to show. Because if it didaround the kitchen table at her home in Greenwich Village, or later in Toronto, or at a public meeting, or among a bunch of academicsshed just gobble you up. There are ways to disagree with Jane Jacobs, but not as many as you might think, Roger Sale wrote of her in The Hudson Review in 1970, because on her own terms she is almost invariably right and the real questions arise when you start to consider what she has left out.

Janewhich is what everyone called her, including her three childrenwrote seven books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, basked in the glow of legions of admirers, and had a million discussions and debates around the kitchen table, which she always won. At least in her later yearsthough theres reason to think it went all the way back to grade schoolshe invariably dominated the conversation. She listened, she responded, she challenged. She thought about what she wanted to say and said it. Not honey coated, not smoothed over. It just came out. Call her brutal, call her honest. Someone once said of her, What a dear, sweet grandmother she isnt.

Jane was perfectly normal, healthy and happy in all the important ways. She had friends who loved her. She was good to them, kind, and loving. She could be playful, even silly; at least once, she screwed up her face into ridiculous shapes and submitted herself to the camera. When you greeted her shed throw her arms around you in a tight clasp. She took time out from the writing that was about the most important thing in the world to her to help her children, her friends, her neighbors. But always, she said what she thought; she didnt know how not to. Once, the editor of a magazine she worked for spoke to her when she said what she thought to The New York Times. I believe you really should not have sounded off

Now, its fair to ask: Was she always like this? Or was it a personality trait that blossomed over time? Perhaps only after she became famous with her first book? Or, having moved to Toronto, after she became a revered symbol of that city? Were these the affectations of Personality that a prominent person sometimes makes part of him or herself over the years? Or was she always this way?

Jane Jacobs wrote seven books, but is remembered most for one of them, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, continuously in print ever since, and heralded as the book that, more than any other single influence, has reshaped how people see cities and what they expect of them. When they talked about it later, readers sometimes made it sound as if Death and Life was near to a religious experience for them. That before reading it, they were as they were; then, after they read it, they were different. That henceforth they saw differently. That their Chicago or New York or Boston had been reshaped before their eyes, with a new balance as to what was important and what was not. For many today, certainly, Jane Jacobs verges on a cult figure, with Death and Life a kind of gospel, like Chairman Maos Little Red Book in its time, or the Bible, or the U.S. Constitutiona repository of revealed Truth. I was among those early drawn to Jacobs through Death and Life, which I read in the early 1970s. Its unapologetic assertion of all a city could be at its best, its affirmation of urban sensibilities like those Id absorbed growing up in New York, and later seen in Paris and San Francisco, was a revelation.

But these many years later, the subject of the book you are now reading is not cities, urban planning, or urban design. Its not a book that sets out to gather upbeat stories of rejuvenation and revitalization from the urban front lines. It does not take the reader by the hand and guide her through resurgent Station North in Baltimore or gentrified Williamsburg in Brooklyn; through old warehouses and office buildings made into homes, or downtowns set a-bustling again. Or exult in the reassuring drops in crime in New York and other cities. Or enjoy the vision of city-busting urban highways torn down in Boston and San Francisco. Each of these, seen through the right lens, can be laid at Jane Jacobss door. And youll find such happy stories in this book. But they are not its subject.

Rather, this is a biography of the remarkable woman who helped make such accounts possible. This book looks back, to a time when the rare upbeat report of city life was buried beneath stacks of press releases from new suburban developments, new interstate highways linked by cloverleafs, new rounds of corporate exodus to suburban office parks. To a time when old city neighborhoods were being erased, high-rise housing projects erected in their place; when slums were slums and everyone knew exactly what they were, or thought they did; when anyone who wanted to live in the city would have been seen as just a little weird. To a time into which Jane Jacobs strode, looked around her, and helped the rest of us see through new eyes.