Laurence - Becoming Jane Jacobs

BECOMING JANE JACOBS

THE ARTS AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN MODERN AMERICA

Casey Nelson Blake, Series Editor

Volumes in the series explore questions at the intersection of the history of expressive culture and the history of ideas in modern America. The series is meant as a bold intervention in two fields of cultural inquiry. It challenges scholars in American studies and cultural studies to move beyond sociological categories of analysis to consider the ideas that have informed and given form to artistic expressionwhether architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature. The series also expands the domain of intellectual history by examining how artistic works, and aesthetic experience more generally, participate in the discussion of truth and value, civic purpose and personal meaning that have engaged scholars since the late nineteenth century.

Advisory Board: Steven Conn, Lynn Garafola, Charles McGovern, Angela L. Miller, Penny M. Von Eschen, David M. Scobey, and Richard Cndida Smith

PETER L. LAURENCE

Copyright 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Laurence, Peter L., author.

Becoming Jane Jacobs / Peter L. Laurence.

pages cm. (The arts and intellectual life in modern America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4788-6

1. Jacobs, Jane, 19162006. 2. City plannersUnited StatesBiography. 3. City plannersCanadaBiography. 4. Women city plannersUnited StatesBiography. 5. Women city plannersCanadaBiography. 6. City planningUnited StatesHistory20th century. 7. City planningCanadaHistory20th century. 8. Urban renewalUnited StatesHistory20th century. 9. Urban renewalCanadaHistory20th century. 10. Sociology, UrbanPhilosophy. I. Title. II. Series: Arts and intellectual life in modern America.
HT167.L353 2015
711.4092dc23

2015022496

INTRODUCTION

How my ideas developed. Oh my God, who knows how their ideas developed?! The nearest I can pin it down is two things: First of all, I had a pervading uneasiness about the way the rebuilding of the city was going, augmented by some feeling of personal guilt, I suppose, or at least personal involvement. The reason for this was that in all sincerity I had been writing for Forum about how great various redevelopment plans were going to be. How delightful. How fine they would work.

I believed this. Then I began to see some of these things built. They werent delightful, they werent fine, and they were obviously never going to work right. Harrison Plaza and Mill Creek in Philadelphia were great shocks to me. I began to get this very uneasy feeling that what sounded logical in planning theory and what looked splendid on paper was not logical in real life at all, or at least in city real life, and not splendid at all when in use.
Jane Jacobs, 1959

JANE JACOBSS The Death and Life of Great American Cities is considered one of the most important books written about cities. Since it appeared in 1961, it has been required reading for generations of city planners, architects, urban designers, landscape architects, sociologists, urban economists, geographers, and students from other disciplines who are interested in the physical design and social construction of cities. Combined with her legendary battles against New York master builder Robert Moses and other urban renewal plans and highway projects in New York and Toronto, Jacobss books and activism made her a heroic figure, but, like other heroes, one often stereotyped and mythologized.

FIGURE 1 . Jane Jacobs in 1957. Gin Briggs/AP.

Despite all that has been written about The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs (who was born Jane Isabel Butzner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1916, and died in Toronto in 2006), and her activism, the notion that Jacobs was primarily a housewife with unusual abilities to observe and defend the domestic surroundings of her Greenwich Village home has persisted since the 1960s. While in the past this description of her observational capacities was often meant, consciously or unconsciously, to demean the scope of her observations and ideas, as Jacobss ideas found wider validation, her status as a housewife without a formal education in city planning or urbanism became a symbol of her genius, but no less problematic. The contemporary view has taken the form of deification, with the phrase What Would Jacobs Do? (a play on What Would Jesus Do?) and descriptions of her as Saint Jane, an apostle, and a goddess, suggesting that her divine wisdom and martial powers appeared spontaneously and fully formed, like Athena from Zeuss forehead. This contemporary view admirably celebrates the rejection of sexism and critiques of her since proven wrong, and affirms the abilities and contributions of average citizens, but neither past nor present views take into account the years of experience, the larger history and context, and the local circumstances and influences that contributed to Jacobss thinking and her writing of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Yet critics and commentators are not completely to blame for misunderstanding Jacobs or her work. Jacobss early writing career and the formative years leading up to Death and Life remain largely unknown. As late as 1993, even her friend and colleague William H. Whyte, who played an important part in bringing her book into being, could describe Jacobs as someone who had never written anything longer than several paragraphs before the late 1950s. For someone who knew Jacobs so well to make such a mistake was remarkable, but little evidence was then available to refute Whytes point. Almost nothing was known about the great amount of writing she had done prior to Death and Life. And although an anthology of papers from Jacobss archives and other sources was published in 1997 with her assistance, it added little to our understanding of the twenty-five years of her career between 1935 and 1961. Not only were important early essays on the city and a large body of later writing missing, but Jacobss first book, which was not Death and Life, was completely unknown.

There are a number of reasons why even someone as professionally close to Jacobs as Whyte was unaware of her early writing career. Like others, Whyte would have had no reason to know about her freelance work, starting in the mid-1930s, for various magazines or newspapers; her work for a trade magazine called The Iron Age in the early 1940s; or her work, in the mid-1940s and early 1950s, for the publication branches of the Office of War Information (OWI) and the State Department (some of it then classified), including her role as a senior editor of the magazine Amerika. As for her work at Architectural Forum, where she contributed to most of the seventy-seven issues published between her first assignment in 1952 and her departure to write Death and Life