Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 235

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs," by Robert Kanigel.

And yet, out of their two dissimilar natures emerged, as if alchemically transmuted, a home of healthy, sometimes madcap exuberance, lively talk, free questioning, enjoyment, and encouragement that profoundly inspired the confidence and independence of their children.

If we had to pin down a moment when that began to change, when Jane Jacobs began to see in a new way the streets and cities, buildings, plans, and architectural visions she had been writing about, it would probably be sometime in early 1955, in Philadelphia.

LATER, IN 1992, thinking back to the article he commissioned her to write for Fortune that would bring her such attention and acclaim, Whyte remembered deciding that Jane was “just the person” to do it. Nonetheless, the article, “Downtown Is for People,” almost never happened at all. 

At first, as Whyte told it, “she demurred and told me she wasn’t up to it; she had never written anything longer than a few paragraphs.” His colleagues at Fortune “felt she should not be entrusted” with so important a piece. “She was a female; she was untried.” Why, she commuted to work on…a…bicycle. All in all, it seemed to them, Jane Jacobs was “a most inappropriate choice” and was actually taken off the story—which, to hear Whyte tell it, left her feeling relieved. But when a senior editor on the project fell ill, Jane was reinstated. And this time there was no stopping her. “She wrote and wrote and wrote, providing a first draft of 14,000 words with not a word, she believed, to be edited out. Our lamb had become a tigress.” 

Controversy lit up Jane’s piece, not just potentially but right then, right there, within Time Life. When her draft was passed around, Whyte heard right off from the publisher, C. D. Jackson, who was “aghast.” Just who, he demanded to know, was this “crazy dame” who, in the pages of Fortune, proposed to give “aid and comfort to critics of Lincoln Center?” That much-anticipated, gleaming new performing arts complex was all set to go up and transfigure the cultural life of the city’s West Side. Yet Jane was painting it as an example of all that was wrong with modern planning.

What did Jane do? She helped ensure that today children splash in the fountain at Washington Square Park untroubled by the roar of traffic; that the broad sidewalks around her house were not ignominiously narrowed; that the West Village avoided the heavy hand of urban renewal. She addressed some of the neighborhood’s housing problems through a project architecturally more at home in the nineteenth century than the twentieth and helped actually get it built. And she blocked an enormous expressway that would have all but sliced off the tip of Lower Manhattan and changed the face of the city forever and for the worse. Probably only the last of these civic battles would figure in any general history of New York City. The others, to anyone who didn’t live in the Village, might today seem trifling or remote; we live here and now, not there and then. But it was just Jane’s fierce focus on the intimate, the nearby, and the small that was her most lasting contribution to the culture of civic activism: not just the Big Picture counted, but your street, your house. In each of these confrontations with civic authority, powerful public figures failed to get what they wanted; their aims were thwarted, their say-so challenged,. Tides of traffic, demolition, and faceless new construction didn’t (back then) wash over Greenwich Village. And because they didn’t, the species of urban life Jane Jacobs championed was better preserved.

She was forever taking on ambitious subjects from new directions, marching imperturbably into all she didn’t know. She’d never understand, she told an interviewer once, how other authors could “stand the boredom of just writing down everything [they] already knew.” But she paid the price for indulging her insatiable curiosity. With each new book, she would tell Bob’s niece Lucia Jacobs, “I always get scared to death.” Caught up in complexities of a new field not at first fully apparent, “I realize it’s too deep for me, but I have to keep on with it.” Until she gets it.