Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (46 page)

He’d remember Jane, at fifty-two, as “a large haystack of a woman…with a thick, beaky nose and shoulder-length hair, dressed in the green mechanic’s coveralls which the whole family (particularly she and Jimmy) had adopted as their workaday uniform.” He’d remember her “owlish round tortoise-shell glasses”; her wry, ready laugh, her salt-of-the-earth mien, her approachability; her “drink of choice,” dry sherry, as well as the eggnog, spiked with apple brandy, that she’d make from scratch come Christmas. And he’d remember her traipsing down the street, “with two gigantic shopping bags, sagging,” stuffed with books, which for the next few days she’d retreat to her study to devour.

One other impression stuck with him across the years: “She was not afraid of anything in the world”; it rubbed off on the children, too, “who tended to see things as exciting, as an adventure,” not scary. Jane, he says, was “genuinely fearless.”

—

Jane and the rest of the family had much to learn and absorb; spelling it “colour,” not “color,” was the least of their worries. They hadn’t immigrated to Somalia or Peru; Canada was different, but not
very
different—just different enough to catch you up. Local politicians ran for office in “ridings,” not districts. America’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was Canada’s
“peace, order, and good government.” City, provincial, and federal relationships differed from their American counterparts just enough to leave you perplexed. Then there was the country’s French-English divide, with Quebec forever in tension with English-speaking Canada. And the peculiar relationship of Canada to the United Kingdom, with the queen of England the country’s head of state and the governor general her representative. From an American perspective, history could look quite upside down; those who’d fled the new United States for Canada after the American Revolution were now good guys, not unpatriotic Tories. Canadian dollars were normally worth roughly that of American dollars, but never exactly so. Canadians celebrated Thanksgiving, but not on the same day as Americans. Other holidays bore names like Victoria Day and Dominion Day. Then there was the first Monday in August, which, Jane wrote her mother,
“is a holiday
here, but Canadians don’t know what to call it.” None of this was intellectually daunting; unfamiliar street names, new maps to master, were the necessary work of every traveler. But still, it was all a little strange and new for a woman of fifty-two who’d spent her whole life in America, her adult life solely in New York City.

What helped them adapt was the
Spadina fight, into which they were thrust soon after their arrival. Pronounced
spah-DY-nah
and named for a local estate, Spadina wasn’t just the street where they lived (a “road” north of Bloor Street, an “avenue” south), but, for provincial traffic engineers going back to the 1940s, a future expressway. The campaign to block its construction split Toronto for more than three years. “Where local politicians stood on the Spadina Expressway,” wrote John Sewell, a friend and collaborator of Jane’s for most of her time in Toronto, “was the defining issue of the day. Two opposing visions of the city had rarely been presented in such a powerful, volatile and bitter way.” Jane was drawn into the controversy through another transplanted American, Bobbi Speck.

Speck had moved from New York in 1966 and was living in the neighborhood known as the Annex when one day she read of an expressway, already being built, that was to barrel down from the northern suburbs in wide swaths of asphalt, in tunnels and trenches, and ultimately right down Spadina Road, to mate up with planned crosstown expressways. “We are not experts, but we know a monster when we see one,” Speck would say of the Spadina. Teaming up with another young mother, they formed a Committee of Concerned Citizens. When Speck spoke up at a public meeting, the local papers covered it, and soon her phone was ringing nonstop. She became virtually shackled to the phone, her career as a freelance editor derailed.

At one meeting, she’d recall, a woman “with this familiar New York voice” spoke up forcibly about tactics and strategies to defeat the Spadina. Speck thought, “This woman is incredible! She has everything down pat! Her thoughts came out in paragraph form, and put our instincts into broader context.” “I hope you’ll get involved,” said Speck, going up to her after the meeting.

“That’s why I’m here, dearie,” said Jane Jacobs.

The Spadina was supposed to slash down through the heart of the city from Highway 401, which had been built in the early 1950s as a modest intercity highway but would morph into a commuter artery at
some points eighteen lanes wide. “Those who lived in the suburbs had difficulty understanding why anyone would want to save older neighborhoods,” wrote John Sewell, in his book
The Shape of the City.
“Suburbanites thought it entirely reasonable that the existing city be demolished to make way for the new city,” which required highways to link their suburban homes to the downtown towers where they worked. “City residents didn’t quite see it that way.”

Opposition had already stiffened by the time Jane got involved; no one, least of all she, would claim she alone was responsible for the expressway’s defeat. But by early 1969, still new in town, she was already a voice in a civic debate that would extend over the next two years. “My understanding,” said Speck many years later, “was that she had not yet unpacked.” Early that year, Jane was featured in a Canadian television program about urban design. At one point, we see her stride across University Avenue, uncharacteristically regal, in a dark matching winter outfit, skirt to just above the knees, and heels. “
Toronto’s a very refreshing city to come to from the States,” she says. But “probably the biggest single menace to Toronto is the Spadina Expressway. The minute you take an expressway into—not up to, but into—the dense part of the city,” then you start doing damage, exchanging parks for parking lots, narrowing sidewalks, deadening street life.

Later that year, Jane wrote a blistering attack in
The Globe and Mail
, “
A City Getting Hooked on the Expressway Drug.” In it, she looked in seeming wonder at how Canadians, faced with direct evidence for how American cities like Boston, Buffalo, and Los Angeles had bungled so much, could possibly consider following their example. As a transplant from New York, she was often asked whether she found Toronto exciting enough for herself. “I find it almost too exciting. The suspense is scary. Here is the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options.” Maybe Toronto would go down the road of its wrongheaded American cousins, but still she was grateful to have at least “enjoyed this great city before its destruction.”

The whole Jacobs family got involved—though
not
, Jane insisted to an interviewer later, because they wanted to. “I did not, and neither did the rest of my family, react with joy when we heard we had another expressway to fight.” Here, she lapsed into a juvenile voice: “
Oh, we can do it here, we did it in a bigger city.
No, no,” it wasn’t like that. Still, plunge into the fight they did.

On
New Year’s Day 1970 a group of “minstrels,” as a news account had it the next day, protested the Spadina at the mayor’s New Year’s Day “levee,” a Canadian word, a Canadian tradition, where an officeholder hosts a celebratory open house, this one at a new performing arts center. But as soon as the singers, who called themselves the Provocative Street Players and whose chief writer and singer was Ned Jacobs, began to belt out the first chorus of “The Bad Trip,” they were shut down. A newspaper showed long-haired Ned, wearing a paisley outfit Jim had made for him for Christmas, being peacefully, but firmly, ushered off the premises by a guard. The chorus went like this:

And it’s a bad trip, yeah it’s a bad trip—

That Spadina Expressway

While the highway boys are playing with their toys

The people are the ones who pay.

Among other foes of the Spadina Expressway was Marshall McLuhan, who suggested to Jane that they collaborate on a movie about it. “You and I can do the script.”

“But I don’t know a thing about scriptwriting,” she said. No worries, he didn’t either. They’d do it together.

The two of them convened at his University of Toronto office, where McLuhan called in his secretary to record everything they said. After an hour of throwing around ideas, they were finished. “Got it all down?” McLuhan asked his secretary. “Well, that’s it,” he said, turning to Jane. “We’ve got the script.”

Jane was horrified. They had no script at all, just a collection of variants of “Hey, what about this?” When she finally saw the transcript, that’s all it was, words and ideas jumping around, “without beginning or end,” the flimsiest of threads holding it together. “This did not bother McLuhan,” she said, “but it did bother me.”

Yet miraculously, they wound up with a fourteen-minute film called
The Burning Would
(apologies to James Joyce), thick with noisy construction scenes, jackhammers, and demolition derbies, awful screeching sounds, ruthless destruction, all set against the peaceful humanity the expressway would erase—a burbling brook, a little boy playing with his plastic pail in a spot of greenery. Nothing subtle here, voice-over scarcely required, yet oddly effective. “I couldn’t have been more astonished,”
Jane recalled. McLuhan had really worked it over. “There was a shape to it” now. “It had music. It did have a thread, and raised a lot of important issues.” In Toronto,
The Burning Would
made its mark against the Spadina, and ended up being shown all over the U.S. and Canada, too. “It’s a mystery to me,” Jane reminisced, “that something tangible, coherent and constructive could come out of that mess.”

In Jane’s daybook that year, for January 14, she noted “Expressway meeting at Convocation Hall,” the great domed ceremonial auditorium at the University of Toronto, and beside it, simply: “Speak.”

“Do Spadina brief,” she reminded herself for March 25.

“Get copies of Spadina brief,” for the 27th.

“The Spadina fight is
coming to a head,” Jane wrote Jason Epstein on March 29. “People here are so innocent, which is nice but also exasperating. I have privately made up a strategy that would shock them, I fear, but will just try it on my own.”

“It started quietly enough,”
The Toronto Telegram
reported the day after the key April 6 hearing. For seven hours the Metro transportation committee moved smoothly through sixteen speakers at the opening session of hearings into the William Allen (Spadina) Expressway. “Then urban expert Jane Jacobs shattered the lull.”

My name is Jane Jacobs. I reside at 58 Spadina Road, Toronto. I am the author of several works on cities and I first involved myself in the Spadina Expressway controversy with the hope that such knowledge as I may have about cities and their dynamics would prove helpful.

At this point, setting aside her measured, ladylike tone, Jane went on to attack not just the expressway itself but its backers. She impugned their honesty, called the hearing a “charade.” She charged that the planners behind it lacked integrity, choosing data “selectively and even contradictorily to prove a case rather than to illuminate realities.” One account described Jane that day as “a gray-haired lady with grown children and a very pleasant smile, and she comes on with a soft, clear voice that has just a trace of acid in it, a voice as cool as non-alcoholic cider.”

They tried to cut her off, to which Jane replied, “If a citizen cannot speak of a politician’s official capacity without being charged with being personal, we might as well have robots in these jobs.”

She was charged with being a rabble-rouser. One councillor asked her
how, voicing such attacks, she could expect a sympathetic response from them. “I’m not asking you to be sympathetic with me,” she said. “I don’t give a damn.”

Another councillor shot back, “You don’t give a damn about anything.”

In the end, this board, and all the others that needed to give their assent to the expressway, did so. But it was too late; the ground had shifted under them, public opinion turning against the road. Even with the project seemingly cleared by every board and council, the provincial governor, Bill Davis, quashed it, famously declaring to the Ontario legislature, “
If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop.”

For the Jacobs family, there was a hidden payoff to their work over the two years: it helped them acclimate to their home. “I think the 1969–70 Spadina Expressway fight was a blessing for all of us,” Ned Jacobs would say. “We met many interesting people and got involved in Toronto civic life, which made us feel less like exiles.”

It had been no gradual transition. It was more like they’d jumped into a cold, northern lake, the whole Jacobs clan, each of them swimming and paddling like crazy, trying to keep warm, making new lives for themselves. “When we came,” Jane would later tell an interviewer, “we made up our minds we were not exiles, we were immigrants. It was a great adventure for us.” The house on Spadina Road always bustled. They had new friends, new jobs, new activities. They’d drop by en masse at Cineforum, a former porn house, now an art movie center on Bloor Street, to see Buster Keaton and Marx Brothers movies. Jane would rummage through the offerings of Bloor Street fruit and vegetable merchants, just as she had back in the Village. She’d dig into her
two or three daily newspapers, along with
The New York Review of Books
,
Scientific American
,
I. F. Stone’s Weekly
,
Esquire
, and some of the Toronto underground papers, reading always.

—

“What’s it like there?” the Jacobses had started to hear back from friends in New York once the plea bargain on the steno-tape incident had been hammered out and they began getting the word out to their friends about their new home in Canada.
Are there igloos in the street?
To their
New York friends, Canada mainly meant those feared winter weather advisories, the ones warning of “a massive cold front coming down from Canada.” Jane didn’t like the dark of winter—she loved the sun, fairly charting its progress all winter long—but didn’t mind the cold. Toronto, she decided, was just like the U.S., only with
an extra February and no July.