Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (50 page)

Two weeks later, Jane
signed a contract for the new book. Now it was called
Cities and Countries;
it would later be published as
Cities and the Wealth of Nations.
In it, Jane would lay out a vision for the wealth of the world riding on the backs of innovative cities, economic decline the sad lot of places cut off from them. It was supposed to be fifty thousand words—short compared to Jane’s first two books—and was due at Random House on October 1, 1972. Needless to say, it didn’t get there.

Back in July, Jane had written her mother:

I’m working hard on my book these days, but there is a long way to go. If I think about the whole thing I’m appalled, and so mostly think about the part I’m at work on—which is enough to cudjel [a rare misspelling] my brains over. I’m not going to let anything more interfere with it, now that we’re moved, etc., and the expressway has been stopped.

But she
did
let things interfere—or, rather, let us say,
things interfered
, whether Jane “let” them or not.
Death and Life
had, together with her activist notoriety, made her a public figure.
The Economy of Cities
only solidified her standing; she was no one-book wonder. In 1969,
Vogue
ran an interview with her that included a photo. “Mother,” she reputedly said to Mrs. Butzner, who had long lamented Jane’s lack of fashion savvy, “
when was the last time
your
picture was in
Vogue
?” She wouldn’t have to put up with
that
nonsense anymore! Now, and all through the 1970s, Jane grew into the role of public citizen, and public intellectual, even as the times affirmed her ideas and ratified her sensibilities.

—

In the dozen years after publication of
Death and Life
, in schools of planning and architecture around the world, ideas were changing about cities. Years later, Nikolai Roskamm, an urban researcher at the Technical University of Berlin, would give it a name. He’d call it “
the density turn,” referring to population density, as in so many dwelling units per acre, or people per square mile. Before
Death and Life
, high density was bad, period; you didn’t even need to think about it, you just reflexively imagined overcrowded slums. Then Jane Jacobs came along to say that density could be benign, a positive good; that cities
needed
high enough density to be vibrant places; that good neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Boston’s North End had higher densities, while some of the worst slums were low-density wastelands.

In a thirty-page chapter, “The Need for Concentration,” she’d made a sustained, nuanced argument that unquestionably helped bring about a “paradigm shift”—an unsettling new way to see a subject that leaves you either holding on, futilely, to old truths or else forever and fundamentally changed. With
Death and Life
, Roskamm writes, “it became possible to swap the position ‘high density is evil’ with the position ‘density is urbanity.’ ” If you wanted lively streets, or a mass transit system that worked, or economic vibrancy, you needed people thronging together. This thinking, Roskamm allowed, hadn’t always made its way into urban planning
regulations
, which represented the old thinking. But among designers, planners, and architects all through the 1960s and into the 1970s, the great “turn” was evident. Jane’s arguments were taking hold and becoming part of what sophisticated people knew to be true. As the
New York Times
architecture critic Paul Goldberger would write a little later, Jane had become “
standard urban theory.”

—

In St. Louis, the great experiment was over.

A vast housing project—twelve thousand people, in thirty-three eleven-story buildings towering over fifty-seven acres on the north side of the city, acclaimed at the time of its construction in the early 1950s as a marvel of modernism, sure to benefit the poor people it would pluck from the slums—was, beginning one day in 1972, unceremoniously blown up. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, future architect of the New York World
Trade Center’s Twin Towers, it had degenerated, with stunning swiftness, into a grim tableau of crime, vandalism, and despair. By the end it housed only the poorest of the poor.

It was called Pruitt-Igoe and the footage of its last moments became a species of creepy urban porn: We see emptied buildings lined up, standing there, awaiting the firing squad, yet already lifeless. A moment of stillness. Then, in one building, on a lower floor, the first white puffs of the engineered explosions. And then, in rapid sequence, a succession of puffs, finally the whole building toppling to the ground in a paroxysm of smoke, thunder, dust, and debris. “
Modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 pm,” the architecture critic Charles Jencks wrote of Pruitt-Igoe.

Of course, things weren’t so simple. Modern architecture survived. And besides, Pruitt-Igoe did have its virtues. Its first residents had new apartments that were all anyone could want; “
A poor man’s penthouse,” one of them called hers. Jane herself would write of Pruitt-Igoe, “
I don’t think things should be blown up. I don’t think we can afford to be that wasteful. Instead of destroying them, we must learn to knit them back and make them part of the fabric of the city.” Still, for Jane, who had condemned New York’s own Pruitt-Igoes and the architectural and planning nostrums behind them, the dynamiting had to be an intellectually redeeming moment.

—

In a June 1974 letter to her mother, Jane apologized for not having written in a while. She excused herself because, first, “it is planting and weeding time and
I have to hop to it to keep up with Nature, who has been giving us a glorious and incredibly beautiful spring”; and, second, because work on her book had left her so exhausted she could “hardly bring myself to hit those typewriter keys again until after a night’s sleep.” She went on to tell of the tomato plants on the roof, of tulips and lilacs past their prime, of how high and fast the bean plants had grown.

Then, abruptly, the next paragraph: “A stupendous book has been written about Robert Moses.” The publisher had sent her a prepublication copy of Robert Caro’s
The Power Broker
, all twelve hundred pages of it, so big that the prepub edition had to be bound in two volumes. She and Bob lay “in bed at night, propped up under the reading light with our twin volumes,” she wrote. “Jimmy says the sight is hilarious. Well,
we always knew Moses was an awful man, doing awful things, but even so this book is a shocking revelation. He was much worse than we had even imagined.” Moses, long seen as the Goliath to Jane’s David, was now revealed, in damning detail, as bully and liar, destroyer of communities and lives.

One more strike for Jane’s own more intimate and humane vision of city life.

—

In Toronto, you probably didn’t need to be aware of all these particulars to know that ideas about cities were changing and that Jane Jacobs had something to do with it. Over the years, Torontonians would lay claim to her, with friendly, familiar warmth, as “
Our Jane”—as if to emphasize that she was no longer “Their Jane,” the Jane Jacobs of Hudson Street, New York City, USA. More and more she belonged to Toronto. She tried to keep her writing time sacrosanct, but that was hard when she was so often solicited for her advice, probed for her ideas, or sought out for her imprimatur on a project or petition.

Soon after arriving in town, her husband’s employer, Eb Zeidler, who’d read
Death and Life
early on,
consulted with Jane on a number of his projects. Like Eaton Centre, his firm’s vaulted, more-than-a-mall galleria in the middle of downtown Toronto and how it might better be stitched into the surrounding city, not walled off from it. Or his ambitious plan, never realized, for a complex of sixty thousand people sitting out on land reclaimed from Lake Ontario. Harbour City, it was called, and it represented, declared Jane at a press conference in May 1970, perhaps “
the most important advance in planning for cities that has been made in this century.”

Privately—and probably more comfortably—she prepared a memo on zoning principles to guide Harbour City. “Prohibitory” zoning forbade certain practices but left you free to do anything else. “Permissive” zoning allowed a few activities but barred everything else. Jane looked into noise and air pollution, inharmonious scale, ugly signs: The idea was to avoid “
nasty, tacky collections of signs” but not standardize them or bar them outright. One strategy was to limit their area in square feet, another was to require approval of each one individually; neither approach was ideal. In any case, Jane wasn’t skating lightly over these tricky questions but digging down into them:
nineteen pages
on zoning.

Partly through the Spadina Expressway fight, Jane drew close to a generation of young political figures who would grant her an entrée to city government she’d never had in New York. At the end of December 1972, she wrote Jason of the “
fantastic election” just held in Toronto: “Many rascals out. Many unbelievably good people in.” The new mayor was David Crombie, who, as a young professor at Ryerson University, had actually taught
Death and Life.
Later, he’d be dubbed, in homage to his diminutive stature and immense popularity, Toronto’s “tiny, perfect mayor.” The new “reform” council included the community organizer and future mayor John Sewell, who, long before Jane arrived in Toronto, had battled, Jane-style, on behalf of a poor community. Both became Jane’s friends. Both brought energy, talent, and a dollop of ’60s idealism to the new Toronto.

Before Jane arrived, Crombie says, Toronto still looked too much to the U.S.:
“We need urban renewal and expressways, we need to learn from the U.S.,”
was the attitude. Of course, when you looked across the border you might see Detroit in flames. But either way, “America was
the constantly reminding background.” What Jane did for Torontonians of a certain urban bent “was not [so much] deliver her wisdom as legitimize our instincts…She gave a moral legitimacy to us.”

To the suggestion, sometimes heard, that
Jane’s personal influence on the city, apart from that of her books, was slight, Crombie doesn’t buy it: “If you could be any wronger than that,” he doesn’t know how. Alan Broadbent, a Vancouver-born philanthropist who came to Toronto in 1972, and a longtime admirer of Jane’s, allows that maybe you couldn’t draw an absolutely “straight line from her to any particular planning process” in Toronto, but “the power of her ideas was there,” and those ideas “became central tenets of Toronto planning.” Not just through her books but behind the scenes, in conversation, reviewing plans, recommending people, at public forums. And sometimes she was right there on the front lines.

“
This morning at 6:30 am,” Jane wrote Jason Epstein on April 5, 1973, “I helped knock down a lot of fences around some houses that were to be wrecked for a horrid apartment tower, thus staving off the wreckers, because they aren’t allowed to wreck without a fence up. Very satisfying.” Orchestrated by John Sewell, neighborhood groups had rallied at the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne streets, a shabby corner of the city just east of downtown. The day before, a high wooden fence—“hoardings,”
in Canadian parlance—had been erected around the twenty old houses to be demolished. The houses were run-down, no question. But, fixed up, they’d be a lot better than the six identical apartment houses set to go up in their place; the province, the demonstrators felt, was imposing on the city something vacuous and impersonal. Those “gathered in the predawn dark that morning,” wrote Jane, didn’t at first know what to do. “But as they stood talking together and stomping their feet in the cold,” someone remembered that key regulation: no demolition without a fence.

The remark was repeated from person to person, and group to group, and without another word everyone began taking action. You would be amazed at how rapidly and purposefully several hundred men, women, and children, with no one directing them, can dismantle a sturdily built fence and turn it back to neatly stacked piles of lumber.

Their act of civil disobedience, Jane wrote, had left her almost giddy, primed for round two early the next morning. Of course, she added, “The schedule has its advantages. One can knock down fences and be back home, ready to go to work, at 8:30. Better than usual. Of course it makes you dreadfully sleepy by 10 at night.” The old houses were saved. Two days of fence whacking, together with Mayor Crombie’s pull, and they had the promise of a provincial loan that would permit building near the site without destruction of the old buildings.

One of the first things Crombie did as mayor was set up a housing department to spearhead a new low- and middle-income housing project for downtown Toronto. A
project
? For
poor
people? Near
downtown
? Why, Toronto had one of those already. It was called
Regent Park and, as
Farewell Oak Street
, an artful black-and-white film produced by the Film Board of Canada, attests, it was in 1953 still being offered as an example of modernist planning at its best.

In the film we see an adolescent boy happily tossing a ball with his buddies in the new Regent Park; then, the grim past, as the same boys play amid slum rubble, the music’s disarming lilt yielding to dark, disturbing jazz notes. “This is how it used to be,” intones the narrator, “one of Toronto’s oldest streets, and not one of its best…Aged houses, crowded quarters, squalor. Not quite a slum, but close. Call it substandard. Life was unavoidably substandard, too.” Even around the supper table we see it—parents and children trading dark, menacing looks, only
the clicking of utensils to break up the silence, the very air on edge. It’s the street’s fault, the film all but says, the street that bears the full load of slum pathology. In the new Regent Park, where “everything’s sparkling and new and tidy,” there is no street. No Oak Street or any other. The old blocks of two-story peaked-roof row houses have been torn down. In their place are mid-rise cruciform-shaped apartment buildings set in a superblock of lawns cut off from neighboring streets.