The Battle for Gotham (59 page)

“This took a long time, getting booked as a serious criminal. And my arresting officer explained to the jail matron that she didn’t need to put me in the cells where people were yelling and screaming, that I was not going to cause any trouble and it would be nice if I could sit out there with her. [laughter] And you see, he was in a bad spot. Here I was the sort of person he had been trained to protect. This was a terrible upset. Now he was arresting me, and the arrest was getting worse and worse. [laughter]

“My favorite moment with him was when he had me brought back in the paddy wagon, although he hated to do it. Every other time he said to me that if I had enough money for a taxi, we could go in a taxi and it would be dignified. [laughter] I could see that was what he wanted, so we always went in a taxi. But this time we had to get down to the Tombs very fast from police headquarters at Broome Street, or we would be put off to night court and be there late. He was trying to protect my innocence. He said, ‘And the type of people who are at night court, frankly, Miss Jacobs, I wouldn’t want you to mix with.’ [laughter] So we hurried down there in the paddy wagon. A matron had to come along. She has to come with any female prisoner. There were just the three of us and a driver. We went tearing down. The Tombs is behind the courthouse at Foley Square. Well, this time I had to come into the courtroom through the prisoner’s entrance, because I was a serious prisoner now, not a disorderly conduct prisoner.

“Then there was the arraignment. They wanted the judge to order that I could not address any meeting or take any part in activities until my trial. We found a lawyer to speak against this. I didn’t know exactly what was happening. Nobody was being mean to me, torturing me, or making me make confessions or anything. [laughter] So he argued that such an order was an infringement of free speech and that they couldn’t enjoin me not to talk. And if I said something that was illegal I could be punished for that, or did something that was illegal, I could be punished for that, but I couldn’t be enjoined from exercising my normal, peaceful civil rights. The judge agreed with this. So they lost that round, and that’s what they had wanted most. Oh, they made out what a dangerous character I was: Inciting to riot, I was a menace on the streets. I had to be silenced. If I spoke I was to be put right in jail, because it would probably be incitement to riot.

“The next thing was a pretrial hearing. And they turned up with all kinds of lies about how I had damaged the stenotype machine. That’s what the ‘criminal mischief was.’ Mr. Toth was there, and he gave a horrendous account of how terrifying all this was. I guess it was, to him. I guess he wasn’t putting this on, but it sounded ludicrous to me, but he really was terrified. Poor, ignorant jerk [laughter], didn’t know when to be scared and when not.”

This was all happening during the day, unbeknownst to anyone in Jacobs’s family. “Well, Jimmy was away at college, and Ned was at school. I guess Mary was at school and had gone to visit a friend, and Bob was still at work. It was the middle of the afternoon when I got home. And Ned came in, threw down his books, and said, ‘Well, how’d things go in court?’ And I said, ‘Oh, all right, I guess.’ And he said, ‘Seems to me that for a woman of fifty-two, you lead a very exciting life.’ [laughter] And all of a sudden, I felt so much better; it was the greatest thing to say. I felt good all of a sudden. That put a new look on it all. Bless Ned. So my real low point didn’t last very long, thank goodness.

“But now I had a very expensive, top-grade lawyer, and we had to hold fund-raisers to pay him. The lawyer’s strategy was this: to put it off and put it off, as long as possible, until they cooled down. Because they were furious, and they wanted to really sock it to me. He found that out.

“By the time it came to court, we plea-bargained. I pled guilty. I thought I would get fourteen days in jail because it was a second conviction for disorderly conduct. I’d had one when I was arrested in a war protest downtown. We were all let off then with the warning that next time we’d be sent to jail. So I thought I would get fourteen days in jail. I figured I can stand fourteen days of almost anything, okay. Instead, I was convicted of disorderly conduct and let off with a suspended sentence and ordered to pay for the damage done to the machine. I hadn’t done any damage to the machine. The lawyer and I tried to get them to put something in writing. Oh, they had said a whole lot about how it had to be repaired and how much it cost, hundreds of dollars’ worth of damage to this valuable machine. This was all made up, a hoax. But, that was all they had to really substantiate anything except my standing around where I wasn’t invited. So they minimized what was destroyed of the record. They couldn’t make a big thing out of that because it would not have been a valid hearing. And actually, very little of that paper was gone, obviously, because they still had a big transcript.”

Repeatedly, Jacobs’s lawyer kept asking for a valid receipt from the repairman. “What we wanted to do was get a receipt and then investigate and see what corruption and phoniness there was about this receipt since we knew the machine had not been damaged. She had been clutching it to her bosom very protectively. That’s why she was losing all the paper. [laughter] The lawyer got no answer at all about the receipt. He telephoned. They never returned his call. So then I wrote to the judge, saying that I had this judgment to pay. I didn’t like this debt hanging over my head. I enclosed a copy of the letter that had been sent, told him about the phone calls, and asked him to please order them to comply with their part of the court order so I could comply with my part. Got no answer. But at least I had the letter on the record, if ever it was said, ‘Well, she was ordered to do this, and she didn’t.’

The whole thing just stopped there. “I guess they could see the trap that we were hoping they would fall into. We would have had a field day if they had tried to falsify a repair bill.”

Notes

PREFACE

1
A big fight was going on within the city’s Democratic Party, and I got involved in the Reform wing.

2
What I did know was totally unrelated. Joe Kahn and Sidney Zion at the
New York Post
had done a thorough investigation on who was getting the contracts and making money on the 1964 World’s Fair under the direction of Robert Moses. A multiple-page report that was due for publication in the
Post
was canceled just before the fair opened because of the pressure brought on the publisher by advertisers.

3
The year 1975 was considered the worst economic downturn since the Depression.

INTRODUCTION

1
In the six books that followed, Jacobs redefined how to understand urban economies, in
The Economy of Cities
; explored the potential gains of Quebec’s independence from Canada in
The Question of Separatism
; taught us how real wealth is generated, in
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
; examined the different values embodied in the separate moral codes of commercial and guardian institutions, in
Systems of Survival
; and then synthesized her strands of thought—economic, social, and environmental—in
The Nature of Economy
. In
Dark Age Ahead
, she tied all these issues together.

2
Not long before she died, I asked Jacobs, “What would you like to say to Corbusier or his followers?” She replied in a typical direct and dismissive manner: “People influenced by him are not interested in how cities function, so what am I going to talk to them about? Accuse them of not being interested in how cities function? No. Ask them what they think is a portrait of a city economy, where it comes from, what it does, where it’s going? They don’t know, and they don’t think about that. I don’t have anything to say to these people.”

3
Robert Fishman, “Rethinking Public Housing.”

4
In 1968 Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller merged the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (totally controlled by Moses) into the MTA, eliminating Moses’s key remaining source of power and funding.

5
Carson had already written three books about environmental conditions in the oceans, starting with
The Sea Around Us
(1951).

6
Daniel Horowitz,
The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture
,
1939-1979
, 151-154.

7
McLuhan would publish
Understanding Media
in 1964 and
The Medium Is the Message
in 1967.

8
Mumford and Jacobs were in total agreement, however, on the damage of new highways to all cities and the country as a whole.

9
Daniel Horowitz, author of
Anxieties of Affluence
, has also written books on Vance Packard and Betty Friedan.

10
Jane Jacobs,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
, 15.

11
I interviewed Jane Jacobs numerous times over the course of twenty-five years. Any quotes without attribution come from these interviews.

12
Journal of American Society of Architectural Historians
, 1944.

13
This impact may be lessened by the current economic setback but only temporarily.

14
Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava,
What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs
.

15
Opened in April 2008, Omar Freilla was the 2007 winner of the Jane Jacobs Prize, given by the Rockefeller Foundation.

16
I tell the story of regenerating the South Bronx in
The Living City
.

17
The technical and spiritual guiding hand of both groups is an extraordinary, dedicated advocacy planner, Joan Byron, whose formal title is director of the Sustainability and Environmental Justice Initiative of the Pratt Center for Community Development. For years, she has helped all these groups pursue their community-shaped agendas while bridging the gap where necessary between them and government.

18
The late Yolanda Garcia, founder and dynamic leader of Nos Quedamos, first alerted the community to the state DOT plan that she uncovered. If completed originally, the Sheridan Expressway would have gone through the Bronx Zoo.

19
The Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance’s members partially overlap with those of the Bronx River Alliance. The SBRWA is composed of Mothers on the Move, the Point, Sustainable South Bronx, Nos Quedamos, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, and the Pratt Center for Community Development. But there are groups in each that aren’t in the other, and the missions are quite distinct.

20
See Gratz, “Planned Shrinkage: The Economy of Waste,” chap. 9 in
The Living City
.

21
Winner of the 2009 Rome Prize for Landscape Architecture.

22
This is not a net gain, however, since thousands of low-income units have also been lost. A study conducted by the NYU Furman Center reported an overall loss of two hundred thousand affordable to low-income units (
New York Times
, October 15, 2009).

23
This was Jane Jacobs’s term as well.

24
Too many privileged parkers still clog the streets, double-parked usually. The biggest offenders seem to be the chauffeured cars. A sense of entitlement pervades certain groups of high-wage earners, and the impact is quite apparent throughout the city.

CHAPTER 1

1
Eventually, he brought in my uncle, who quickly struck out on his own, opening several stores in the East Village and then on Long Island.

2
A Spaldeen, made by Spalding, is a pink rubber ball.

3
For a full treatment of this period of urban stress, see my first book,
The Living City
.

4
For the movie, producers achieved a temporary postponement of the West Side blocks coming down for Lincoln Center in order to use them for film scenes. Look at the pictures of those blocks now and with a straight face say, “Of course that was an irreparable slum.”

5
Yes, the same Mario Cuomo who resisted Moses on behalf of Willets Point property owners during the 1964 World’s Fair clearance battle.

6
In contrast, on August 14, 2003, a power failure blacked out New York for twenty-five hours. The city coped easily and peacefully. There were fewer arrests than on a normal August midweek day.

7
David Gonzalez, “Will Gentrification Spoil the Birthplace of Hip-Hop?”
New York Times
, May 21, 2007, focused on the concern by music historians and tenants at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue that Campbell’s building could lose its middle- and low-income tenancy. The city eventually stepped in to ensure its continued affordability.

8
Thomas L. Friedman, “The Open-Door Bailout,”
New York Times
, February 11, 2009.

9
The City Futures, Inc., journal for the annual gala, 2006.

10
The Pratt Center, led by Ron Shiffman, was the advocacy planning model that similar organizations emulated around the country.

CHAPTER 2

1
Even critic Lewis Mumford was so pessimistic he commented, “Make the patient as comfortable as possible. His case is hopeless.”

2
Those tapes are in the archives of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

3
The full articles are available online at
www.NYPAP.org
.

4
The commission is an eleven-member body appointed by the mayor for three-year terms. By law it must include three architects, a historian, a city planner, and a Realtor. All five boroughs must be represented.

5
Norval White and Elliot Willensky, eds.,
AIA Guide to New York
, 343, 353, 351.

6
The letter began, former MAS director, Kent Barwick remembers, “Jack loved Grand Central.”