Battles over this issue in the future will be many, and, to be sure, some iconic landmarks may not accommodate any and all energy-saving add-ons. If they can’t, that shouldn’t mean they are disposable. They may not even need to be mechanically adjusted, if the inherent natural systems are allowed to perform as they were meant to. No building need automatically be eviscerated to increase energy efficiency; competing values must be weighed. Community values count. Balance does not mean 100 percent either way. The essence of sustainability is cultural as well as scientific. And preservation is as much about culture as anything else.
The good news is that both the historic preservation and environmental movements share similar goals, and both reflect the legacy of Jane Jacobs. In her sixth book, The Economy of Nature, Jacobs reinforced her early embrace of both the preservation and the environmental movements. The more these two movements can find common ground—and like Jacobs be both preservation environmentalists and environmental preservationists—the more New York and all cities will continue to come out from under the residual shadow of Robert Moses.
Historic preservation, as we saw earlier in this book, is a precursor of urban regeneration. But it is also a precursor to a greener planet. Preservation is good environmentalism; good environmentalism starts with preservation. The Eldridge Street Synagogue is a model of both; when I first walked in in 1982, who would have known that it would be such a good story?
Appendix:
Jacobs’s Arrest in Her Own Words
“A very curious thing was occurring. I was used to hearings at the Board of Estimate where the microphone for the speaker faces the people holding the hearing, the ones going to make the decision. The speaker’s back was always to the audience. At this hearing, however, the microphone was directed the other way. The state people, engineers and people like that, not elected officials, sitting on the stage, had the speakers address the audience. The speaker’s back was to the officials. This was very symbolic. The hearing was being held with the idea that it was necessary for people to let off steam, not that they would have anything that would be instructive or informative for the hearing officers whose minds were plainly made up. So when it was my turn to speak, I drew attention to this, how we weren’t talking to the hearing officers; we were just talking to each other. It was a charade. Furthermore, it wouldn’t matter if we were talking to these officials, because they were not the people who made the decisions anyway. They were just errand boys, sent from Albany to preside while we let off steam under the guise of a hearing. It was phony as a hearing.
“So I decided that at least I would send them back to Albany with the message that we really didn’t like this, and since talk would never be that kind of a message, since they didn’t hear anything, I planned to just walk across the stage and let them know that I was not content to remain down there talking to my fellow citizens, that I wanted to give them an immediate message. And I said, anybody who wants to come with me, come along. I addressed them instead of the hearing officers. They had set it up for us to talk to each other, so I was going to do that. And so I started up the stage. And pretty nearly all the audience got up and began to follow me as I walked across the stage. That’s all I was going to do, walk across the stage and down the other steps. And this threw them into the most incredible tizzy. [She laughs with obvious enjoyment at the memory.] The idea of unarmed, perfectly gentle human beings just coming up and getting in that close contact with them. You never saw people so frightened. They had a policeman up there on the stage. As I came up on the stage with I guess pretty nearly all the audience coming along too, everything was quiet, absolutely quiet, except the chairman, a state engineer, kept yelling, ‘Officer, arrest this woman! Arrest this woman!’
“[The policeman] didn’t arrest me at first. He came over to me and he said, ‘Mrs. Jacobs, come on over here and sit down.’ And so I sat down where he suggested, and the chairman was now standing blocking the way. Nobody knew what to do. The woman with the stenotype had jumped up in alarm—nobody was even making an ugly face—and her tape was all running out, and she grabbed her stenotype. So people began picking up this tape that was all around now and sort of tossed it around. That was all that was happening, and this eerie silence and sort of leisurely kind of confetti, it was really surrealistic, because nobody was tearing it up or doing anything violent, just wafting this paper and the engineer was yelling, ‘Arrest this woman! Arrest this woman!’ Everybody else was absolutely silent. Nobody knew what to do. The policeman said, ‘March down the other side; just make a gesture.’ So, I made some derogatory remark to him about these people holding the hearing. I forget what I said; it was pretty plain. Something like, ‘They’ve got their minds made up; they’re just trying to do us in, these people.’ And he said, ‘Aren’t they, though.’ And so there I sat. This scene went on, and after a while I thought, ‘Somebody has to bring this to an end. Nobody knows what to do any more than I do.’ So I got up from the chair—all these frightened men went down the other side—and went to the microphone again. I said, ‘What’s the charge? Why am I being arrested? ’ The policeman said, ‘It’s at the request of Mr. Toth [John Toth, chief engineer for the State Department of Transportation]. I wouldn’t arrest you except that he has demanded your arrest.’ So, I said again, ‘What are the charges?’ And he said, ‘Well, that will be worked out at the station house. But I must arrest you. I’m sorry.’ And I said, ‘Well, I think they’re making a mistake.’ And he said, ‘I think they are too, but I have no choice.’ [laughter]
And at this point, Jacobs might have figured it would do the cause well if she were arrested. She didn’t want to be arrested, but she was. The crowd followed her to the station and continued the protest as she was booked. It was the same arresting officer who had been on the stage.
“He was really nice. He was always on my side. I was booked on disorderly conduct. A court date set. When we got to court I waited and waited all morning. My case wasn’t called. My arresting officer came down to me at one point and said, ‘They’re making new charges against you. They’re opening up law books they’ve never opened up before.’ Jacobs laughs recalling this and laughs further as she reports that the charges they came up with were ‘riot, inciting to riot, criminal mischief, and obstructing government administration. Four years in jail. They’d have liked to put me in for it too. They really would. Then my arresting officer had to take me back to the Tombs, the central police station, to get a mug shot, fingerprints, and get me booked as a serious criminal.
“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 t
o 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
The Battle for Gotham Page 42
